e excitement
of his brother's arrival had proved too great, and he fell from one
fainting fit into another. Wentworth was greatly alarmed, but the doctor
was reassuring and cheerful. He said that Michael had borne the news
with almost unnatural calmness, but that the shock must have been great,
and a breakdown was to be expected. He laughed at Wentworth's anxiety
even while he ministered to Michael, and assured him that no one in his
experience had died of joy.

But later in the evening when Wentworth, somewhat pacified, had returned
to Venice for the night, the doctor felt yet again for the twentieth
time that the young Englishman baffled him.

It seemed to him that he was actually relieved when the kind, awkward,
tender elder brother had reluctantly taken his departure, promising to
come back early in the morning.

"Do not distress yourself, you will be quite well enough to leave
to-morrow," the doctor said to him many times. "I expected this
momentary collapse. It is nothing."

Michael's eyes dwelt on the kind face and then closed. There was that in
them which the doctor could not fathom.

He took the food that was pressed on him, and then turned his face to
the wall, and made as if he slept.

And the walls bent over him, and whispered to him, "Stay with us. We are
not so cruel as the world outside."

And that night the dying convict in the next cell, nearly as close on
freedom as Michael, heard all through the night a low sound of strangled
anguish that ever stifled itself into silence, and ever broke forth
anew, from dark to dawn.

The next morning Michael went feebly down the prison steps, calm and
wan, leaning on Wentworth's careful arm, and smiling affectionately at
him.

CHAPTER XXVI

Les caracteres faibles ne montrent de la decision que
quand il s'agit de faire un sottise.--DANIEL DARC.

A week or two after the news of Michael's proved innocence had convulsed
Hampshire, and before Michael and Wentworth had returned to Barford,
Aunt Aggie might have been seen on a fine May afternoon walking slowly
towards "The Towers." She had let her cottage at Saundersfoot for an
unusually long period, and was marking time with the Blores. Whatever
Aunt Mary's faults might be she was always ready to help her sister in
this practical manner, when Aunt Aggie was anxious to add to the small,
feebly frittered away income, on which her muddled, impecunious
existence depended.

In spite of the most