'How glad I am I did not know that before' cried Amy.
'Did you remember it when you came here?' said Philip.
'Yes,' said Guy, not in the least conscious of the impression his words made on the others. 'By the bye, Philip, I wish you would tell us how you fared after we parted, and how you came here.'
'I went on according to my former plan,' said Philip, 'walking through the Valtelline, and coming down by a mountain path. I was not well at Bolzano, but I thought it only fatigue, which a Sunday's rest would remove, so on I went for the next two days, in spite of pain in head and limbs.'
'Not walking!' said Amy.
'Yes, walking. I thought it was stiffness from mountain climbing, and that I could walk it off; but I never wish to go through anything like what I did the last day, between the up and downs of that mountain path, and the dazzle of the snow and heat of the sun. I meant to have reached Vicenza, but I must have been quite knocked up when I arrived here, though I cannot tell. My head grew so confused, that my dread, all the way, was that I should forget my Italian; I can just remember conning a phrase over and over again, lest I should lose it. I suppose I was able to speak when I came here, but the last thing I remember was feeling very ill in some room, different from this, quite alone, and with a horror of dying deserted. The next is a confused recollection of the relief of hearing English again, and seeing my excellent nurse here.'
There was a little more talk, but a little was enough for Philip's feeble voice, and Guy soon told him he was tired, and ordered in his broth. He begged that Amy would stay, and it was permitted on condition that he would not talk, Guy even cutting short a quotation of,--'As Juno had been sick and he her dieter,'--appropriate to the excellence of the broths, which Amabel and her maid, thanks to their experience of Charles's fastidious tastes, managed to devise and execute, in spite of bad materials. It was no small merit in Guy to stop the compliment, considering how edified he had been by his wife's unexpected ingenuity, and what a comical account he had written of it to her mother, such, as Amy told him, deserved to be published in a book of good advice to young ladies, to show what they might come to if they behaved well. However, she was glad to have ocular demonstration of the success of the cookery, which she had feared might turn out uneatable; and her gentle feelings towards Philip were touched, by seeing one wont to be full of independence and self-assertion, now meek and helpless, requiring to be lifted, and propped up with pillows, and depending entirely and thankfully upon Guy.