Again no one answers.
"You do not seem to be listening to what I am saying," cries Sybilla fractiously; "will you please tell him, Jim?"
Jim lifts his heavy eyes from the ugly carpet on which they have been resting, and looks distastefully back at her.
"I do not think that I will, Sybilla," he replies slowly; "I do not think he cares a straw whether your temperature goes up or down. I think that he does not come here because—because he has found metal more attractive elsewhere."
He makes this statement for no other reason than because it is so intensely unpleasant to him, because he realizes that he must have to face the fact it embodies, and to present it not only to himself, but to others. And each day that passes proves to him more and more conclusively that it is a fact. He asks Byng no question as to the disposition of his day. He sees but little of him, having, indeed, changed the hours of his own breakfast and dinner in order to avoid having his appetite spoilt by the sight of so much unnecessary radiance opposite him; but he knocks up against him, flower-laden, at the Strozzi steps; he notes the splendour of his ties and waistcoats; he grows to know the Elizabeth-look on his face, when he comes singing home at evening, as one knows the look of the western clouds that the sun's red lips have only just ceased to kiss, though no sun is any longer in sight; and yet he does not interfere. He has received from the young man's mother a hasty letter, pencilled in the train, not an hour after she had quitted him; another more leisurely, yet as anxious, from Turin; a third from Paris, and lastly a telegram from Charing Cross. All bear the same purport.
"Write; keep an eye upon him!" "Write; keep an eye upon him! Write!"
And yet, though a full week has passed, though he sees the son of his old ally drifting, faster than ever autumn leaf drifted on a flush October river, to the whirlpool she had dreaded for him, yet he sends her never a word. He writes her long letters, it is true, covers telegram-forms with pregnant messages, but they all find their ultimate home in the wood fire. When the moment comes, he finds it impossible to send them, since, upon searching his heart for the motives that have dictated them, he finds those motives to be no fidelity to an ancient friendship, no care for the boy's welfare, but, simply and nakedly, the satisfaction of his own spite, the easing of his own bitter jealousy.
So the Florentine post goes out daily, bearing no tale of Byng's backslidings to his native land, and Jim, brushing past him, answering him curtly, never going nearer to the Piazza d'Azeglio than the Innocenti—a good long street off—devotes himself to the frantic prosecution of a suit long since won, to the conquest of a heart for eight weary years hopelessly, irrecoverably, pitiably his. His presence at the Anglo-Américain is so incessant, and his monopolizing of Amelia so unreasonable, that Sybilla—for the first time in her life really a little neglected—alternately runs up her pulse to 170 and drops it to 40.
"And then you wonder that I am anxious to be married," says Cecilia, accompanying her future brother-in-law to the door, on the day on which the latter phenomenon has occurred, and wiping the angry tears from her plump cheeks. "I make no secret of it, I am madly anxious, I would marry anyone, I am desperate. Just think what my life will be when Amelia is gone; and though of course I shall be a great deal with her—she has promised that I shall be almost always with her" (Jim winces)—"yet of course it can't be the same thing as having a home of your own."
"We will do our best for you," replies he, with a rather rueful smile and a sense of degradation; "but you know, my dear Cis, anybody can lead a horse to the water, but it is not so easy to make him drink."