It nerves her to new effort. “Was not Féodorovna very much excited at your getting it?” her terror of herself driving her on into a torrent of trivial questions. “How is Féodorovna? is she yellow still?” “No; not at all.” “Is she quite herself again?--quite recovered?” “She is supposed to be.” “But you think that she is not?” “I think she is--rather--hysterical.” Lavinia’s feverish trickle of inquiry drops into silence. Between the lines of his brief words, and in the constraint of his tone, she reads that the method adopted by Miss Prince to show her hysteria has been to throw herself into his arms, as she had done by letter into General ----’s, and has volunteered to follow him round the globe, as she had generously done in the case of his predecessor. Well, she herself has been within an ace of a similar action during the last five minutes. She ought, therefore, to feel a sympathy for the same abandonment on the part of another. And yet, although Miss Carew knows, as well as if she had been present at the drama, that Féodorovna has remained in Binning’s arms not a moment longer than the space of time needed for him to find a chair in which to deposit her, yet a dizzying jealousy seizes her at the thought that, though only for a minute, and deeply against the will of the object of her amorous demonstration, Miss Prince has lain on that breast whose pulsing against her own Lavinia will never feel. “_Hysterical!_” she repeats, after a pause, in a low key of suspicion. “Why was she hysterical? How did she show that she was hysterical?” A slight flush, or so she fancies, passes over his hollow cheeks. “Oh, I don’t know. How do people usually show it?”--with impatient evasion. “Laughing? Crying?” “Yes, yes; that sort of thing!” Then, with an upbraiding accent, that escapes him against his will, “Why should we talk about her, poor soul?” “Why not?” she answers. “What else is there to talk about? There is nothing else.” The words, extravagant as they are, represent to Lavinia the exact truth. _He!_ _She!_ There is nothing else in God’s universe; and before both him and her stands the prohibitory angel, the flame of whose waved sword blinds them to all creation also. She looks straight before her in dogged despair, and a caught half-sobbing breath beside her tells her with what a strangling grip the temptation is taking him by the throat. Yet this time she puts out no finger, utters no wisely trivial commonplace to help him. The mental picture of Féodorovna clinging sobbing round his neck, even though she knows with what repellant grudgingness that embrace had been met, has robbed Lavinia of all further power of fight than what lies in silence. He does not leave her even that. “We shall hear of each other indirectly, I suppose?” he says by-and-by, in a voice not the clearer for the lump in his throat, which is clearly past his power to swallow.