Venetia with a double barb.  She was the victim; and all the cares of Lady Annabel had been directed to soothe and support this stricken lamb.  Yet perhaps these unhappy women must have sunk under their unparalleled calamities, had it not been for the devotion of their companion.  In the despair of his first emotions, George Cadurcis was nearly plunging himself headlong into the wave that had already proved so fatal to his house.  But when he thought of Lady Annabel and Venetia in a foreign land, without a single friend in their desolation, and pictured them to himself with the dreadful news abruptly communicated by some unfeeling stranger; and called upon, in the midst of their overwhelming agony, to attend to all the heart-rending arrangements which the discovery of the bodies of the beings to whom they were devoted, and in whom all their feelings were centred, must necessarily entail upon them, he recoiled from what he contemplated as an act of infamous desertion.  He resolved to live, if only to preserve them from all their impending troubles, and with the hope that his exertions might tend, in however slight a degree, not to alleviate, for that was impossible; but to prevent the increase of that terrible woe, the very conception of which made his brain stagger.  He carried the bodies, therefore, with him to Spezzia, and then prepared for that fatal interview, the commencement of which we first indicated.  Yet it must be confessed that, though the bravest of men, his courage faltered as he entered the accustomed ravine.  He stopped and looked down on the precipice below; he felt it utterly impossible to meet them; his mind nearly deserted him.  Death, some great and universal catastrophe, an earthquake, a deluge, that would have buried them all in an instant and a common fate, would have been hailed by George Cadurcis, at that moment, as good fortune.

He lurked about the ravine for nearly three hours before he could summon up heart for the awful interview.  The position he had taken assured him that no one could approach the villa, to which he himself dared not advance.  At length, in a paroxysm of energetic despair, he had rushed forward, met them instantly, and confessed with a whirling brain, and almost unconscious of his utterance, that ’they could not hope to see them again in this world.’

What ensued must neither be attempted to be described, nor even remembered.  It was one of those tragedies of life which enfeeble the most faithful memories at a blow shatter nerves beyond the faculty of revival, cloud the mind for ever, or turn the hair grey in an instant.  They carried Venetia delirious to her bed.  The very despair, and almost madness, of her daughter forced Lady Annabel to self-exertion, of which it was difficult to suppose that even she was capable.  And George, too, was obliged to leave them.  He stayed only the night.  A few words passed between Lady Annabel and himself; she wished the bodies to be embalmed, and borne to