He cannot, upon reflection, conscientiously say that he has; but is yet disingenuous enough to allow a speaking silence to imply acquiescence.
"And you are on your way to Florence too?" continues she, mistaking the cause of his dumbness; the tide of compunction evidently setting more strongly towards him, in her womanly heart, at the thought of the entire want of interest she has manifested in the case of one whose long faithfulness to her and her family had deserved a better treatment.
"Yes."
His face clouds so perceptibly as he pronounces this monosyllable, that his interlocutor inquires, with a growing kindness:
"Not on any unpleasant errand, I hope?"
He laughs the uneasy laugh of an Anglo-Saxon obliged to tell, or at all events telling, some intimate detail about himself.
"I am going to see my young woman—the girl I am engaged to."
"Well, that is a pleasant errand, surely?" (smiling).
"C'est salon!" replies Jim gloomily. "I have a piece of ill-news to tell her;" then, with a half-shy effort to escape into generalities, "which way do you think that ill-news read best—on paper or vivâ voce?"
She shivers a little.