"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.
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