"I beg your pardon," he says sweet-temperedly; "I suppose I am a hideous bore to-night; I suppose one must always be a bore to other people when one is tremendously happy."
"It is not your being tremendously happy that I quarrel with," growls Burgoyne, struggling to conquer, or at least tone down, the intense irritability of nerves that his friend's flights provoke. "You are perfectly right to be that if you can manage to compass it; but what I should be glad to arrive at is your particular ground for it in the present case."
The question, sobering in its tendency, has yet for sole effect the setting Byng off again with spread pinions into the empyrean.
"What particular ground I have?" he repeats, in a dreamy tone of ecstasy. "You ask what particular ground I have? Had ever anyone cause to be so royally happy as I?"
He pauses a moment or two, steeped in a rapture of oblivious reverie, then goes on, still as one only half waked from a beatific vision:
"I had a prognostic that to-day would be the culminating day—something told me that to-day would be the day; and when you gave me up your seat in her carriage—how could you be so magnificently generous? How can I ever adequately show you my gratitude?"
"Yes, yes; never mind that."
"Then, later on, in the wood"—his voice sinking, as that of one who approaches a Holy of Holies—"when that blessed mist wrapped her round, wrapped her lovely body round, so that I was able to withdraw her from you, so that you did not perceive that she was gone—were not you really aware of it? Did not it seem to you as if the light had gone out of the day? When we stood under those dripping trees, as much alone as if—"
"I do not think that there is any need to go into those details," interrupts Burgoyne, in a hard voice; "I imagine that in these cases history repeats itself with very trifling variations; what I should be glad if you would tell me is, whether I am to understand that you have to-day asked Miss Le Marchant to marry you?"
Byng brings his eyes, which have been lifted in a sort of trance to the ceiling, down to the prosaic level of his Mentor's severe and tight-lipped face.