She starts. It is evident that the unimportant fact of his having taken

part in their games has quite escaped her; but, a moment later, her soft

and courteous nature evidently making her fear that he will look upon

her obliviousness as unkind--

"Oh yes, to be sure!" Then again lapsing into reminiscence, "What odd

words we used to choose sometimes--words that nobody could guess! I

wonder what words they have chosen?"

He thinks of saying jocosely, "Shall I go and ask them?" but refrains,

because he fears it would put it into her head to send him away.

A sort of piercing squeal makes itself heard from the _salon_.

"Do you think that that can be meant for a _pig_?" asks Elizabeth, her

line ears pricked in unaffected interest. "Oh!"--with a return of

uneasiness--"I wish that they would not make so much noise; father does

so dislike noise. They might as well have put it off till to-morrow."

"Why would to-morrow's noise be more endurable than to-night's?"

"It would not have mattered to-morrow; father will not be here; he is

going to Hammam Rhira."

Burgoyne's jaw drops. Is this the alternative course decided upon by

Mrs. Le Marchant? Having failed to dislodge him from Algiers, is she

going to remove herself and her daughter out of his reach?

"Do you mean--are you _all_ going to Hammam Rhira to-morrow?--_all_

going away?"

Is it some effect of light from the rose-shaded lamp that makes it seem

to him as if a tiny smile, and a yet smaller blush, swept over

Elizabeth's face at the aghastness of his tone--an aghastness much more

marked than he had intended it should be.

"Not to-morrow; not all of us. Father and mammy are going there for a

couple of nights to see what the place is like--one hears such

contradictory accounts; and if they are pleased with it--"

"Yes?"

"If they are pleased with it we shall all probably move on there in a

day or two."

He would like to be sure that this sentence ends with a sigh, but a

prodigious storm of hand-clapping from the extempore theatre prevents

his hearing whether it has that regretful finish.

"And they are going to leave you behind?"

"Why not? there would not be much use in taking me; and, as I tell you,

they love being _tete-a-tete_."

"And you love being alone?"

The moment that the question is out of his mouth, he realizes its full

unkindness. He is perfectly aware that she does _not_ like being alone;

that she is naturally a most sociable little being; that, even now,

these frightened five minutes of unsatisfactory broken talk with himself

have made her look less chilled, less wobegone, less white. Her answer,

if it can be looked upon as one, must be taken by him as a rebuke. It is

only that she says nervously:

"One certainly does hear dreadfully plainly here with the door open."

Her tone is of the gentlest, her look no angrier than a dove's, and yet

he would be obtuser than he is if he did not at once comprehend that her

remark implies a wish that he should presently shut that door behind him

on the outside. He complies. With that newly-gained knowledge as to

to-morrow's Hammam Rhira, he can afford to comply.

The next morning's light reveals that the weather, pleased with having

so indisputably proved its power of being odious, has recovered its

good-humour.

Beyond the tree-tops a radiant sea is seen laughing far below; and the

wet red tiles on the little terrace shine like jewels. A sea even more

wonderful than radiant; no servile copy of the sky and clouds to-day,

but with astonishing colours of its own--a faint yet glorious green for

a part of its watery breadth; then what our poverty compels us to call

blue; and then a great tablecloth of inky purple, which looks so solid

that the tiny white boats that are crossing it seem to be sailing on dry

land. From amongst the glossy green of the wooded hill, mosque and

campagne start out, dazzling, in their recovered lustre; one cool

entrancing villa in especial, backed with a broken line of dusky

stone-pines, stands, snowy-arcaded, enthroned high up among the verdure.

