The Bentleyites were the strongest. In a short time Madame Rosa’s Wednesday evenings were almost deserted. All the very good avoided her and her house as if a moral plague existed around her. The Miss Grandvilles, indeed, very nearly cut her. They scarcely bowed when they saw her, and passed her very stiffly even in church. Sometimes they were afflicted with sudden short-sightedness, and did not see her at all. Miss Augusta, through being triumphant, could afford to be magnanimous; and she was a shade less distant in her manner: when met with Mr. Bentley, she was positively gracious. Then the Cantabs went back to their respective colleges, and the leaves began to fall. In the dreary autumn weather--the rain and fog and drizzling mist--that now came on, even her own adherents could not come out so often to see her; so that the sweet face grew sad in thinking of the bright sky and the warm hearts of Italy; and the joyous spirits sank in this social solitude, for want of love and sympathy to sustain it. The days were so grey and dark, she could not even paint; and in the Langthwaite lending library, were only dull histories or biographies. The mud and the rain frightened the soft half-foreigner, and kept her much within doors, moping in a dull Cumberland house, where the clouds came down so low, that they sometimes rested on the roof; and where the only visitors she saw were half-a-dozen good-hearted country girls, with not an idea amongst them beyond Berlin work or babies’ caps; which, to a woman accustomed to the best and most intellectual society of Rome, was scarcely sufficient mental distraction. What was she to do?--fight or retire? She thought of Italy, of her friends there, of the treasures of art, of the beauty, the free life, the ease, the love, the fulness of existence,--and she covered her face in her hands, while tears forced their way through her fingers. Then she thought of Mr. Bentley, and of his offer and of how he looked when he was down on his knees before her; and she laughed till she had a pain in her side. But she could not laugh for ever at Mr. Bentley and his offer, and the ennui of her life began to grow insupportable. It was reported at last that she was going away. It was Laura Winter who said so first, by Rosa’s permission, one day after she had been at Whitefield House. Madame Floriani had cried, and said that she was ill: the constant damp did not agree with her; and she had grown very thin and sallow rather than pale as she used to be; and she said, too, that she was dull; she could not bear it any longer. Her heart was Italian. It would not live in such an atmosphere; and then she had cried dreadfully, and Laura had cried too, for sympathy. As girls in the country always do.