"_Shot through the heart!_" murmurs the latter, repeating his own phrase as if he found a dismal pleasure in it. "I had always been told that it was a painless death; I now know to the contrary." "Shall you stay here? There is no longer any use in your staying here." "There is no longer any use in my doing anything, or leaving anything undone. "'There's nothing in this world can make me joy; Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.'" So saying, he replaces his head upon his arms, and his arms upon the chair-rail, with the air of one who, upon mature consideration, has decided to maintain that attitude for the remainder of his life. * * * * * A week has passed; a week upon which Burgoyne looks back as upon a blur of wretchedness, with distinct points of pain sticking up here and there out of it. It is a blur; for it is a time-space, without the usual limitations and divisions of time; a week not cut up into orderly lengths of day and night, but in which each has puzzlingly run into and overlapped each. There have been nights when he has not been in bed at all, and there have been days when he has slept heavily at unaccustomed hours. He has not dined at any particular time; he has shared forlorn breakfast, dotted about the morning as the less or more anxiety about Amelia dictated, with the Wilsons. He has drunk more tea than he ever did in his life before, and the result of this whole condition of things is, that he cannot for the life of him tell whether the day of the week is Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday, and that he has lost all sense of proportion. He has not the least idea whether the dreadful moments when he stood on the landing outside Amelia's door, and heard her heartrendingly beg him not to go away from her for _quite_ so long, to be a little gladder to see her when he came back; or again affectingly assure him that she can do quite well, be quite cheerful without him--whether, I say, those dreadful moments were really only moments, or stretched into hours. Besides the agony of remorse that the impotent listening to those pathetic prayers and unselfish assurances causes him, he suffers too from another agony of shame, that the father and sister, standing like himself with ears stretched at that shut door, should be let into the long secret of his cruelty and coldness, that secret which for eight years she has so gallantly been hiding. It is an inexpressible relief to him that at least the old man's thickened hearing admits but very imperfectly his daughter's rapid utterances. "Poor soul! I cannot quite make out what it is all about," he says, with his hand to his ear; "but I catch your name over and over again, Jim; I suppose it is all about you." Cecilia, however, naturally hears as well as he himself does, and apparently pitying the drawn misery of his face, whispers to him comfortingly--