Though "February Fill-dyke" was never and nowhere truer to her name than this year, and in Algiers--coming laden with wet days to make the green Sahel, if possible, greener than it was before; yet the inhabitants of the Grand Hotel do not again, for a matter of three weeks, relieve their ennui or let off their energies in far from Dumb Crambo, or loud charade. The voice of the battledore is silent in the entrance-hall, and the shuttlecock sleeps. M. Cipriani has scarcely had to do more than mention his request that they would lay aside their more noisy pastimes, for they are, most of them, rather good-natured persons than otherwise, since, indeed, it is quite as uncommon to be very ill-natured as to be very selfless, or very foolish, or very wise. Those of them who have been fortunate enough to be present at the catastrophe have carried away such a moving image of a wounded Adonis, apparently several yards long, stretched upon Mrs. Le Marchant's Persian carpet, that they have infected those less happy persons who know of him only by hearsay with a compassionate interest scarcely inferior to their own. The only person in the hotel who makes much noise is poor Byng himself, and for awhile he falls it with clamour enough to furnish two or three of those bump suppers of which, not so long ago, he was a conspicuous ornament. There had never, even when he was in his wits, been much disguise as to the state of his feelings; now that he is out of them, the whole house rings with his frantic callings upon the name of Elizabeth, uttered in every key of rage, expostulation, tenderness, and appeal. These cries reach Elizabeth herself as she sits cowering in that one of the little suite of rooms which is nearest the door of entrance--sits there cowering, and yet with the door, through which those dreadful sounds penetrate to her, ajar, in order the better to hear them--cowering, and for several days alone.