After all, there is something of the original Byng left, and the ghost of his old spouting voice in which he recites the above couplet gives her back a greater measure of composure than could almost anything else.
"It is nice, only one would like to be able to jump, not 'the life to come'—ha! ha!—but the convalescence to come. My mother is even more impatient than I am. She has made up her mind that we are to be off in three days, even if I am carried on board on a shutter."
She can see now that he is very much embarrassed—that his fluency is but the uneasy cover of some emotion—and the discovery enables her yet further to regain possession of herself.
"I should think," she says in her gentle voice, "that you would be very glad to get out of this room, where—where you have suffered so much."
"Well, yes; one does grow a little tired of seeing
"'The casement slowly grow a glimmering square;'
but"—with a rather forced laugh—"at least, I have had cause to be thankful that there is no wall-paper to count the pattern of. I have blessed the white wall for its featureless face."
She moves a little in her chair, as if to assure herself that she is really awake. That stupefaction is beginning to numb her again—that hazy feeling that this is not Byng at all, this polite invalid, making such civil conversation for her; this is somebody else.
"But I must not tire myself out before I have said what I want to say to you," he continues, his embarrassment perceptibly deepening, while his transparent hand fidgets uneasily with the border of the coverlet thrown over him, "or"—laughing again—"I shall have that tyrant of a nurse down upon me, and—and I do wish—I have wished so much—so unspeakably—to see you, to speak to you."
She sits immovable, listening, while a ray of something—can it be hope? why should it be hope?—darts across her heart. After all, this may be Byng—her Byng; this strange new manner may be only the garment in which sickness has dressed his passion—a worn-out garment soon to drop away from him in rags and tatters, and in which cannot she already discern the first rent? After all, she may have need for her armour—that armour which, so far, has seemed so pitifully needless.