"I was sent away," replies Byng, in a voice whose intoxication pierces even through the first four small words; "they sent me away—they would not let me go further than the house-door. I say 'they,' but of course she had no hand in it—she, not she. She would not have sent me away, God bless her! it was her mother, of course—how could she have had the heart?"
Burgoyne would no doubt have made some answer in time; though the "she," the implication of Elizabeth's willingness for an indefinite amount of her lover's company, the "God bless her," gave him a sense of choking.
"But I do not blame Mrs. Le Marchant," pursues Byng, in a rapt, half-absent key. "Who would not wish to monopolize her? Who would not grudge the earth leave to kiss her sweet foot?
"'All I can is nothing
To her whose worth makes other worthies nothing.
She is alone!'"
"That at least is not your fault," replies Burgoyne dryly; "you have done your best to avert that catastrophe."
But to speak to the young man now is of as much avail as to address questions or remonstrances to one walking in his sleep.
"If she had allowed me, I would have lain on her threshold all night; I would have been the first thing that her heavenly eye lit on; I would—"
But Burgoyne's phial of patience is for the present emptied to the dregs.
"You would have made a very great fool of yourself, I have not the least doubt. Why try to persuade a person of what he is already fully convinced? But as Miss Le Marchant happily did not wish for you as a doormat, perhaps it is hardly worth while telling me what you would have done if she had."
The sarcastic words, ill-natured and unsympathetic as they sound in their own speaker's ears, yet avail to bring the young dreamer but a very few steps lower down his ladder of bliss.