Tom--can it be Tom?--with a moustache, Charles with a beard and a bowie-knife, Rose dandling her baby, Miriam hanging over her new husband--all his little playfellows! How far the wave of time has rolled them away from him! He strolls to the window whence, at sunset, the green shutters have been thrown back, and stares out at the Piazza garden, where the twilight is taking all the colour out of the Judas flowers, thence to the piano upon which Schubert's "Trockne Blumen" stands open. Absently he repeats aloud the song's joyous words: "Der Lenz wird kommen, der Winter ist aus!" Is her "Winter aus"? Judging by the look in her eyes, it has been a long and cruel one. If he wishes to put the question to her, she comes in just in time to answer it--enters laggingly, as one tired, blinking a little from the sudden crude lamplight after the soft feather-handed dusk. She is evidently unprepared to find anyone in the room, and gives a frightened jump when she sees a man's figure approaching her. Even when she recognises him the scared look lingers. It is clear that in her sad experience surprises have been always synonymous with bad news. The white apprehension written on her small face makes him so cordially repent of his intrusion, that his explanation of his presence is at first perfectly unintelligible. "I hope you will excuse my taking such a liberty. I know that I had no business to come in when I was told you were out," he says incoherently, "but--I thought--I hoped--I had an idea--that you might be glad to hear----" He stops, puzzled how to word his piece of intelligence, whether or not to name the person whose presence, whose very existence had yesterday seemed to inspire with such terror the woman before him. She has sunk down upon a chair, holding her hat, which she had taken off on entering the room, nervously clutched in her hands, the little waves of her hair, straightened out by the night wind, invading her forehead more than their wont and giving her an unfamiliar look. "To hear what?" asks Mrs. Le Marchant, who, following her daughter more leisurely, has come in just in time to catch the last few words of Burgoyne's speech dissevered from their context. He begins that speech again, still more stammeringly than before. "I thought you might be glad to hear that the--the inquiries you asked me--I mean that I promised to make--that the person relating to whom I--I made inquiries, leaves Florence to-morrow." He hears a long sighing breath that may mean relief that may mean only distress at the introduction of the subject, from the chair beside him, while the elder woman says in a low abrupt voice: "To-morrow? Are you sure? How do you know?" "He said so himself to-day." "Have you met him? Have you been talking to him?" It seems to Jim as if there were a sharp apprehension mixed with the abruptness of her tone, as she puts the two last questions. He makes a gesture of eager denial.