the admirable motive of wishing him not to feel that their patient had suffered by his absence or called for him in vain. This indeed appeared not to have been the case if Pinnie had opposed successfully his being written to. “I came in very soon,” Lady Aurora only said—“it was such a delightful chance. Since then she has had everything—if it wasn’t so sad to see a person _need_ so little. She did want you to stay where you were: she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr. Robinson.” “I don’t know what to say to you—you’re so extraordinarily good, so angelic,” Hyacinth replied, bewildered and sickened 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—this whole contrast cut him like a knife and made the ugly accident of his absence a perversity of his own. “I can never blame you when you’re 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’ve 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 fill 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 touch of consolation. 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’ve made his charming acquaintance; it’s impossible to be more kind.” Then while for a space 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.