Thus time came to have a prodigious sweep and fling as the long delicious holiday approached its end. The hours and days rushed on like the waters of a river hurrying to the falls, every minute increasing the velocity; already the skies were getting bright (as if they had ever been anything but bright!) with spring; the flowers were bursting forth everywhere; the warmth becoming excessive; the English tourists beginning to return home in clouds. And the Brothertons spoke quite calmly of going back to England. To them it meant a natural succession, no more; they would return home to other delights. When autumn came back they would set out again, and go over the same enchanted lands; but for Lydia all would be over. She tried to enter into their plans, however, quite steadily, concealing the vertigo that seized her, and her wild sense of the hurrying rush of those last days. When it was suggested that they should rest a few days at Pisa, Sir John having a cold, and from thence go on to Leghorn, and take the steamer, Lydia felt like a criminal who has got a reprieve; but oh, how guilty, how more than ever deserving of any sentence that could be passed upon her! By this time there had come a strange uneasiness into her intercourse with “Cousin Lionel.” Liddy had always been more reserved with him than with anyone else, she could not tell why. Since the first frankness of the days when she went with him to Birrenshead there had been a great seriousness in all their relations. This was partly his doing, and partly hers. Lord Eldred’s appearance had checked him when he had been getting rid of the impression which his mother’s opinion on the subject of Lord Eldred had produced on him. And Lydia’s seriousness had subdued the young man. She had consulted him indeed, referred to him constantly, took his advice, kept up an invariable tacit appeal to him in all her concerns, which she was scarcely herself aware of, but which went to the very bottom of his heart; but she was always serious. Her gayer flights were with the moths, as Lady Brotherton called them, the commissionaires, the young men who fluttered about the two ladies, and whom Lydia, caring nothing about them, treated with every kind of gay malice, and a hundred caprices; but she was never capricious with cousin Lionel. They treated each other with a sort of stately dignity, reserved on one side, reverential on the other, to the amusement, but great gratification of Lady Brotherton.