Jim is very anxious to be out of the way at the hour of the Le

Marchants' departure. He has a panic fear of being waylaid by the

mother, and having some earnest supplication addressed to him to

abstain, during her absence, from any converse with Elizabeth. He is not

quite clear at what time they will set off, so, to insure himself

against mistakes, he resolves to spend the morning and lunch at the

Villa Wilson. Arrived there, he is shown by an Arab man-servant into the

court, and, finding it empty, sinks down into a cane chair, and lets his

eyes wander round to the fountain, lullingly dripping into its basin; to

the tiles, the white-arched doorways, carved in low relief, and

themselves so low that it must be a humble-statured person who enters

them without stooping. What a home for love in idleness! Who can picture

any of the vulgar work of the world done in such a house? any harder

labour ever entered upon than a listening to some lady singing "with

ravishing division to her lute"?

The lady who presently joins Jim appears, by her ruffled air, to have

been engaged upon no such soothing occupation as luting to a recumbent

lover.

"You will not mind staying here?" asks Cecilia; "Dr. Crump is in the

drawing-room with Sybilla; I am sure that you do not want to see Dr.

Crump!"

"I cannot express how little I wish it."

"I cannot think what has happened to Sybilla"--wrinkling up her forehead

into annoyed furrows--"but she is so dreadfully sprightly when he is

there; she never was sprightly with Dr. Coldstream, and he is such an

impossible man!--the sort of man who, when first he comes in, always

says, 'Well, how are we this morning?' Do not you think that it stamps a

man to say 'How are we?'"

"I think it does."

"He talks such nonsense to her!"--with irritation--"he tells her that

he, too, is a bundle of nerves! if you could only see him! And one day

he told her that when first he came here he had seen the Angel of Death

waving his fans above her head! and she swallows it all!"

"I am not at all surprised."

"It makes me sick!" cries she energetically; "let us go into the

garden."

So into the garden they go; both the new one, whose luxuriant growth of

verdure is the outcome of but eight or nine years; and the old one,

along whose straight walks the feet of the Moorish ladies used to patter

under the orange-trees. Beneath them now there are no white bundles of

muslin; only on the ground the oranges lie thick, no one in this

plenteous land thinking it worth while to pick them up. Jim and his

companion pace rather silently to a pretty Moorish summer-house, dug, a

few years ago, by the English architect out of a farm-house, into which

it had been built. It is dainty and cool, with a little dome and lovely

green and blue tiles; and an odd small spring, which is taught to wander

by tiny snaky channels into a little basin. They go into the

summer-house and sit down.

"Yes, it is pretty," says the girl absently! but her mind is evidently

preoccupied by some other subject than the beauty of the giant bignonia

which is expanding the multitude of its orange-red clusters all over a

low wall, making it into one burning hedge, and has called forth an

exclamation of delight from Burgoyne. What that subject is immediately

appears.

"Do you know who is in Algiers--whom I saw driving through the Place

Bressant on Sunday afternoon?"

"Who?"

"The Le Marchants. Ah, you are not surprised!"--rather suspiciously.

"You knew already!"

Jim hesitates a second; then, reflecting that, whether or not he

acknowledges the fact now, Cecilia is certain to learn it in a day or

two at latest, he answers with a slight laugh:

"It would be odd if I did not, seeing that they are staying at my

hotel."

"You knew that when you went there?"--very quickly.

"Of course not!"--with a movement of impatience.

A pause.

"I suppose," says Cecilia, rather cautiously, as if aware that she is

treading on dangerous ground, "that you have not found out why they

stampeded from Florence in that extraordinary way? Oh no, of course

not!"--as this suggestion is received with a still more accented writhe

than her former one. "It is not a thing upon which you could question

them; and, after all, it was their own affair; it was no business of

ours, was it?"

"Not the slightest."

"I always used to like them," continues Cecilia pensively; "at

least"--becoming aware of an involuntary movement of surprise at this

statement on the part of her neighbour--"at least, they never gave me

the chance of _liking_ them; but I always _admired_ them. I wonder are

they more accessible than they were in Florence? There are so few nice

English here this year; everybody says that there never was a year when

there were so few nice English!"

The tentative towards sociability implied in this last speech is

received by Jim in a discouraging silence. He has not the slightest

desire to promote any overture on the part of Cecilia towards intimacy

with Elizabeth. He knows that they would be unsuccessful; and, moreover,

he is conscious that he would be annoyed if they were not.

