wandered back into the garden, and five minutes later Miss Ambient
came forth from the house to greet me. She explained that breakfast
would not be served for some time, and that she wished to catch the
doctor before he went away. I informed her that this functionary had
come and departed, and I repeated to her what he had told me about his
dismissal. This made Miss Ambient very serious, very serious indeed,
and she sank into a bench, with dilated eyes, hugging her elbows with
crossed arms. She indulged in many ejaculations, she confessed that she
was infinitely perplexed, and she finally told me what her own last
news of her nephew had been. She had sat up very late,--after me, after
Mark,--and before going to bed had knocked at the door of the child's
room, which was opened to her by the nurse. This good woman had admitted
her, and she had found Dolcino quiet, but flushed and "unnatural," with
his mother sitting beside his bed. "She held his hand in one of
hers," said Miss Ambient, "and in the other--what do you think?--the
proof-sheets of Mark's new book! She was reading them there, intently:
did you ever hear of anything so extraordinary? Such a very odd time to
be reading an author whom she never could abide!" In her agitation Miss
Ambient was guilty of this vulgarism of speech, and I was so impressed
by her narrative that it was only in recalling her words later that I
noticed the lapse. Mrs. Ambient had looked up from her reading with her
finger on her lips--I recognized the gesture she had addressed to me in
the afternoon--and, though the nurse was about to go to rest, had not
encouraged her sister-in-law to relieve her of any part of her vigil.
But certainly, then, Dolcino's condition was far from reassuring,--his
poor little breathing was most painful; and what change could have taken
place in him in those few hours that would justify Beatrice in denying
the physician access to him? This was the moral of Miss Ambient's
anecdote, the moral for herself at least. The moral for me, rather, was
that it _was_ a very singular time for Mrs. Ambient to be going into a
novelist she had never appreciated, and who had simply happened to be
recommended to her by a young American she disliked. I thought of her
sitting there in the sick-chamber in the still hours of the night, after
the nurse had left her, turning over those pages of genius and wrestling
with their magical influence.

I must relate very briefly the circumstan