"I am to understand, then, that—that she would have stopped my coming if she could."
Jim is silent. He cannot answer that question with any certainty even to himself.
"She would have escaped me again if she had had the chance! What am I saying?"—with a sudden access of terror in his tone—"she may have escaped me already! She may be gone! Tell me the truth—do not dare to tell me anything but the bare truth. I saw that you hesitated when I asked you whether she was really here. Is she gone?"
"Gone!" repeats Jim, with an exasperated jerk of the head towards the window, against which the rain and wind are hurling themselves with threefold rage, as if to recapture the victim just escaped them. "To-night—in this storm? How likely! Come, be rational; try to keep your head, and let us have a truce to this ranting. I give you my word of honour that she is here, under this roof; asleep, I should hope, if your bellowings have not awoke her."
The latter clause may perhaps come under the head of a pardonable fiction; at all events, it has, despite its incivility, the desired effect of soothing, to some extent, the agitation of him to whom it is addressed.
"Asleep!" he repeats, while an ecstatic smile breaks over his handsome, dissipated face. "Good angels guard her slumbers! But"—with a rather ominous return of excitement—"are you sure that she is asleep—that she has gone to bed yet? They used to sit up very late in Florence sometimes. If she has not gone to bed, why should not I see her; why should not I fall at her feet now—to-night?"
"My dear boy," rejoins Jim, with a praiseworthy attempt to answer this modest and sensible proposal with patient good-humour, "have you any idea what time it is? I should have thought it might have occurred even to you that 1.30 A.M. is scarcely a suitable hour for paying a morning call! Do not be a fool! Pull yourself together. I swear to you that she has every intention of seeing you to-morrow. Come"—trying to laugh—"you will not have long to wait! It is to-morrow already; and, meantime, sit down and eat something; you must be as empty as a drum."
But to this prudent if homely counsel Byng opposes an obstinate negation, adorned with excited asseverations that food shall never cross his lips until they have pastured upon his lady's pardoning hand.
The same prohibition does not, however, apparently apply to drink, as he pours more than half the bottle of happily not very potent wine, prepared for his refreshment, into a tumbler, and tosses it off at a draught. He offers an even stouter refusal to Burgoyne's suggestion that he should go to bed; and as he utters it a flash of cunning suspicion comes into his eyes, shocking his friend with a gleam as of possible and scarcely latent madness. Across the latter's brain darts the query, which had proposed itself more than once to him last spring at Florence:
"Is there insanity in Byng's blood"