lgar has fallen into habits of excessive indolence; doesn't it
seem to you that you might help him out of hem?"

"I think he may not need help as you understand it, now."

"My dear, he needs it perhaps five hundred times more than he did
before. If you decline to believe me, I shall be only too much
justified by your experience hereafter."

"What would you have me do?"

"What must very soon occur to your own excellent wits, Cecily--for I
won't give up all my pride in you. Mr. Elgar should, of course, go back
to England, and do something that becomes him; he must decide what. Let
him have a few days with us in Capri; then go, and so far recommend
himself in our eyes. No one can make him see that this is what his
dignity--if nothing else--demands, except yourself. Think of it, dear."

Cecily did think of it, long and anxiously. Thanks to Elgar, her
meditations had a dark background such as her own fancy would never
have supplied.

He knew not how sadly the image of him had been blurred in Cecily's
mind, the man who lay that night in his room overlooking the port.
Whether such ignorance were for his aid or his disadvantage, who shall
venture to say?

To a certain point, we may follow with philosophic curiosity, step by
step, the progress of mental anguish, but when that point is passed,
analysis loses its interest; the vocabulary of pain has exhausted
itself, the phenomena already noted do but repeat themselves with more
rapidity, with more intensity--detail is lost in the mere sense of
throes. Perchance the mind is capable of suffering worse than the
fiercest pangs of hopeless love combined with jealousy; one would not
pretend to put a limit to the possibilities of human woe; but for
Mallard, at all events this night did the black flood of misery reach
high-water mark.

What joy in the world that does not represent a counter-balance of
sorrow? What blessedness poured upon one head but some other must
therefore lie down under malediction? We know that with the uttermost
of happiness there is wont to come a sudden blending of troublous
humour. May it not be that the soul has conceived a subtle sympathy
with that hapless one but for whose sacrifice its own elation were
impossible?

CHAPTER XIII

ECHO AND PRELUDE

At Villa Sannazaro, the posture of affairs was already understood. When
Eleanor Spence, casually calling at the _pension_, found that Cecily
was unable to receive visitors, she at the same tim