"I can fancy that this would be a very pleasant place if one had someone

to go about with," continues she; "but father grows less and less

inclined to move. Poor dear! he is not so young as he was, and I am not

quite old enough yet, I suppose, to go about alone."

She makes a rather wistful pause--a pause which he feels that she

intends him to fill by an offer of himself as her escort. But none such

comes. Realizing this, she goes on with a sigh:

"There are not many advantages in being old; but, at least, one is

freer, and in a youth spent as mine is, there is really not much profit

or pleasure."

The tone in which she makes this lugubrious reflection is so extremely

doleful that Jim cannot refrain from a laugh.

"Cheer up, old girl! there is a good time coming! It is a long lane that

has no turning."

But he contents himself with these vague forms of consolation. He has no

engagements of his own. Why, then, is he conscious of so strong a

reluctance towards tying himself by any promise to the broadly-hinting

lady beside him? There is another pause, during which Cecilia looks down

on the floor with a baffled air, and traces the outlines of the tiles

with the point of her red sunshade.

"There is a band plays twice a week in the Place de Gouvernement--plays

admirably. Now, I suppose that there would be nothing odd; that no one

could say anything; that it would not be the least improper, considering

our connection and everything, if you were to take me to hear it some

day?"

"I never have the slightest idea of what is improper and what is not,"

replies he; but there is more of alarm than of encouragement in his

tone.

"No more have I"--laughing rather awkwardly--"but in this case I am

pretty sure. Tuesdays and Fridays are the days on which the band plays."

"Oh!"

"To-day is Tuesday, is not it?"

"Yes."

Another pause.

"I thought that perhaps, if you had nothing better to do, you might take

me to-day?"

The direct proposal which he has in vain tried to avert has come. If he

accept it, of what profit to him will the absence of the Le Marchant

parents be? He does not formulate this fact to himself, not having,

indeed, owned to his own heart that he has any set design upon

Elizabeth's company for the afternoon.

"I am afraid----" he begins slowly.

"You are vamping up an excuse!" cries Cecilia, reddening. "I see it in

your eyes. You cannot have made any engagements here yet. You do not

know anybody, do you, except the Le Marchants?"

"And they have gone to Hammam Rhira," replies he precipitately.

He is ashamed the moment that the words are out of his mouth, for he

knows that they convey a falsehood.

"At least----"

But she interrupts him before he can add his conscience clause.

"To-morrow, then?"

Again he hesitates. The same objections apply with even greater force to

the morrow.

"But the band does not play to-morrow."

"Oh! what does that matter?" rejoins she impatiently. "I had just as

soon go somewhere else--the Arab town, the Kabyle village, anywhere."

He is driven into a corner, and remains there silent so long that there

is a distinct element of offence in the tone and large sigh with which

the girl resumes.

"Well, times are changed! I always used to make one in those happy

excursions at Florence; and somehow--thanks to her, I suppose--I never

felt a bad third."

She rises as she speaks, and takes a couple of huffy steps towards the

house; but he overtakes and stops her. The allusion to Amelia has

annoyed and yet stirred in him the sea of remorse, which is always lying

but a very little way below the surface in his soul.

"Why, Cis!" he says, in a tone of affectionate rallying, "are we going

to quarrel at this time of day--you and I? Of course I will take you to

the band and the Kabyle village, and any other blessed sight you choose

to name, only tell me by which of them you would like to begin to ride

round."

As he leaves the house and the appeased fair one, after luncheon, an

hour and a half later, he tells himself that he has got off cheaply in

having vaguely sacrificed the whole of his Algerian future, but having

preserved to-day and to-morrow.

CHAPTER VI.

"And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre,

Making sweet solace to herself alone.

Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre,

Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan."

