"Will not you stay to breakfast with me?" she asks, a little aghast at this unexpected manoeuvre; "I cannot make my toilette till the luggage arrives: and I suppose that he"--her eyes wandering wistfully over the hotel front till they rest on her son's closed persiennes--"that he is not up yet; it would be a sin to wake him; do stay with me." "I am afraid I cannot." "Why cannot you?"--with an impatient but friendly little mocking imitation of his tone. "You are not"--with a conciliatory smile--"angry with an old hen for standing up for her own chick?" Jim smiles too. "I do not think that the old hen need have clucked quite so loudly; but that is not why I am leaving her; I _must_ go." "Where _must_ you go?" "To the Anglo-Américain." She lifts her eyebrows. "At this hour--you forget how early it is. Well, Amelia _has_ got you into good training; but I can assure you that you will still find her in bed." He sighs. "I am afraid that there is not much doubt of that." "What do you mean?--she is not ill, surely?"--in a tone of lively surprise--"Amelia ill?--impossible!" He looks at her with an irrational stupefaction. It appears to him now, in the distortion of all objects that the last fortnight has brought, as if Amelia's illness had spread over the whole of his life, as if there had never been a time when she had not been ill, and yet of this event, immense as it seems to him in its duration, the woman before him obviously has never heard. When he comes to think of it, how should she? In point of fact it is not a fortnight since Miss Wilson fell sick, and during that fortnight he himself has not written her a line; neither, he is equally sure, has her son. "I am evidently very much behind the time," she says, noting the, to her, unintelligible astonishment in his face; "but you must remember that I have been kept completely in the dark--has she been ill?" In answer he tells her, with as much brevity and compression as he had employed in the tale of Elizabeth's disappearance, that of Amelia's illness, often interrupted by her expressions of sympathy. At the end she says: "I am so thankful I did not hear till she was getting better! It would have made me so wretched to be such a long way off!" Her adoption of his trouble as her own, an adoption whose sincerity is confirmed by her impulsive seizure of his hand, and the feeling look in her handsome eyes make him forgive the exaggeration of her statement, and go some way towards replacing her in that position in his esteem which her diatribes against Elizabeth had gone near to making her forfeit. "But it will be all right now," continues she sanguinely; "there will be nothing to do but to build up her strength again, and she is young--at least"--as the reminiscence of Amelia's unyouthful appearance evidently flashes across her mind, of that prematurely middle-aged look which an unequal fortune gives to some plain women--"at least, young enough for all practical purposes."