I never saw Mrs. Ambient till six months after this, and therefore can’t pretend to have verified the comparison. At the latter period she was again the type of the perfect lady. “She’ll treat him better after this,” I remember her sister-in-law’s saying in response to some quick outburst, on my part, of compassion for her brother. Though 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 I might, as such an intimate, make of her. I extracted from her a pledge that she’d never say to her brother what she had just said to me, that she’d let him 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 it was all too late. His sole, his adored little son 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 won’t speak of that. _Basta_, _basta_, as he used to say. Miss Ambient kept her secret—I’ve 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 ultimately retiring from the world. And, apropos of consciences, the reader is now in a position to judge of my compunction for my effort to convert my cold hostess. 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 during the few supreme weeks before her death—she failed rapidly after losing her son, sank into a consumption and faded away at Mentone—she even dipped into the black “Beltraffio.”