Jim's first care on returning to his hotel is to ascertain that the

departure for Hammam Rhira has really taken place, and, having been

reassured on this point, retires to his own bedroom to reconnoitre the

terrace, upon which it gives. The sun has long drunk up the rain from

the tiles, and the chairs have been set out again. The hotel guests, in

all the sociability of their after-luncheon mood, are standing and

sitting about. The widow Wadman, with great play of eyebrow and lip, is

pacing up and down in arch conversation with her habitual victim.

Snatches of her alluring talk reach Jim behind his muslin curtain as she

comes and goes:

"I think that caged birds ought to be _loved_!" "The Prophet was a

wise man, was not he? he knew a little about us," etc.

In her usual place, aloof from the rest of the company, Elizabeth is

sitting in a clinging white gown of some woolly stuff. With a dainty

white kerchief twisted about her head, and a bundle of many-tinted

Eastern stuffs on her knees, she looks like a little Romney. Now and

again, as fragments of the widow's siren strains reach her ears, he sees

her lips curl up into delighted laughter; but, for the most part, she

seems to be looking round rather uneasily, as if seeking something or

someone. Can it be himself that she, in her innocence of being observed,

is on the watch for? He has no right to be playing the spy on her in any

case. It is clear that, dressed as she is, she cannot be meditating

going out. He must not frighten her by any too direct or sudden

attentions. In a little while the other occupants of the terrace will

drift away, and he will stroll out and join her, and together they will

watch the shade of the ficus-tree, lengthening over the red flags. But

she presently baffles his calculations by rising, and, with her

rainbow-tinted pile of brocades clasped in her slender arms, slowly

passes into the house. Has she retreated thither for good? and will he

have to frame some new flimsy excuse for knocking at her door? But again

he is out of his reckoning, for in about a quarter of an hour she

re-issues, dressed for walking; and after one more lingering and, as it

seems to him, disappointed glance around her, paces, a solitary little

figure, down the hill. He lays his watch before him, and, having counted

five minutes on its dial-plate, sets off in pursuit. He overtakes her

just as she reaches the point where the lane debouches into the

highroad. She stands, looking rather disconsolately, first up the hill,

then down it, evidently uncertain which direction to choose.

"You cannot make up your mind?" he says, pausing beside her, and taking

off his hat.

She gives a slight start, and a friendly, pleased smile runs all over

her face and up into her eyes--a smile that makes him say to himself

confidently that it _was_ he whom her glance had been seeking on the

terrace.

"Which do you advise?"

"I advise the town."

He has long known her teachableness, so it is no great surprise to him

that she at once turns in the direction counselled.

"As I am going there myself, will you allow me to walk a little way with

you?"

He makes the request with respectful diffidence; and she, after one

small troubled look, evidently given to the memory of her father,

assents.

They set off down the hill together, the air, sharp after the rain--as

sharp, at least, as Algiers' stingless air ever is--bringing the colour

to Elizabeth's cheeks, as she steps along light-heartedly, scarcely

refraining from breaking into a run, down the steep incline. Her spirits

are so evidently rising at every yard that he hazards his next step.

"I am going to see the Arab town; Miss Strutt says that I ought."

"She meant you to ask her to show it you!" cries Elizabeth, with a

laugh; "but she was quite right--it is delightful; I am sure you will

like it."

"You have been there?"

"Yes, once or twice; not half so often"--regretfully--"as I should like

to have been."

Dare he speak upon the last innocent hint? But while he is doubting she

goes on:

"You must take care not to lose yourself; it is such a puzzling place;

all the streets are exactly like each other."

"You do not feel inclined to show me the way about it?"

He throws out the suggestion in a semi-bantering voice, so that if it

meet with obvious disapproval he may at once withdraw it. She stops

suddenly stock-still, and faces him.

"Are you speaking seriously? It would be very delightful; but do you

think I might? do you think I ought?"

She lifts her eyes, widely opened, like a child's at hearing of some

unexpected treat, to his. How astonishingly clear they are! and how

curiously guileless! He has not the least doubt that she will sweetly

acquiesce in his decision, whichever way it tends; and, for a second, a

movement of irritation with her for her pliability crosses his mind. She

ought to be able to have an opinion of her own. While he hesitates, she

speaks again.

