"How she fired up if anyone said anything slightingly of you: she never cared in the least if one abused herself; she always thought she quite deserved it; but if anybody dared to say the least disparaging thing of _you_"--it is pretty evident, though at the moment in his agony of preoccupation the idea does not occur to Jim, that this has not been an uncommon occurrence--"she was like a lioness at once." "The saddest thing of all," says Sybilla, taking up the antiphonal strain, "is that she should have died just as she was beginning to be so happy!" _Just beginning to be so happy?_ And he might have made her heavenly happy so easily, since she asked so little--for eight years. The groan he utters is low in proportion to the depth of the fountain whence it springs, and they do not hear it. If they did, they would in mercy stop; instead, they go on. "Did you ever see anything so radiant as she was--that last fortnight? She used to say that she was quite ashamed of being so much more fortunate than anyone else, she seemed always trying to make up to us for not being so happy as she. Oh, she was happy that last fortnight!" This time he does not groan, he seems to himself to have passed into that zone of suffering which cannot be expressed or alleviated by the utterance of any sound. Perhaps, by-and-by, Cecilia dimly divines something, some faint shadow of what he is enduring; for she begins with well-intentioned labour to try to assert lamely that Amelia had always been happy, well, _fairly_ happy, as happy as most people. You could not expect, in this dreadful world, to be always in the best of spirits, but she had never complained. And, oh! that last fortnight she _had_ been happy, it was a pleasure to see her! And, oh, what a comfort it must be now to Jim to think that it was all owing to him. She puts out her hand kindly to him as she speaks, and he takes it, and silently wrings it in acknowledgment of the endeavour--however clumsy--to lay balm upon that now immedicable wound. He stays most of the night with them; and when at length, overcome with weariness and sorrow, they rise from their grief-stricken postures to go to bed, he kisses them all solemnly, even the old man. He has never kissed any of them before, except once or twice Cecilia on some return of his from the Antipodes, and because she seemed to expect it. * * * * * Three days later Burgoyne leaves Florence; and, as his arrival in the City of Flowers had been motived by Amelia alive, so is his departure to companion her dead. END OF PART ONE. PART II. Elizabeth. CHAPTER I.