One of the reasons, though not the sole or even the main one, of Burgoyne's visit to Algiers is that the Wilson family are wintering there. And yet he dreads the meeting with them inexpressibly. When they last parted, immediately after having stood together round Amelia's open grave, they had all been at a high pressure of emotion, and of demonstrative affectionateness, which nothing in their tastes, habits, or natures could possibly make continuous. He has a horrible fear that they will expect to take up their relations at the same point at which he had left them. He would do it if he could, but he feels that it is absolutely impossible to him. The door of that room in his memory which is labelled "Amelia" is for ever locked. It is only in deepest silence and solitude that he permits himself now and again to turn the key and sparely and painfully look in. How will he bear it if they insist on throwing the portals wide, dragging its disused furniture to the light, rummaging in its corners? He sleeps ill on this, his first night of Africa; and even when at length he succeeds in losing importunate consciousness, he is teased by absurd yet painful dreams, in which Amelia and Elizabeth jostle each other impossibly with jumbled personalities and changed attributes. Extravagant as his visions are, they have yet such a solid vividness that, at his first waking, he feels a strange sense of unsureness as to which of the two women that have beset his pillow is the dead, and which the living one. In dreams, how often our lost ones, and those whom we still possess, take hands together on equal terms! Even when he is wide awake, nay more, dressed and breakfasted, that feeling of uncertainty, that something akin to the "Blank misgivings of a creature, Moving about in worlds not realized," remains strong enough to drive him once again to the list of visitors in the entrance-hall, in order to assure himself that his brain has not been the dupe of his eye. M. Cipriani has been as good as his word. The corrected list, promised overnight, has replaced the incomplete one, and almost the first names that Jim's eye alights upon are those of "Mr., Mrs., and Miss Le Marchant, England." His own name immediately follows, and he takes as a good augury what is merely an accident due to the fact of his room and theirs being on one floor. Elizabeth is, beyond question, beneath the same roof as himself; nay, even now she may probably be sunning herself like a white pigeon on that terrace, whose red tiles he sees shining in the morning sun through an open side-door. The thought is no sooner formed than he follows whither it leads him; but she is not on the terrace; and though a moment ago his nerves were tingling at the thought of speech with her, yet he is conscious of a feeling of relief that their meeting is, for the moment, deferred. What can he say to her? What can she say to him?