“Thank heaven there is no fear of these two falling in love with each other,” she said, “which is an embarrassment one is scarcely ever safe from.” As for Sir John, he chuckled and declared that his son was an old woman. “Talk’sh like two ambassadorsh,” said the old man. Never was anything more satisfactory; for to have a course of true love so near to her, notwithstanding her sentimental sympathy with the thing in the abstract, would not have suited Lady Brotherton at all. But on the day of Sir John’s cold at Pisa, something occurred which, if she had not been so busy administering gruel, she might not have found so satisfactory. The two young people being thus left alone went out together, and walked very soberly, as was their wont, about the Cathedral and the Baptistery, gazing at everything as it was their duty to do. They stood and looked up at the delicate fretted galleries of the leaning tower, and the blue sky above which filled up every opening. They had been very silent, and silence is dangerous. At last Lionel said hastily: “I don’t know why this should make me think of the old Joscelyn tower you showed me; there is not much likeness certainly between this and a Border tower.” “The sky was just as blue,” said Lydia, “in all the crevices; though they say that in England we never see the sky.” “You remember it too?” “Yes,” she said with a faint little tremor in her voice. “And soon you will be there again,” he said (as if it were not brutal to remind her of it!), “but I---- where shall I be?” He threw so much pathos into his tone that Lydia, feeling herself on the brink of darkness and desolation, could not quite restrain a little outburst of impatience. He to talk like that, who would have nothing to give up, whose life would always be as beautiful as it was now! “Where should you be--but where you please!” she said, with a sharp tone of irritation in her voice. “Where I please?----do you think?--but I must not ask you that,” Lionel said, drawing a long breath. And then he added as if he were breathless and hurried, though in reality there was nothing to hurry him, “Lydia--I want to speak to you before--before----” “I don’t know what you mean; you can talk to me whenever you please,” cried Lydia, with the daring of anger. She was angry with him, she could scarcely tell why.