"And then you wonder that I am anxious to be married," says Cecilia, accompanying her future brother-in-law to the door, on the day on which the latter phenomenon has occurred, and wiping the angry tears from her plump cheeks. "I make no secret of it, I _am_ madly anxious, I would marry anyone, I am desperate. Just think what my life will be when Amelia is gone; and though of course I shall be a great deal with her--she has promised that I shall be almost always with her" (Jim winces)--"yet of course it can't be the same thing as having a home of your own." "We will do our best for you," replies he, with a rather rueful smile and a sense of degradation; "but you know, my dear Cis, anybody can lead a horse to the water, but it is not so easy to make him drink." "That is quite true," replies Cecilia, one of whose most salient merits is an extreme unreadiness to be affronted, wiping her eyes as she speaks, "and I have no luck; such promising things turn up, and then come to nothing. Now, that clergyman the other day, whom we met at the Villa Careggi--such a pleasant gentlemanlike man--he was on the look-out for a wife, he told me so himself, and I know so much about the working of a parish, and next day he was off, Heaven knows where!" Jim gives a slight shudder. "I do not think you had any great loss in him," he says hastily; then, seeing her surprised air, "I mean, you know, that it is always said that a man is a better judge of another man than a woman is, and I did not like his looks; give us time, and we will do better for you than that." Cecilia can no longer accuse her future relation of any slackness in the matter of expeditions. There is something of fever in the way in which he arrives each morning, armed with some new plan for the day, giving no one any peace until his project is carried out. It seems as if he must crowd into the last fortnight of Amelia's stay in Florence all the sight-seeing, all the junkets, all the enjoyment which ought to have been temperately spread over the eight years of their engagement.