Egidia made a sad little pilgrimage to the scenes of this romance that grieved her so. Brignal Banks under their winter aspect reminded her somehow of a young and pretty woman after a long and devastating illness. It was the same, and not the same, the warm tones had gone out of the green, the ragged boughs seemed blotted in upon the sky; the moist sides of the cliff, that no glow of sunset irradiated now, showed hard and chill behind the streaky lines of the leafless creepers that still hung on them. The water still bubbled and splashed over the stones, but with an empty merriment. So it seemed to the sad woman who stood by the river bank and looked at the bridge of stones made by human labour, that was no longer continuous. There had been a storm or two, and the rains had flushed the river bed, and the added flood had washed the stones away. She would never dare to confess it to Rivers and Phœbe, but she was at immense pains to gather up a heavy stone and try to drop it into a place between two remaining ones, and thus make the bridge passable. She would add her mite to Rivers’ bridge too. Phœbe Elles should not be the only woman who had helped him. She came away from there a prey to terrible depression, and resolved to visit no more “mouldering lodges” of a past in which she had no share. A fate seemed to be hanging over the whole world; to the sad Egidia, all the inanimate things that he had seen and touched seemed instinct with the foreboding of the particular disaster that threatened one man. And Jane Anne, too, who waited on her entirely now, at this dull season, when the personnel in the inn was necessarily diminished--was Jane Anne sad, or was it only the accustomed heaviness of the lonely, empty-lived, country girl? Egidia had written her name, Miss Alice Giles, very clearly in the hotel book, and, in brackets, her nom de guerre, which had a world-wide reputation. She committed this solecism with a distinct purpose. Had her name as a novelist reached Jane Anne’s ears? That was the point she meant to work from. Jane Anne certainly was full of the little civilities and attentions which that name generally evoked among the celebrity hunters of superior rank among whom Egidia’s ways were cast. Of taciturn habit though the landlady’s niece unmistakably was, she yet beamed on the authoress on every possible occasion, and lost no opportunity of insinuating herself into her good graces as far as was consistent with perfect deference and civility. At the close of the second day she spoke and asked a question. “If you please, ma’am,” she said, “might I venture to inquire if you are going to make a book about this place? So many do.” “But tell me why you think I am likely to?” asked Egidia, with the elaborate indulgence of the conspirator.