"I do not know. I do not like them either way."
Then, taking out her watch, with the evident determination to be surprised at the lateness of the hour, she cries, "It is actually a quarter to two! Are not you famished, Elizabeth? I am!"
There is such apparent and imminent departure in her eye that Burgoyne feels that there is no time to be lost.
"Have you decided upon your hotel in Florence?" he asks precipitately.
"We have decided against them all," is her answer. "We have taken a little apartment—a poor little entresol; but it is such a poor little one, that I should be ashamed to ask any of my friends to come and see me there."
She accompanies the last words, as if to take the sting out of them, with as sweet and friendly a smile as any he remembers in the Devonshire days. But the sting is not taken out, all the same; it lingers, pricking and burning still, after both the tall, thin, black figure, and the slim, little gray one have disappeared.
The moment that this is the case, Byng rejoins his friend; a curiosity and alert interest in his young eyes, which his companion feels no desire to gratify. He is unable, however, to maintain the entire silence he had intended upon the subject, since Byng, after waiting for what, to his impatience, appears a more than decent interval, is constrained to remark—
"Did I hear you tell that lady, when first you spoke to her, that she was dead?"
"I thought she was."
"Had you heard it?"