"So you are going off on a long afternoon's pleasuring?" she says, with a pathetic smile. "I am so glad that neither of my sisters is going to stay at home with me. We invalids must guard against growing selfish, though I think that is perhaps more the danger with malades imaginaires; we real ones have learnt our lesson of suffering better, I hope."
"You do not look so very ill," replies Byng, in his sympathetic voice, letting his eyes rest caressingly on the prostrate figure, which has yet no smallest sign of emaciation about it.
"Ah, that is because of my colour," replies Sybilla, with an animation slightly tinged with resentment. "You, too, fall into that common error. My London doctor tells me that there is no such unerring indication of radical delicacy of constitution as a fixed pink colour like mine; the more feverish I am, the deeper it grows. It is very hard"—smiling again sadly—"for one gets no pity!"
"Where is Cecilia?" cries Jim brusquely, and fidgeting in his chair. "Why is not she ready?"
As he speaks, the young lady in question enters—so obviously arrayed for conquest, in so patently new a hat, and such immaculate pale gloves, that across Burgoyne's mind there flashes, in vexed mirth, the recollection of the immortal caution addressed by Major O'Dowd to his friend and comrade, "Moind your oi, Dob, my boy!" Would he not do well to repeat it to his friend?
CHAPTER VIII.
They are off now, there being nothing further to retard them, leaving Sybilla tête-à-tête with her thermometer. They are off, sociably packed in one fiacre—
"Four precious souls, and all agog
To dash thro' thick and thin."