I never saw Mrs. Ambient till six months after this, and therefore cannot pretend to have verified the comparison. At the latter period she was again the type of the lady. “She’ll treat him better after this,” I remember Miss Ambient saying, in response to some quick outburst (on my part) of compassion for her brother. Although I had been in the house but thirty-six hours, this young lady had treated me with extraordinary confidence, and there was therefore a certain demand which, as an intimate, I might make of her. I extracted from her a pledge that she would never say to her brother what she had just said to me; she would leave him to form his own theory of his wife’s conduct. She agreed with me that there was misery enough in the house, without her contributing a new anguish, and that Mrs. Ambient’s proceedings might be explained, to her husband’s mind, by the extravagance of a jealous devotion. Poor Mark came back with the doctor much sooner than we could have hoped, but we knew, five minutes afterwards, that they arrived too late. Poor little Dolcino was more exquisitely beautiful in death than he had been in life. Mrs. Ambient’s grief was frantic; she lost her head and said strange things. As for Mark’s--but I will not speak of that. _Basta_, as he used to say. Miss Ambient kept her secret,--I have already had occasion to say that she had her good points,--but it rankled in her conscience like a guilty participation, and, I imagine, had something to do with her retiring ultimately to a Sisterhood. And, _à propos_ of consciences, the reader is now in a position to judge of my compunction for my effort to convert Mrs. Ambient. I ought to mention that the death of her child in some degree converted her. When the new book came out--it was long delayed--she read it over as a whole, and her husband told me that a few months before her death,--she failed rapidly after losing her son, sank into a consumption, and faded away at Mentone,--during those few supreme weeks she even dipped into _Beltraffio_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Author Of Beltraffio, by Henry James