"When you put it in that way," he says, in an awed half-whisper, "it does seem an inconceivable audacity on my part that I, who but a few days ago was crawling at her feet, should dare to-day to reach up to the heaven of her love."
Burgoyne had known perfectly well that it was coming; but yet how much worse is it than he had expected!
"Then you did ask her to marry you?"
But Byng has apparently fled back on the wings of fantasy into the wet woods of Vallombrosa, for he makes no verbal answer.
"She said yes?" asks Burgoyne, raising his voice, as if he were addressing someone deaf. "Am I to understand that she said yes?"
At the sound of that hard naked query the dreamer comes out of his enchanted forest again.
"I do not know what she said; I do not think she said anything," he answers, murmuring the words laggingly; while, as he goes on, the fire of his madness spires high in his flashing eyes. "We have got beyond speech, she and I! We have reached that region where hearts and intelligences meet without the need of those vulgar go-betweens—words."
There is a moment's pause, broken only by the commonplace sound of an electric bell rung by some inmate of the hotel.
"And has Mrs. Le Marchant reached that region too?" inquires Jim presently, with an irony he cannot restrain. "Does she, too, understand without words, or have you been obliged, in her case, to employ those vulgar go-betweens?"
"She must understand—she does—undoubtedly she does!" cries Byng, whose drunkenness shares with the more ordinary kind the peculiarity of believing whatever he wishes to be not only probable but inevitable. "Who could see us together and be in uncertainty for a moment? And her mother has some of her fine instincts, her delicate intuitions; not, of course, to the miraculous extent that she possesses them. In her they amount to genius!"