"It is just the afternoon to do something pleasant on," she says

wistfully, and yet gaily too. "Oh, how good the air tastes! and how

dearly I love the sun!"--lifting her face with sensitive lips, half

open, as if to suck in his beams, to the great gold luminary pouring

down his warmth through the pepper-trees upon them. "But I will take

your advice; I know of old"--with a pretty flattering smile--"that you

always give good advice. Do you think that I ought--do you _really_

think that I ought?"

He throws conscience to the winds, and although not two hours ago he had

professed to Cecilia his inability to decide upon the propriety or

impropriety of any given course of female action, now answers with an

almost brutal decisiveness:

"I do not think that there is the smallest doubt about it."

A relieved look crosses her features.

"Then I am sure it is all right," she says, with a joyful surrendering

of her judgment into his keeping, and so, once again, steps along with

her quick feather-light feet at his side.

For the moment she is the happier of the two, since he is not perfectly

pleased either with himself or her. It is in vain that he tells himself

that it is no babe whom he is beguiling; that, difficult as it is to

believe it, those limpid eyes have looked at the sun for

seven-and-twenty years. He still has a lingering sense of discomfort at

having availed himself, for his own profit, of her ductility. And yet,

five minutes later, he takes yet further advantage of that quality in

her. They have reached the Plateau Sauliere, and the stand of fiacres

that "stationnent" there. Jim pauses.

"It is a good distance to the Arab town, I fancy, and very tiring

walking when you get there."

"It is as steep as the side of a house; we shall be like flies on a

wall," cries she delightedly.

"It would be a pity to be too tired to enjoy it before you got there,

would not it?" says he doubtfully, and eyeing her bright slenderness

with an air of uncertainty as to her powers of endurance. "Had not we

better--would you mind--our driving there?"

"I am not at all tired," replies she; "I do not feel as if I ever should

be tired to-day; but if you think it better----"

Still he looks at her dubiously. To him there appears to be a much

greater degree of the compromising in a _tete-a-tete_ drive than in a

walk. In the one case the meeting may have been accidental; in the other

there can be no mistake as to the deliberate intention. But either this

does not strike Elizabeth, or she thinks, "In for a penny, in for a

pound"; or, lastly, and most probably, having given up her judgment into

his keeping, she finds it easiest and most natural to acquiesce in

whatever he may propose.

The ungenerous thought flashes across him that if this is the principle

on which she has guided her life, it is small wonder if she have made

shipwreck of it. He hails a fiacre, and silently hands her in, and again

they are off.

Elizabeth has disclaimed fatigue, and yet the restful position is

evidently agreeable to her delicate body; and she thanks him so

gratefully for his thought of her that his hard thoughts of her dissolve

into remorse, and by-and-by change into an enjoyment almost as entire

and uncalculating as her own.

Elizabeth has astonishing powers of enjoying herself. If he had not

known that fact before, the afternoon would have revealed it to him.

She must have driven through the French town almost every day since her

arrival, and yet its cheerful white-shuttered houses, its boulevards of

glossy-leaved ficus-trees, its cafes, its arcaded streets with their

polyglot promenaders, seem to fill her with as lively a pleasure as if

she had but just landed from the steamboat that brought her.

The three Spahis, eternally sitting in a row on a bench outside some

general officer's quarters, robed in their great red cloaks, with

muslin-swathed swart heads and long red-leather boots, dimly descried

beneath the stately sweep of their mantles, sitting there motionless,

solemn and silent as the Fates; a venerable Arab, only to be

distinguished from Abraham or Isaac by his carrying a vulgar brown

umbrella; a short Kabyle seen in back view, with his rope-bound

headdress, his brown-and-white striped frock, and his bare red legs

striding along, looking exactly like a ludicrous and indelicate old

woman; a Biskrah water-carrier, poising a great burnished copper pot on

his shoulder; two little baggy trousered white ladies waddling along; a

dozen of smart blue Turcos. She is enraptured with them all.

