"How—how pale you are!" he says. If he had given utterance to the word that hovered on his lips, he would have cried, "how yellow!"
"It would be very odd if she did not," says Cecilia with a shrug, looking up from her "Etiquette," to which she has returned; "she has sat up three nights with father, and last evening Sybilla bid us all good-bye. You know she never can bear anybody else to be ill, and when father has the gout she bids us all good-bye—and Amelia is always taken in and sheds torrents of tears—do not you, Amelia?"
Amelia has subsided rather wearily into a chair. "She really thinks that she is dying," says she apologetically—"and who knows? some day perhaps it may come true."
"Not it," rejoins her sister, with an exasperated sniff "she will see us all out—will not she, Jim?"
"I have not the remotest doubt of it," replies he heartily; and then his conscience-struck eyes revert to his betrothed's wan face, all the plainer for its wanness. "No sleep, no fresh air," in an injured tone, checking off the items on his fingers.
"But I have had fresh air," smiling at him with pale affection; "one day Mrs. Byng took me out for a drive. Mrs. Byng has been very kind to me."
She does not lay the faintest invidious accent on the name, as if contrasting it with another whose owner had been so far less kind; it is his own guilty heart that supplies the emphasis. His only resource is an anger which—so curiously perverse is human nature—is not even feigned.
"You can go out driving with Mrs. Byng then, though you could not spare time to come out with me," he says in a surly voice.
She does not defend herself but her lower lip trembles.
"Come out with me now," he cries, remorse giving a harshness even to the tone of the sincerely-meant invitation. "You look like a geranium in a cellar; it is a divine day, a day to make the old feel young, and the young immortal; come out and stay out with me all day. I will take you wherever you like. I will——"