house, he
concluded that this must be the bill which Neil was disputing so hotly,
and bidding good-day to the boy, he walked on across the river, with a
feeling that life could never be to him again just what it had been
before. On the morning when he left the hotel he had seen the nurse, and
inquired after the patient, who, she reported, had slept well and seemed
a little better. And now she was dead! the girl he loved so much. Dead,
in all her soft beauty, with only the suns of nineteen summers upon her
head. Dead in Rome, and he not there with her to take a last look at the
fair face which, as he walked rapidly on through street after street,
seemed close beside him, sometimes touching his own and making him
shiver, it was so cold and dead.

"Dead and gone! Dead and gone!" he kept repeating to himself, as he
tried to fancy what was passing in the room where he had spent so many
hours and where he had kissed the girl now dead and gone forever.

"If I were only there," he thought. "If I could but kiss her again and
hold her hand in mine," and for a moment he felt that he must go back
and take the matter away from Neil, who could swear at the expense,
however great it was.

He must go back and himself carry Bessie to the old home in Wales and
bury her in the nook between the father and the wall--the spot which,
when he saw it last, he little dreamed would be her grave, and she so
young and fair. But to go back would necessitate his telling his Aunt
Lucy of the fever, and to excite in her alarm and anxiety for his
safety. So he gave it up, but walked on mile after mile, until the night
shades were beginning to fall, and be realized how late it was, and that
his aunt must be getting anxious about him. Hailing a carriage, he was
driven back to his hotel, and found, as he expected, his aunt alarmed at
his protracted absence, and still more alarmed at the whiteness of his
face and the strange look in his eyes. He had never told her a word of
Bessie, or the fever, and he would not do so now. So he merely said he
had walked too far and was tired. He should be all right in the morning,
and he asked permission to retire early to his room where he could be
alone with his sorrow.

They left Florence the next day, for Miss Grey, who had made a long stop
there early in the winter, when on her way to Rome, was anxious to leave
Italy as soon as possible, fancying that the climate did not agree with
Grey, who had not seemed himsel