He is out of the room and out of the hotel before his companions can take exception to his disappearance. For some time he walks along aimlessly, his mind a jumble of misery, and dull, remorseful anxiety about Amelia; intolerable comparisons between his own lot and his friend's; sharp knives of jealousy as often as—which is almost unintermittently—his imagination wings its cruel way to the Piazza d'Azeglio—through one opulent week, his Piazza. At this moment—this moment, while his own leaden feet are treading goalless the hot flags that for him lead nowhere—Byng is enthroned with her in the heaven of the mean little salon. He unconsciously shows his teeth in a stern smile to the surprised passers-by. He had jeered Byng for his hyperboles, and now he is out-hyperboling him. What a detestable verb he has invented! He laughs out loud. Are they sitting at the window, looking out at the judas tree and the Paulownia? Not they! The window is commanded to a certain extent by the roadway. The window is for acquaintances, banal acquaintances, like himself—no place for the permitted freedoms of exquisite new love. Are they then on the sofa, the vulgar walnut sofa, over which Elizabeth has thrown her blue Neapolitan tablecloth? It is a little sofa, scarcely room for two upon it, but, oh! plenty of room for them! Or are they at the piano? Is she singing him some sugared ditty "lovely well" until he breaks into her song with the storm of his kisses, and her little white hands drop from the keys, and they lie sobbing with ecstasy in each other's arms? It is quite certain that Byng will sob. He is always delighted at having an opportunity for turning on the water-works. Is there a bare possibility that Mrs. Le Marchant may carry her disapprobation to the pitch of impeding by her presence their tête-à-tête? The idea gives him a momentary alleviation. Why should not he go and see for himself whether it is so? It will be a method of passing the tedious interval before he can hear the doctor's verdict on Amelia. He must at some time or other comply with Byng's pressing prayer to him to offer his congratulations to Elizabeth, and he may as well have a day of complete and perfect pain—pain of various flavours and essences mixed into one consummate draught—a day of which not one hour shall be without its ache.
Having come to this conclusion, his aimless walk quickens, and changes into a purposeful striding through streets and Piazzas, till he finds himself standing at the door of 12a. He looks up at the entresol windows—they are all open, but no one is either sitting in or looking out at them. It is as he had thought. The window is too public for them; neither can they be at the piano, for not a sound of either voice or instrument is wafted down to him. He runs up the stone stairs, and rings the electric bell. The standing before the unopened portal, and the trembling jar of the bell, bring back to him, with a vividness he could do without, those other long-ago days—they seem to him long ago—when he stood there last, with no easy heart even then, but yet with how different anticipations. He has found it hard enough to bear the brunt of Byng's furious inhuman joy when alone with him. How will he stand it when he sees them together?
He is recalled from these reflections by the opening of the door, and the appearance in it of the ministering angel who has usually admitted him into his Eden—Annunziata. It strikes him that Annunziata looks older and more dishevelled than ever, and is without that benevolent smile of welcoming radiance which her hard-featured face generally wears. Nor does she, as has been her wont, stand back to let him pass in almost before he has put his question, as if she could not admit him quickly enough. But to-day she stands, on the contrary, in the doorway without a smile. In a second the idea flashes across Jim's mind that Byng has forbidden anyone to be let in. It turns him half sick for the moment, and it is with an unsteady voice that he stammers:
"The Signora? The Signorina?"
Annunziata lifts her shoulders in a dismal shrug, and stretches out her hands:
"Gone!"
"Gone? You mean gone out driving?" Then remembering that her English is as minus a quantity as his Italian, he adds in eager explanation, "En fiacre?"
She shakes her head, and then nods vaguely in the direction of the whole of the rest of the world—the whole, that is, that is not 12 bis.
"No, gone!"
"But where? Dove?" cries he, frantic with irritation at his own powerlessness either to understand or be understood.