For a moment Jim stands dumb with consternation at the announcement of this intention; but, reflecting that it would not be a whit more irrational to attempt to reason with a madman who had reached the padded-room stage of lunacy, than with his present companion, he contents himself with saying:
"And supposing that you do not learn to-night where she has gone?"
"There is no use in supposing anything so impossible!"
But as the hours go by, the possibility becomes a probability, the probability a certainty! Midnight comes, and the closed telegraph-office puts a final extinguisher upon the expectation, which no one but the unhappy lover had ever entertained, that Florence would be enlightened before the dawn of another day as to the place whither her two truants have fled.
Burgoyne has accompanied his friend upon his last importunate visit to the now-going-to-bed and justly-incensed 12 bis. He has been ashamed again to present himself at the so-often-attacked door, so has awaited at the bottom of the stairs, has heard Byng's hoarse query, and the negative—curter and less suave than the last one—that follows it; has heard the door shut again, and the hopeless footsteps that come staggering down to him.
"You will go home now?"
"'Perchance, Iago, I shall ne'er go home!'"
replies Byng; and, though he is compelled to admit that there is no longer any possibility of his to-night obtaining the information for which he so madly hungers, that there can consequently be no question of his setting off by one of the early trains, since he would not know in which direction to go, and might only be fleeing further from her whom he would fain rejoin, yet he still keeps with fevered pertinacity to his project of spending the night à la belle étoile.
Finding it impossible to dissuade him, Jim resigns himself to bearing him company. It is with very little reluctance that he does so. There is no truer truism than that all sorrows, however mountainous, are more easily carried under God's high roof than man's low ones, and he who does not sleep has for compensation that at least he can have no dreadful waking. So the two men wander about all night in the boon southern air, and see—
"The moon exactly round,
And all those stars with which the brows of ample heaven are crown'd;
Orion, all the Pleiades, and those seven Atlas got;
The close-beam'd Hyades, the Bear, surnamed the Chariot,
That turns about heaven's axle-tree, holds ope a constant eye
Upon Orion, and of all the cressets in the sky,
His golden forehead never bows to the Ocean's empery."