only said, “I came in very soon, it was such a delightful chance. Since then she has had everything; only it’s sad to see a person _need_ so little. She did want you to stay; she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr Robinson.” “I don’t know what to say to you—you are so extraordinarily good, so angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and made weak by a strange, unexpected shame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—the contrast seemed to cut him like a knife, and to make the horrible accident of his absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame you, when you are so kind, but I wish to God I had known!” he broke out. Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. “Of course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that your visit should _not_ be cut short. When you should come of yourself, it would be time enough. I don’t know exactly where you have been, but she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would do you so much good.” Hyacinth felt his eyes filling with tears. “She’s dying—she’s dying! How can she live when she’s like that?” He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him and laid her finger-tips gently on his hand. So, for a minute, while his tears flowed and she said nothing, he felt her timid, consoling touch. At the end of the minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said ‘we’ just before, and he asked her whom she meant. “Oh, Mr Vetch, don’t you know? I have made his acquaintance; it’s impossible to be more kind.” Then, while, for an instant, Hyacinth was silent, wincing, pricked with the thought that Pinnie had been beholden to the fiddler while _he_ was masquerading in high life, Lady Aurora added, “He’s a charming musician. She asked him once, at first, to bring his violin; she thought it would soothe her.” “I’m much obliged to him, but now that I’m here we needn’t trouble him,” said Hyacinth. Apparently there was a certain dryness in his tone, which was the cause of her ladyship’s venturing to reply, after an hesitation, “Do let him come, Mr Robinson; let him be near you! I wonder whether you know that—that he has a great affection for you.” “The more fool he; I have always treated him like a brute!” Hyacinth exclaimed, colouring.