So saying, she tums away precipitately, and leaves the room hastily, by another door from that by which they both entered, and which evidently communicates with an adjoining bedroom. Elizabeth remains lying back in her chair, looking as white as the tablecloth. She is always white, but usually it is a creamy white, like meadow-sweet. Out of her eyes, however, has gone the distressed look of fear, and in them is dawning instead a little friendly smile.
"You must have thought us rather impostors when you saw us at the Accademia this morning, after leaving us apparently so shattered overnight," she says, with a somewhat deprecating air.
"I was very glad to find you so perfectly recovered," he replies, but he does not say it naturally. When a person, habitually truthful, slides into a speech not completely true, he does it in a bungling journeyman fashion; nor is Burgoyne any exception to this rule.
"I think we are a little like india-rubber balls, mammy and I," continues Elizabeth; "we have great recovering powers; if we had not" (stopped for a second by a small patient sigh) "I suppose that we should not be alive now."
He does not interrupt her. She must be a much less finely-strung instrument than he takes her for if she does not divine the sympathy of his silence, and sympathy so much in the dark as to what it sympathizes with as his, must needs walk gropingly, if it would escape gins and pitfalls.
"But we should not have gone out sight-seeing this morning—we were not at all in a junketing mood—if it had not been for Mr. Byng; he came in and took us both by storm. It is difficult," her face dimpling and brightening with a much more confirmed smile than the tiny hovering one which is all that Jim has been able to call forth—"it is difficult to resist a person who brings so much sunshine with him—do not you find it so? He is so very sunshiny, your Mr. Byng. We like sunshine; we—we have not had a great deal of it."
It is on the very edge of his lip to tell her that when he had known her she had had and been nothing but sunshine. But he recollects in time her prohibition as to the past, and restrains himself.
"When you look so kind and interested," she cries impulsively, sitting up in her chair, with a transparent little hand on each arm of it, "I feel a fraud."
She stops.
"I look interested because I feel interested," returns he doggedly; "fraud or not—but" (in a distressed voice) "do not, even in joke, call yourself ugly names—fraud or not, you cannot hinder me."