"Yes, yes; he was not an Englishman, was he? We used to laugh about him"—adding stroke to stroke in order to convince her of the accuracy of his recollections—"used to call him the 'distinguished foreigner.'"
"Did we? Yes"—slowly—"I remember now that we did. Well"—gathering herself up for a supreme effort, panting painfully, and turning her head quite aside so that he may have no glimpse of her face—"he came, and he stayed two months, and at the end of those two months I—I—ran away with him!"
CHAPTER XIV.
VALE?
One would have thought that Jim had been in some measure prepared for the just-fallen blow, both by the overheard fragments of Mr. Greenock's conversation with the Devonshire clergyman at Florence last year; by the accumulated evidence of there being some blight upon Elizabeth's life; and, lastly and chiefly, by the ravings of Byng. But there is something so different from all these, so infinitely more dreadful, in hearing this naked statement from her own lips, that it stuns him as much as if he had never received any hint of that ruinous secret in the background of her life.
Having now uttered it, she stops, either to pick up her own spent strength or to give him the opportunity for some question or comment.
He makes neither.
"I thought—I hoped—that you had guessed, from what Mr. Byng said. I believed that when he was not himself——"