"But if he is not himself," interrupts she, with a pathetic pertinacity, "he would not know me. I could not do him any harm if he did not know me, and I might do something--oh, ever such a little thing for him! If you knew what it was to stand here and do nothing--_do nothing_ indeed!"--with a change of tone to one of agonized self-reproach;--"have not I done enough already? Oh, would anyone have believed that it would be I that should kill him!" She turns back to the window again, and dashes her forehead with violence against the frame. Outside the tall date-palm is shaken through all its plumes by the loud breeze; it is swaying and waving and blowing, and not less is its solid shadow cut out by the moonshine's keen knife on the terrace, wavering and shaking too, as if convulsed by laughter. The porch of the hotel--mere whitewash and plaster, as memory and reason tell one that it is--stands out in glorified ivory like the portals of such a palace as we see in vision, when "Good dreams possess our fancy." "I can't have you talking such nonsense," says Jim, in an exceedingly kind and not very steady voice, for his own feelings are horribly harrowed; and on thinking over the scene afterwards, he cannot swear that, at this point, he did not pass a most brotherly arm for one moment round the poor little heaving shoulder, which is shaking almost as much as the palm-tree's shadow. "He is not going to die; he is not thinking of dying. Nobody has killed him--least of all you." She makes him no answer, nor lifts her stricken head, over which he looks out, while the ghostly mirth shakes the landscape; at his wits' end, in search of consolation. Below waves a sea of foliage, out of which the strong elfin light has stolen all the colour. From that colourless dark ocean rises far away to the right the dazzling little snowy dome of a mosque, showing like a transfigured mushroom; and down below the rounding bay is seen laying its foam-lips in white glory on the land. "Dr. Stephens feels sure that he must have had a sunstroke. You know that he has been in the East. He was a month in Cairo; the sun has great power there, even in winter, and he is sure to have exposed himself recklessly. He was on his way home--had got as far as Paris, it seems--when he accidentally heard that you were here. Since then, no doubt, he has neither eaten nor slept; so you see how little you are to blame. You know that I told you how odd he was before you even saw him. Do not you remember?"--trying to recall every circumstance that may tend to reassure her--"I warned you that you would have to be careful what you said to him?" His words have a very different effect from that intended by him. "Oh, that is why I cannot forgive myself!" says she, with what sounds almost like a cry of physical pain. "You _did_ warn me; I had no excuse. In his state I ought never--it was murdering him to tell him--"