"Then I shall have to give you a present, I suppose!" cries Mrs. Byng, still with that delighted accent. "Something useful, I have no doubt. I feel sure that Amelia would like something useful; why should not we choose it to-day? Florence is an ideal place for buying presents; do you think that Amelia would spare you to me for a whole morning?"
Jim hesitates. It is not that he has any doubt as to Amelia's cheerful renunciation of any portion of his time that he may see fit to abstract from her; but the occupation suggested—that of squiring Mrs. Byng—is not that to which he had purposed devoting his forenoon. She sees his unreadiness to answer, and attributes it to a wrong cause.
"Amelia will not?" cries she in a tone of surprise and disappointment. "Well, I could not have believed it of her! Not even if you told her that it is on purpose to buy her a present?"
Jim breaks into an unavoidable smile. "How frightfully quickly your mind moves! It leaps like a kangaroo! I never said that she would not resign the precious boon of my society; on the contrary, I am sure that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but—but—what will Willy say to my monopolizing you?"
At the excessive disingenuousness of this speech his conscience gives him a severe prick, recalling to his mind the attitude of prostrate affliction—stretched face downwards on his bed—in which his young friend had received the news of his parent's prospective approach. A light cloud passes over that parent's sunny face.
"Willy has an engagement this morning," she answers more slowly, and with less radiance than has hitherto marked her utterances; "nothing could be sweeter and dearer than he was, and he is going to take me somewhere this afternoon—to Fiesole or Petraia, or somewhere else delightful; but this morning he has an engagement. He did not tell me what it was, and I did not like to tease him with questions. You"—with a rather wistful glance of interrogation at her companion—"do not happen to know what it is?"
Jim shakes his head, while a rather deeper shade than habitually lies upon it settles on his careworn forehead. It is perfectly true that he knows nothing of young Byng's engagement, but yet he has a shrewd suspicion to what quarter of the town that engagement will lead him.
"So that I rather counted upon you," continues Mrs. Byng, turning with a somewhat crestfallen air to the window.
"And you did not count in vain," replies Burgoyne, with a sort of forced gallantry. It has flashed upon him that he will have to consent under penalty of giving a detailed account of the reasons for his inability, and that therefore he had better make a virtue of necessity, and do it with a good grace. After all, the deferring for a couple of hours of his researches cannot be of any great consequence to the persons in whose behalf those researches are set on foot. To a suspicious ear there might be something dubious in the sudden and galvanized alacrity of his assent; but not a shadow of doubt crosses Mrs. Byng's mind as to her old and tried ally being as pleased to avail himself of an opportunity for enjoying her society as he has always showed himself during the twenty years and more of their acquaintance.
Protected by this happy misconception, she sets off, all smiles, though at the outset of the expedition she finds that she has to modify her project; and that Burgoyne shows himself restive as to bric-à-brac shops, and declines peremptorily to be any party to buying himself a wedding present. He puts his objection upon the semi-jocose ground that he shall be unable to avoid overhearing the price of her intended gift, and that his modesty could not stand the strain of helping her to haggle over it. Perhaps, however, deep in his heart is an unconscious feeling that to receive nuptial offerings gives an almost greater body and certainty to his on-striding fate than even the buying of dinner-services and saucepans. So they go to the Accademia delle Belli Arti instead, it having occurred to Jim that in a picture-gallery there will be less opportunity for conversation, less opening for interested inquiries on his companion's part as to Amelia and the minutiæ of his future life with her, than there would be in the green walks of the Cascine, or on the slopes of Fiesole.