"Yes, the dear boy! He always has clung to me, though, heaven knows, I often manage badly enough for him. But whatever he likes--There's one thing I must tell you. You know I tried to hold him up when he fell. My strength was going--in another minute he must have pulled me over. And he knew it--and let my hand go!" Sylvester could hardly speak of that most awful moment, and Amethyst grew paler with sympathy. "Oh--that was splendid of him!" she said. Then her heart gave a great throb and bound, and she knew which life was the dearest to her. The blood rushed back to her temples, she could see nothing, but she felt that Sylvester held her hand close in his own, and presently she heard his voice whispering-- "You know what makes my life worth living?" She turned, and at once giving him her hands, and putting him away from her, she said-- "Oh, we will do everything for him, we will not think of anything but him--while he wants us." She fled away as she spoke; but her words seemed to Sylvester the most beautiful answer that she could have given him, the perfect expression of their according hearts. In his pocket-book was still preserved the young primrose springing from dead leaves, with which, long ago, Amethyst had illustrated her saying that "beginnings come out of endings." It was no inapt type of the sweet hopes springing up in these days of mourning--hopes all the sweeter for the generous reverence with which they waited for fulfilment. CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE. THE POWER OF THE PAST. While all the bitterness of past wrongs was thus, for Amethyst, softening into a tender haze of memory, it became apparent to Una that a new future was offered to herself. The pleasant, wholesome intercourse that had begun for her at Restharrow, had made the days cheerful at Bordighera, and, together with health much improved by the southern climate, had brought her for the first time something of the natural gaiety of her eighteen years. She very soon knew quite well, that her presence made the pleasure for Wilfred Jackson, that he sought her at every possible moment, and offered her the natural and innocent courtship of a warm-hearted youth, which ought to have been the opening of all the joys and rights of her young womanhood. But behind her lay, not the "duties enough and little cares" of unawakened childhood, not the playful preferences of attractive girlhood, but the searing, burning memory of premature passion. She let the pleasant thing go on, she hesitated and doubted, for she liked Wilfred Jackson very much, and she liked--she always would like-- intercourse that was touched with possibilities of emotion. And she would have been so glad to forget all her miserable past, to go on into a happy future.