“Oh, Mr. Jerrold, listen,” Bessie began, just as the door opened and Flossie came in.

“Time’s up,” she said, smilingly, as she glanced at Bessie’s flushed cheek and Grey’s white face, and guessed that something exciting had taken place.

When Jack Trevellian returned from his unsuccessful wooing the previous summer, he had in strict confidence told Flossie why he failed, so that she knew of Bessie’s engagement to Neil, but did not feel at liberty to communicate what she knew to Grey, even though she guessed the nature of his feelings for Bessie.  And so he was ignorant that he had a rival, and did not in the least suspect the truth, as he once more said farewell and followed Flossie out into the hall.

“Wait a minute, I have something for you,” she said to him, and, putting her hand into her pocket, she drew out a piece of soft white paper in which was carefully wrapped one of the curls she had cut from Bessie’s head.  “I brought this to you, thinking you might like it when you were far away and she was dead,” she said, in a choking voice.

“Thank you, Flossie,” he said, taking the package from her, “God bless you for all you are to her.  Write me at Venice, Hotel New York, and tell me how she is.  We shall stay there a day or two before going on to Vienna and Berlin.”

He wrung her hands and walked away down the broad flight of stairs, and Flossie saw him no more.

CHAPTER III.

DEAD.

That was what Adolph, a messenger boy from the Quirinal, said to Grey three days later, when the latter accidentally met him in Florence and inquired for the young English girl who was so sick with the fever.  Adolph had left the Quirinal for Florence, his home, on the evening of the same day of Grey’s departure from Rome.  The next afternoon the two met accidentally on one of the bridges which cross the river Arno.

“Dead!” Grey repeated, turning white to his lips and staggering as if he had been smitten with a heavy blow.  “How can she be dead?  They told me she was better the morning I left.  When did she die?”

“A little after twelve,” the boy replied, and Grey continued: 

“Did her cousin come—­a young man from Naples?”

“Yes,” the boy answered, “Some gentleman was there—­a big swell, who swore awfully at the clerk about the bills; there was no end of a row.”

“The bills!  What does it mean?” Grey thought, for he had paid them all up to the time of his leaving.

Then, remembering to have heard what exorbitant sums were demanded by the proprietors of hotels when a person died in their 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