"I was afraid," he says solemnly; "after ten years one is afraid; and as you did not mention her--you know you mentioned all the others--I thought you had lost her!" A sort of slight shiver passes over the woman's frame. "No, thank God! No!" During the foregoing little dialogue about herself, Elizabeth has stood with her eyes on the ground; but at the end of it she lifts them to smile lovingly at her mother. They are very pretty eyes still, but surely they seem to have cried a good deal; and now that the hurrying blood has left her cheek again, Burgoyne sees that she looks more nearly her age than he had imagined at the first glance. He has not heard her voice yet; she has not spoken, unless that first shaken whisper--so much more likely to be the freak of his own heated fancy--could count for speech. He must hear her tones. Do they keep an echo of the other world, as he still imagines that he sees a shade from it lying lingeringly across her face? "Do you ever climb apple-trees now?" he asks abruptly. She starts slightly, and again, though with a weaker red wave, her rather thin cheeks grow tinged. "Did I ever climb them?" she says, with a bewildered look, and speaking in a somewhat tremulous voice. "Yes"--slowly, as if with an effort of memory--"I believe I did." "You have forgotten all about it?" cries Jim, in an accent of absurdly disproportioned disappointment. "Have you forgotten the kangaroo too? have you forgotten everything?" Perhaps she is putting her memory to the same strain as he had done his in the case of her mother's name on the occasion of their Oxford meeting. At all events, she leaves the question unanswered, and the elder woman again hurries to her help against this persistent claimant of reminiscences. "You must not expect us all to have such memories as you have," she says with a touch of friendliness in her look. "I must own that I too had quite forgotten the kangaroo; and so I fear had Robert, until you reminded us of it in Mesopotamia." "How is Mr. Le Marchant?" inquires Jim, thus reminded to put his tardy query--"is he with you?" "No, he is not very fond of being abroad; it is not"--smiling--"'dear abroad' to him, but I think that he will very likely come out to Florence to fetch us." "You are going to Florence?" cries the young man eagerly. "So am I! oh, hurrah! then we shall often meet." But the touch of friendliness, whose advent he had hailed so joyfully, has vanished out of Mrs. Le Marchant's voice, or, at least, is overlaid with a species of stiffness, as she answers distantly, "We do not intend to go out at all in Florence--I mean into society." "But I am not society," replies he, chilled, yet resolute. "I wish"--glancing rather wistfully from one to the other--"that I _could_ give you a little of my memory. If I could, you would see that, after being so infinitely good to me at the Moat, you cannot expect me to meet you as total strangers now."