"You will come back, will not you?" she asks. "You are not of much use, I suppose; but still, one feels that you are there, and we are all so much at sea. You have not an idea how much we are at sea—without her."
"I think that I have a very good idea," he answers mournfully. "Tell me, Cis; do you think she is really very ill?"
As he puts the question, he feels its irrationality. He knows that the person to whom he is making his futile appeal has already given him all the scanty tidings she has to give; yet he cannot help indulging a faint hope that her response to this last query of his may perhaps set Amelia's condition in a slightly more favourable light. A look of helpless distress clouds Cecilia's already cloudy face.
"I tell you I do not know; I am no judge; I have seen so little real illness. Sybilla would kill me if she heard me say so, would not she"—with a slight parenthetical smile—"but I have seen so little real illness, that I do not know what things mean; I do not know what it means that she should be so heavy and stupid. As I told you before, the only time that she roused up at all was when I mentioned your—"
He stops her, breaking rudely into her sentence. He cannot bear to hear that it is only at the magic of his name that his poor faithful love lifts her sick head.
"Yes, yes; I remember."
"Some one ought to sit up with her, I am sure," pursues Cecilia, still with that same helpless air of disquiet; "she ought not to be left alone all night; but who? I should be more than willing to do it, but I know that I should fall asleep in five minutes, and I am such a heavy sleeper that, when once I am off, there is no possibility of waking me. I am a dreadfully bad sick-nurse; father can never bear to have me near him when he has the gout."
Burgoyne is too well aware of the perfect truth of this last statement to attempt any contradiction of it.
"Amelia has always been the one to sit up when any one was ill," continues she woefully; "and even now, by a stupid confusion of ideas, I catch myself thinking, 'Oh, Amelia will sit up with her!' before I can realize that her is Amelia herself."
Jim can well sympathize with this same confusion, when, several times during his walk back to the Piazza d'Azeglio, a muddled thought of comfort, in the idea that he will go and tell Amelia what a terrible day of anxiety about some one he has been having, taps at the door of his brain. The portals of No. 12 are once again opened to him by Annunziata, who indicates to him, by a series of compassionate gestures and liquid Tuscan sentences, that the povero is still within, and the Padrona, who this time also appears on the scene, and who is possessed of somewhat more English than her handmaid, intimates, albeit with a good deal of sympathy for his sufferings, yet with still more of determination, that it would be no bad thing were he to be removed, since, whether the sun shines or the rain falls, people must live, and the apartment has to be prepared for new occupants.