After one look of unbounded astonishment at his companion's onslaught, Byng has withdrawn to a discreet distance.
"You never mentioned her when I met you in Oxford," says Burgoyne, disregarding her trivial and conventional questions, and turning his eyes away with difficulty from his old playfellow.
Mrs. Le Marchant laughs again, still constrainedly.
"Probably you never asked after her."
"I was afraid," he says solemnly; "after ten years one is afraid; and as you did not mention her—you know you mentioned all the others—I thought you had lost her!"
A sort of slight shiver passes over the woman's frame.
"No, thank God! No!"
During the foregoing little dialogue about herself, Elizabeth has stood with her eyes on the ground; but at the end of it she lifts them to smile lovingly at her mother. They are very pretty eyes still, but surely they seem to have cried a good deal; and now that the hurrying blood has left her cheek again, Burgoyne sees that she looks more nearly her age than he had imagined at the first glance. He has not heard her voice yet; she has not spoken, unless that first shaken whisper—so much more likely to be the freak of his own heated fancy—could count for speech. He must hear her tones. Do they keep an echo of the other world, as he still imagines that he sees a shade from it lying lingeringly across her face?
"Do you ever climb apple-trees now?" he asks abruptly. She starts slightly, and again, though with a weaker red wave, her rather thin cheeks grow tinged.
"Did I ever climb them?" she says, with a bewildered look, and speaking in a somewhat tremulous voice. "Yes"—slowly, as if with an effort of memory—"I believe I did."