The plural pronoun has dropped out of sight, but neither of them perceives it. The younger man shakes his sleek head. Jim lays down his paper with an air of decision.
"If she did not say 'Yes'—if she said 'No,'" he begins, with an accent of severity, "I fail to understand——"
"She did not say 'No,'" interrupts Byng, still half laughing, and yet reddening as well. "She began to say it; but I suppose that I looked so broken-hearted—I am sure I felt it—that she stopped."
As Jim makes no rejoinder, he continues by-and-by:
"After all, she can but send me away. One is always being sent away" (Jim wishes he could think this truer than he does); "but now and again one is not sent, and those are the times that pay for the others! I'll risk it."
There is a hopeful ring in his voice as he ends, and again a pause comes, broken a third time by the younger man.
"Come now, Jim"—looking with a straight and disarming good humour into his friend's overcast countenance—"speak up! Do you know of any cause or impediment why I should not?"
Thus handsomely and fairly appealed to, Burgoyne, who is by nature a just man, begins to put his conscience through her paces as to the real source of his dislike to the idea of his companion's taking advantage of that introduction which he himself has been the means—however unwillingly—of procuring for him. It is true that Byng's mother had adjured him, with tears in her eyes, to preserve her boy from undesirable acquaintances; but can he, Burgoyne, honestly say that he looks upon Elizabeth Le Marchant as an undesirable acquaintance for anyone? The result of his investigations is the discovery of how infinitesimal a share in his motives regard for his young friend's welfare has had. The discovery is no sooner made than he acts upon it.
"My dear boy," he says—and to his credit says it heartily—"I see no earthly reason why you should not go; you could not make nicer friends."
"Then why will not you come too?" asks Byng, with boyish generosity.