"No doubt, no doubt; but did you trust entirely to Mrs. Le Marchant's instincts, or did you broach the subject to her at all? You must have had time, plenty of time, during that long drive home."
"Well, no," answers Byng slowly, and with a slight diminution of radiance. "I meant to have approached it; I tried to do so once or twice; but I thought, I fancied—probably it was only fancy—that she wished to avoid it."
"To avoid it?"
"Oh, not in any offensive, obvious way; it was probably only in my imagination that she shirked it at all—and I did not make any great efforts. It was all so perfect"—the intoxication getting the upper hand again—"driving along in that balmy flood of evening radiance—did you see how even the tardy sun came out for us?—with that divine face opposite to me! Such a little face!"—his voice breaking into a tremor. "Is not it inconceivable, Jim, how so much beauty can be packed into so tiny a compass?"
Burgoyne has all the time had his brushes in his hand, the brushes with which he has been preparing himself for his solitary dinner. He bangs them down now on the table. How can he put a period to the ravings of this maniac? And yet not so maniac either. What gives the sharpest point to his present suffering is the consciousness that he would have made quite as good a maniac himself if he had had the chance. This consciousness instils a few drops of angry patience into his voice, as, disregarding the other's high-flown question, he puts one that is not at all high-flown himself.
"Then you have not told Mrs. Le Marchant yet?"
But the smile that the memory—so fresh, only half an hour old—of Elizabeth's loveliness has laid upon Byng's lips still lingers there; and makes his response dreamy and vague.
"No, not yet; not yet! She had taken one of her gloves off; her little hand lay, palm upward, on her knees almost all the way; once or twice I thought of taking it, of taking possession of it, of telling her mother in that way; but I did not. It seemed—out in the sunshine, no longer in the sacred mist of that blessed wood—too high an audacity, and I did not!"
He stops, his words dying away into a whisper, his throat's too narrow passage choked by the rushing ocean of his immense felicity.
Burgoyne looks at him in silence, again with a sort of admiration mixed with wrath. How has this commonplace, pink-and-white boy managed to scale such an altitude, while he himself, in all his life, though with a better intelligence, and, as he had thought, with a deeper heart, had but prowled around the foot? Why should he try to drag him down? On the peak of that great Jungfrau of rapture no human foot can long stand.