"'Nothing speaks our grief like to speak nothing!'"
replies Jim, leaving the room with this quotation on his lips, rather hastily, for fear lest the other should change his mind.
CHAPTER XIII.
It is five o'clock, the hour fixed for the expedition to Certosa, and in the entresol of 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio, Mrs. and Miss Le Marchant are sitting—hatted, gloved, and en-tout-cas-ed—in expectation of the arrival of their double escort. Elizabeth's afternoon has, so far, not been a lazy one, as her little cousin Bertie and his dog have again been good enough to pay her a lengthy visit, and the former has insisted upon a repetition of the musical performance of the other day, though with truncated rites. Without the powerful aid of Byng, Elizabeth has found it a task considerably beyond her strength to hold a large collie, poised on his hind-legs, on a music-stool. He has jumped down repeatedly, and now lies on his back—an attitude in which experience has taught him he is less attackable than in any other—sawing the air with his fore-paws, and lifting his lip in a deprecating grin.
"Where is Mr. Byng?" cries Bertie fretfully, baulked in his efforts to make his wily victim resume the perpendicular. "I want Mr. Byng! Why does not Mr. Byng come?"
"Perhaps if you went to the window," suggests Mrs. Le Marchant, in that patiently coaxing voice in which we are wont to address a tiresome child on a visit, instead of the buffet which we should bestow upon it were it resident—"perhaps if you went to the window and looked out, you would see him coming round the corner of the Piazza."
The suggestion is at once accepted, and the child, balancing his fidgety body on a chair, and craning his neck over the window-ledge, is shouting shrill pieces of information as to the passers-by to his friends within the room. Presently he shrieks out in triumph:
"I see him! He is just coming into sight! He is walking so fast! No!"—a moment later, with a changed and disgusted note, as a nearer view corrects the first impression—"it is not he at all! It is only the other one!"