"Yes, we are back before you," replies Burgoyne; and if the penalty had been death, he could not at that moment have added one syllable to the acrid assent.
"Are we late?" asks Elizabeth tremulously; "I am afraid we are late—I am afraid we have kept you waiting! Oh, I am so sorry!"
She looks with an engaging timidity of apology from one to other of the sulky countenances around her; and Burgoyne stealing a look at her, their eyes meet. He is startled by the singularity of expression in hers. Whatever it denotes, it certainly is not the stupid simplicity of rapture to be read, in print as big as a poster's, in Byng's. And yet, among the many ingredients that go to make up that shy fevered beam, rapture is undoubtedly one.
"Did you lose yourselves? Did you go further into the wood?" asks Cecilia, with a curiosity that is, considering the provocation given, not unjustifiable.
They both reply vaguely that they had lost themselves, that they had gone deeper into the wood. It is obvious to the meanest intelligence that neither of them has the slightest idea where they have been.
"I may as well tell the driver to put the horses in," says Burgoyne, in a matter-of-fact voice, glad of an excuse to absent himself.
When he comes back, he finds the Le Marchants standing together in the window, talking in a low voice, and Byng hovering near them. It is evident to Jim that the elder woman has no wish for converse with the young man; but in his present condition of dizzy exhilaration, he is quite unaware of that fact. He approaches her indeed (as the unobserved watcher notes) with a dreadful air of filial piety, and addresses her in a tone of apology it is true, but with a twang of intimacy that had never appeared in his voice before.
"You must not blame her; indeed you must not! it was entirely my fault. I am awfully sorry that you were alarmed, but indeed there was no cause. What did you think had happened? Did you think"—with an excited laugh of triumph and a bright blush—"that I had run off with her?"
The speech is in extremely bad taste, since, whatever may be the posture of affairs between himself and Elizabeth, it is morally impossible that her mother can yet be enlightened as to it; the familiarity of it is therefore premature and the jocosity ill-placed. No one can be more disposed to judge it severely than its unintended auditor; but even he is startled by the effect it produces.
Without making the smallest attempt at an answer, Mrs. Le Marchant instantly turns her shoulder upon the young man—a snub of which Jim would have thought so gentle-mannered a person quite incapable, and walks away from him with so determined an air that not even a person in the seventh heaven of drunkenness can mistake her meaning. Nor does Elizabeth's conduct offer him any indemnification. She follows her mother a little more slowly; and, as she passes Jim, he sees that she is shaking violently, and that her face is as white as chalk. A sort of generous indignation against the mother for spoiling the poor little soul's first moments of bliss mixes curiously in his mind with a less noble satisfaction at the reflection that there are undoubtedly breakers ahead of Byng.