Perhaps it is his irritated fancy that dictates the idea, but it seems to him as if he detected a sort of surprise in Mrs. Le Marchant's face, when he effects the introduction he has proposed, and to which she accedes courteously, after a pause of hesitation about as long as had followed his inquiry of Elizabeth as to their address.
Five minutes later they have all sauntered out again on the terrace, and Burgoyne is again leaning on the wall; but this time he has no fear of hearing of Bayswater, for it is Elizabeth who is beside him. Since last he looked at it half an hour ago, a sort of glorification has passed over the divine view. Down where the river twists through the plain country, there is a light, dainty mist, but the mountains have put on their fullest glory. They are not green, or brown, or purple, or blue; but clad in that ineffable raiment woven by the sun, that defies our weak vocabulary to provide it with a name. A little snow-chain lies on the sun-warmed neck of Morello, and along the tops of the further Apennines, right against the acute blue of the heavens, lies a line of snow, that looks like a fleece-soft cloud resting from its journeyings on their crests; but it is no cloud, nor is there any speck upon the gigantic complete arch that over-vaults town and valley and radiant mountains. In the folds of these last, the shadows slumber; but over all the city is the great gold glory of spring. The one thing in Florence that frowns among so many smiles is the scowling Pitti, and that, from here, is invisible. Nearer to him, against the azure, stand the solemn flame-shaped cypresses arow, and beside them—as unlike as life to death—a band of quivering poplars, a sort of transparent gold-green in their young spring livery. The air is so clear that one can go nigh to counting the marbles on the Duomo walls. In a more transparent amber light, fuller of joy and gaiety, cannot the saved be dancing around, as in Fra Angelico's divine picture? cannot they be walking in the New Jerusalem of St. John's great dream? Only in the New Jerusalem there are no galled and trembling-kneed fiacre horses.
Elizabeth is sitting on the wall, her light figure—is it possible that it has been in the world only four years less than Amelia's solid one?—half-supported by one small gray hand outspread on the stone; her little fine features all tremulous with emotion, and half a tear gathered again in each sweet eye. As Jim looks at her, a sort of cold covetous gripe pinches his heart.
"What a woman with whom to look at all earth's loveliness—with whom to converse without speech!"
Even as he so thinks, she turns her head towards him, and, drawing in her breath with a long low sigh, says:
"Oh, how glad I am I did not die before to-day!"
Her eyes are turned towards him, and yet, as once before, he realizes that it is not to him that either her look or her thoughts are directed. Both are aimed at an object over his shoulder, and, as before, that object is Byng. Byng, too, has been gazing at the view. There are tears in Byng's eyes also. Stevenson says that some women like a man who cries. Byng cries easily and genuinely, and enjoys it; and, as he is a remarkably fine young man, there is something piquant in the contrast between his wet blue orbs and his shoulders.
As Burgoyne rolls home that afternoon in his fiacre, as before, placed opposite Amelia, his mental vision is no longer fixed upon a "double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun;" it is fixed with a teasing tenacity upon the figure of a smallish woman, perennially looking, through brilliant tears, over his shoulder at somebody else.