"Do you mean to say"—falling from her former rapidity of utterance to a dismayed incredulous slowness—"that he will not be glad to see me?—that Willy will not be glad to see me?"
"I mean to say that I am afraid you will not find him very much in sympathy with you; I do not think he will find it easy to hear you speak of Miss Le Marchant in the terms, and make the implication about her that you did just now," replies Jim, avenging by this sentence the wrongs done to Elizabeth, and doing it so well, that a moment later a feeling of compunction comes over him at the success of his own attempt at retributive justice.
Mrs. Byng turns pale.
"Then she has got hold of him?" she says under her breath.
"Got hold of him?" repeats Jim, his ire aroused again, no sooner than allayed, by this mode of expression; "you certainly have the most extraordinary way of misconceiving the situation! Got hold of him? when she had to leave Florence at a moment's notice to escape his importunities!"
But at this, Mr. Burgoyne's auditor looks so hopelessly bewildered that he thinks it the simplest plan at once, in the fewest possible words, to put her in possession of the tale of her son's achievements and disasters. He does this, partly to stem the torrent of her questions, the form that they have hitherto taken producing in him a feeling of frenzied indignation, which he doubts his own power much longer to conceal—partly in order to set Elizabeth's conduct with the least possible delay in its true light before her. Surely, when she has been told of her magnanimous renunciation, she will do her justice, will cease to load her with those hard names and insulting assertions that have made him grind his own teeth to listen to. But in this expectation he soon finds that he is mistaken. The wrath of Mrs. Byng against Elizabeth for having "drawn in" her son, as she persists in stating the case, is surpassed only by indignation at her insolence in having "thrown him over." As to the genuineness of this last action she expresses, it is true, the most complete incredulity.
"It was only to enhance her own value. Do you suppose that she expected him to take her at her word? She thought, of course, that he would follow her—that he would employ detectives—it is a proof"—with an angry laugh—"that he cannot be quite so bad as you make him out, that he has not done so."
"I would not put it into his head, if I were you," replies Jim, with an anger no less real, and a merriment no less spurious than her own.
By this time they have reached the hotel; and Jim, having helped his companion out of the fiacre, shows symptoms of leaving her.
"Will not you stay to breakfast with me?" she asks, a little aghast at this unexpected manœuvre; "I cannot make my toilette till the luggage arrives: and I suppose that he"—her eyes wandering wistfully over the hotel front till they rest on her son's closed persiennes—"that he is not up yet; it would be a sin to wake him; do stay with me."