“You’re not sorry to get rid of me,” he said, with a forced laugh.

“I don’t wish you to stay at the expense of your health.”

“I hope Clarence mayn’t damage yours.  These sleepless nights are telling on you.”

“Go.  You’ll miss the train.”

He looked back from the door, but Cecily had turned away.

He was absent for more than six weeks, during which he wrote frequently from various out-of-the-way places on the Rhine.  On returning, he found Cecily in London, very anxious about the child, and herself looking very ill.  He, on the other hand, was robust and in excellent spirits; in a day or two he began to go regularly to the British Museum—­to say, at all events, that he went there.  And so time passed to the year’s end.

One night in January Reuben went to the theatre.  He left Cecily sitting in the bedroom, by the fireside, with Clarence on her lap.  For several weeks the child had been so ill that Cecily seldom quitted it.

Three hours later she was sitting in the same position, still bent forward, the child still on her lap.  But no movement, no cry ever claimed her attention.  Tears had stained her face, but they no longer fell.  Holding a waxen little hand that would never again caress her, she gazed at the dying fire as though striving to read her destiny.

CHAPTER VI

AT PAESTUM

The English artist had finished his work, and the dirty little inn at Paestum would to-day lose its solitary guest.

This morning he rose much later than usual, and strolled out idly into the spring sunshine, a rug thrown over his shoulder.  Often plucking a flower or a leaf, and seeming to examine it with close thoughtfulness, he made a long circuit by the old walls; now and then he paused to take a view of the temples, always with eye of grave meditation.  At one elevated point, he stood for several minutes looking along the road to Salerno.

March rains had brought the vegetation into luxurious life; fern, acanthus, brambles, and all the densely intermingled growths that cover the ground about the ruins, spread forth their innumerable tints of green.  Between shore and mountains, the wide plain smiled in its desolation.

At length he went up into the Temple of Neptune, spread the rug on a spot where he had been accustomed, each day at noon, to eat his salame and drink his Calabrian wine, and seated himself against a column.  Here he could enjoy a view from both ends of the ruin.  In the one direction it was only a narrow strip of sea, with the barren coast below, and the cloudless sky above it; in the other, a purple valley, rising far away on the flank of the Apennines; both pictures set between Doric pillars.  He lit a cigar, and with a smile of contented thought abandoned himself to the delicious warmth, the restful silence.  Within reach of his hand was a fern that had shot up between the massive stones; be gently caressed its fronds, as though it were a sentient creature.  Or his eyes dwelt upon the huge column just in front of him—­now scanning its superb proportions, now enjoying the hue of the sunny-golden travertine, now observing the myriad crevices of its time-eaten surface, the petrified forms of vegetable growth, the little pink snails that housed within its chinks.