"Do not be interested in me," says she, in her plaintive cooing voice; "we are very bad people to get interested in, we are not repaying people to be interested in. I think—that perhaps" (slowly and dreamily) "under other circumstances we might have been pleasant enough. Mammy has naturally excellent spirits, and so have I; it does not take much to make us happy, and even now I often feel like poor little Prince Arthur—
"'By my Christendom,
So I were out of prison and kept sheep,
I should be as merry as the day is long.'
But then," sighing profoundly, "the moment that we begin to feel a little cheerful, something comes and knocks us down again."
There is such a blank hopelessness in the tone with which she pronounces the last words, and, in his almost total ignorance of the origin of her despair, it is so impossible to put his compassion into fit words, that he can think of nothing better than to pull his chair two inches nearer her, to assure her by this dumb protest of how little inclined he is to accept her warning.
"Are you sure that he is really gone—going, I mean," she asks, in an excited low voice, "going to-morrow morning, as you say? Oh, I wish it were to-morrow morning! But perhaps when to-morrow morning comes, he will have changed his mind. Was he quite, quite sure about it?"
"He said he was going to-morrow morning," replies Jim, repeating Cecilia's quotation from her new friend's conversation with conscientious exactness; "that it was not worth while to change his hotel, as he was leaving Florence to-morrow morning."
"He will not go," she says, shaking her head with restless dejection; "nobody but would be loth to leave this heavenly place"—glancing out affectionately through the open window, even at the commonplace and now almost night-shaded Piazza garden—"we shall find that he is not gone after all."
"Nothing will be easier to ascertain than that fact," says Burgoyne, eagerly catching at so easy an opportunity for help and service; "now that I know which is his hotel, I can inquire there to-morrow morning, and bring you word at once."
"Could you, would you?" cries she, life and light springing back into her dejected eyes at his proposal; "but no," with an accent of remorse, "why should you? Why should we keep you running upon our errands? What right have we to take up your time?"
"My time," repeats he ironically. "I am like the German Prince mentioned by Heine, who spent his leisure hours—hours of which he had twenty-four every day—in——"