Part Three Chapter 3 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 nurse, and inquired after the patient, who, she reported, had slept well and seemed a little better. And now she was dead! the girl he loved so much. Dead, in all her soft beauty, with only the suns of nineteen summers upon her head. Dead in Rome, and he not there with her to take a last look at the fair face which, as he walked rapidly on through street after street, seemed close beside him, sometimes touching his own and making him shiver, it was so cold and dead.