"Saying what?"
"Her son was with her—he had brought her in to have some tea; it was to him that she was speaking; she was asking him about me, where I was? where he had left me? whether he had seen me lately? And then she said, 'Poor Amelia, Jim really does neglect her shamefully; and yet one cannot help being sorry for him, too; it was such child-stealing in the first instance, and he is evidently dead-sick of her! It is so astonishing that she does not see it!'"
There is something almost terrible in the calm distinctness with which Amelia repeats the sentences that had laid the card-house of her happiness in the dust. Certainly she keeps her promise to him to the letter; she gives no lightest sign of breaking down. There is not a tear in her eye, not a quiver in her voice. After a moment's pause, she continues:
"And then he, Mr. Byng, answered, 'Poor soul, it—it is odd! She must have the hide of a hippopotamus.'"
Amelia has finished her narrative, repeating the young man's galling comment, with the same composure as his mother's humiliatingly compassionate ones; and for a space her sole auditor is absolutely incapable of making any criticism upon it. He is forbidden, if he had wished it, to offer her even the mute amends of a dumb endearment, by the reappearance on the scene of a couple of the sun-scorched peasant torments with their straw hand-screens. It is not likely that those so lately bought should have worn out already; but yet they renew their importunities with such a determined obstinacy, as if they knew this to be the case; and it is not until they are lightened of two more, that they consent once again to retire, leaving the warm bright plateau to the lovers—if indeed they can be called such.
CHAPTER XXI.
"True, be it said, whatever man it said,
That love with gall and honey doth abound;
But if the one be with the other way'd,
For every dram of honey therein found
A pound of gall doth over it redound."
"She was perfectly right," says Amelia, still speaking quite quietly; "it is astonishing that I should not have seen it; and it was child-stealing; you were barely twenty-one, and I—I was not very young for a woman even then—I was twenty-three. I ought to have known better."