Her answer seems but to confirm him in this first horrible suspicion.
"It is astonishing," he says, in a strangled voice, "how ready even the best women are to believe evil; what—what evidence have you of the truth of—of these precious stories?"
"What evidence?" she repeats, fastening her sad eyes upon him—"the evidence of my own heart. I realize now that I have known it all along."
Read by the light of his fears, this response is so enigmatic that it dawns upon him with a flash of inexpressible solace that perhaps he may be on the wrong track after all. His ideas are precipitated into such a state of confusion by this blessed possibility that he can only echo in a stupefied tone:
"Have known what all along?"
She has turned round on the stone bench upon which they have hitherto been sitting side by side, and, as he in the eagerness of his listening has done the same thing, they are now opposite to one another, and he feels as well as sees her hungry eyes devouring his face.
"That you are sick of me," she answers, in a heart-wrung whisper, "sick to death of me—that was what she said."
It is impossible to deny that Burgoyne's first impulse is one of relief. He has been mistaken, then. Elizabeth's secret is in the same state of precarious safety as her enemy's departure from Florence had left it in. His second impulse—our second impulses are mostly our best ones, equally free from the headlongness of our first, and the cold worldly wisdom of our third—is one of genuine indignation, concern, and amazement.
"What who said?"
"Mrs. Byng."