Again she shakes her head.
"I do not know; they did not say."
He gathers this to be her meaning, and hurriedly puts another query.
"When? Quando?"
But her answer being longer and more voluble, he can't take in its drift, seeing which she retreats a step, and, motioning him with her hand to enter, points down the passage. He does not require to have the dumb-show of invitation twice repeated, but, rushing past her, hurries down the well-known little corridor to the salon door. It is open, and he stands within. At the first glance it seems to him to wear much its usual air. There is even a score of music standing on the piano, the copper pots are full of rose-branches, and the scaldini brimming with Firenze's own lilies, the bit of red Venetian brocade, with the little old tinsel fringe, still hangs over the arm-chair by the fireplace, and the blue Neapolitan table-cover still disguises the vulgarity of the sofa. He has misunderstood Annunziata—it is really monstrous to be so helplessly ignorant of the language of the country you are living in—or she has lost her wits, or——He had thought the room empty, but as he advances a step further into it, he discovers that he is not the sole occupant: that lying stretched upon the floor, with his fair head buried in a little pillow, against which both men have often seen Elizabeth's small white cheek resting, is Byng!—the Byng whose riotous, insolent happiness he had doubted his own powers of witnessing without murdering him!—the splendid felicity of whose lot he has been so bitterly laying beside his own destiny—the Byng whom he had been gnashing his teeth at the thought of—at the thought of him lying in Elizabeth's arms!
CHAPTER XXVI.
"Cressid, I love thee in so strained a purity,
That the blest gods—as angry at my fancy,
More bright in zeal than the devotion which
Cold lips blow to their deities—take thee from me."
"What does this mean?"