"And do you mean to tell me," asks Byng slowly, and breathing hard, while the fanatical light dies out of his face, and leaves it chalk white; "do you mean to say that I am to acquiesce, to sit down with my hands before me, and submit without a struggle to the loss of——O my God"—breaking out into an exceeding bitter cry—"why did you make me
"'so rich in having such a jewel,
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold,'
if it were only to rob me of her?"
"I do not see what other course is open to you," replies Jim, answering only the first part of the young sufferer's appeal, and ignoring the rhetoric, terribly genuine as is the feeling of which it is the florid expression. "It is evident that she has some cogent reasons—or at least that appear cogent to her—for breaking off her relations with you."
"What cogent reasons can she have that she had not yesterday?" says Byng violently—"yesterday, when she lay in my arms, and her lips spoke their acquiescence in my worship—if not in words, yet oh, far, far more——"
"Why do you reiterate these assertions?" cries Burgoyne sternly, since to him there seems a certain indecency in—even in the insanity of loss—dragging to the eye of day the record of such sacred endearments. "I neither express nor feel any doubt as to the terms you were on yesterday; what I maintain is that to-day—I do not pretend to explain the why—she has changed her mind; it is not"—with a sarcasm, which he himself at the very moment of uttering it feels to be cheap and unworthy—"it is not the first time in the world's history that such a thing has happened. She has changed her mind."
"I do not believe it," cries Byng, his voice rising almost to a shout in the energy of his negation; "till her own mouth tell me so I will never believe it. If I thought for a moment that it was true I should rush to death to deliver me from the intolerable agony of such a thought. You do not believe it yourself"—lifting his spoilt sunk eyes in an appeal that is full of pathos to his friend's harsh face. "Think what condemnation it implies of her—her whom you always affected to like, who thought so greatly of you—her whose old friend you were—her whom you knew in her lovely childhood!"
"You are right," replies Jim, looking down, moved and ashamed; "I do not believe that she has changed her mind. What I do believe is that yesterday she let herself go; she gave way for one day, only for one day, after all, poor soul, to that famine for happiness which, I suppose"—with a sigh and a shrug—"gnaws us all now and then—gave way to it even to the pitch of forgetting that—that something in her past of whose nature I am as ignorant as you are, which seems to cast a blight over all her life."
He pauses; but as his listener only hangs silently on his utterance he goes on:
"After you left her, recollection came back to her; and because she could not trust herself again with you, probably for the very reason that she cared exceedingly about you"—steeling himself to make the admission—"she felt that there was nothing for it but to go."