"You have forgotten all about it?" cries Jim, in an accent of absurdly disproportioned disappointment. "Have you forgotten the kangaroo too? have you forgotten everything?"
Perhaps she is putting her memory to the same strain as he had done his in the case of her mother's name on the occasion of their Oxford meeting. At all events, she leaves the question unanswered, and the elder woman again hurries to her help against this persistent claimant of reminiscences.
"You must not expect us all to have such memories as you have," she says with a touch of friendliness in her look.
"I must own that I too had quite forgotten the kangaroo; and so I fear had Robert, until you reminded us of it in Mesopotamia."
"How is Mr. Le Marchant?" inquires Jim, thus reminded to put his tardy query—"is he with you?"
"No, he is not very fond of being abroad; it is not"—smiling—"'dear abroad' to him, but I think that he will very likely come out to Florence to fetch us."
"You are going to Florence?" cries the young man eagerly. "So am I! oh, hurrah! then we shall often meet."
But the touch of friendliness, whose advent he had hailed so joyfully, has vanished out of Mrs. Le Marchant's voice, or, at least, is overlaid with a species of stiffness, as she answers distantly, "We do not intend to go out at all in Florence—I mean into society."
"But I am not society," replies he, chilled, yet resolute. "I wish"—glancing rather wistfully from one to the other—"that I could give you a little of my memory. If I could, you would see that, after being so infinitely good to me at the Moat, you cannot expect me to meet you as total strangers now."
In the sense of ill-usage that fills his breast, the fact of how almost entirely oblivious he had been of the persons before him, during the greater part of the long interval that had parted them, has—such is human nature—quite slipped his recollection. It is brought back to him in some degree with a twinge by Mrs. Le Marchant saying in a relenting tone, and with an accent of remorse, "And you have remembered us all these years?"