His brows draw together into a painful frown.
"Perhaps I have as little cause to be fond of them as you have of the past."
It is a random shot, a bow drawn at a venture; but it could not have hit more true apparently had it been levelled with the nicest aim.
As her daughter had done before her, Mrs. Le Marchant rises hastily, and leaves him—leaves him to reflect ironically upon how wisely Amelia had acted in insisting upon his visiting these "dear old friends," upon whom the effect of his conversation is so obviously exhilarating.
"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!"
The small fractious voice that wails the two preceding sentences seems to be Jim's own mouthpiece. It is, in point of fact, the voice of Bertie, who, tired of uttering his unregarded request for the repetition of the concert which had filled him with such delight, has of late been trying the effect of his unassisted powers to bring about the desired consummation, by putting his arms as far as he can round the dog's body, and endeavouring to lug him towards the music-stool. The collie has been enduring this treatment for five minutes—enduring it with an expression of magnanimous patience, which seems to say, that, though it is undoubtedly an unpleasant experience, yet, as it is inflicted upon him by one of his own family, he must of course put up with it, when Elizabeth goes to the rescue. Elizabeth goes alone, since Byng is held in converse by her mother at the other side of the room. Verbal persuasions having entirely failed, she tries to loosen the child's arms; but his grasp, though puny, is obstinate, and the only perceptible result of her endeavours is the utterance by her young friend of the two polite aspirations above recorded.
"He does not want to sing any more to-day," Jim hears her saying in her gentle voice; "you really are hurting him; he is too polite to say so; but you are squeezing him so tight that you really are hurting him. Why now" (with a little accent of pain), "you are hurting me."
Jim has been looking with a lack-lustre eye out of the open window at the young plane trees exchanging their frowsy buds for infant leaves; at the one Judas tree pranking in its purple blossoms in the Piazza; but at that low complaint he makes one step across the room, and, whipping off Master Bertie alike from long-enduring dog and plaintive woman, stoops over the latter as she sits upon the floor, passing one hand over the other, upon which the child's angry fingers, transferred from his first victim, have left rosy prints of pain.
"I wish I had not come; I wish it was time to go home!" whimpers the little boy.
"Since he is so anxious to go home, I will take him, if you like," says Jim in a stiff voice; "I must be going myself."