They leave their fiacre in the Place de la Cathedrale, and enter upon

the mysterious recesses of the Arab town. Up and down endless flights of

steps, up street after street--if streets they can be called, that are

not wider than a yard in their widest part--and above their heads the

rafter-supported houses lean together, letting scarce a glint of

daylight drip down upon the dusky path far below.

They pass arched doorways, with pretty designs in plaster--doorways

whose doors open inwards upon mysterious interiors--house or court, or

mosque or Marabe. All along stand tiny shops, like wild-beast dens, as

far as light and space go, lit only by the tempered light--in reality,

only semi-darkness--that enters in front. How can they see to

work--plait straw, for instance? as the three ebon-black negroes are

doing, upon whom they stare in, asquat upon the ground. The turbans, and

the red sashes, and the burnouses glimmer out of the little dim

frontages, where charming pierced-brass Moorish lamps hang and swing

aloft; and tempting piles of dully splendid brocades and bright

gold-laminated gauzes gleam from the crowded shelves.

The narrow streetlets are full of unbusy, un-hurrying Easterns, hideous

old negresses grinning like monkeys, idle Arabs sauntering along in

their lazy grace, draped like Greek statues, sauntering along between

the blue-washed walls that look in their effective variation upon the

blinding whitewash as if some of the sky-colour had rubbed off upon

them.

Jim and Elizabeth have paused, in their leisurely strolling and staring,

to look from the straight shadowed alley in which they are standing up a

long flight of steps to a low carved doorway, and a bit of starch-blue

wall at the top. Down the steep flight a veiled, trousered woman is

waddling, her immense pantaloons waggling awkwardly as she descends.

Elizabeth stands still, shaking with laughter at the sight. Jim laughs

too.

"There is no expense spared in material there, is there? It would not be

a bad dress for a fancy ball. Did you ever go to a fancy ball as a

Moorish lady?"

Her laughter lessens, though her face is still alight with mirth.

"I never was at a fancy ball."

"_Never?_"

"Never; I never was at any ball in my life."

Her laughter is quite dead now.

"Never at any ball in your life!" repeats he, his surprise betraying him

into one of those flights back into the past for which she has always

showed such repugnance. "Why, you used to love dancing madly! I remember

your dancing like a dervish. What is more, I remember dancing with you."

"Oh, do not remember anything to-day!" cries she, with a sort of writhe

in her voice; "do not let either of us remember anything! let us have a

whole holiday from remembering!"

So saying, she moves on quickly; and yet with the dance gone out of her

feet. It never quite comes back. They look into an Arab club, where men

are squatting, playing with odd-looking cards and drinking muddy coffee.

Then a loud noise of jabbering young voices makes them peep in upon an

Arab school, where a circle of little Moslems is sitting on the ground,

scribbling Arabic on slates; while between the knees of the turbaned

master a tiny baby scholar, of three or four, is standing in a lovely

dull green coatlet. Elizabeth strokes the baby-learner's coppery cheek

with her light hand, and says, with a laugh, that it seems odd to see

little street-boys writing Arabic; but her laughter is no longer the

bubbling, irrepressible joy-drunk thing it was before he had indulged in

his tactless reminiscences; it is the well-bred, civil, grown-up sound

that so often has no inside gladness to match it. In his vexation with

himself for the clouding over of his little heaven that he himself has

effected, he tries to persuade himself that it is caused by bodily

fatigue.

"If I were asked," he says, by-and-by, looking down affectionately at

her pallid profile, "I should say that you had had about enough of this;

your spirit"--smiling--"is so very much too big for your body that one

has to keep an eye upon you."

"It would not be much of a spirit if it were not," replies she, with a

pretty air of perfectly sincere disparagement of her own slight

proportions; "I know that I look a poor thing, but I am rather a fraud:

I do not tire easily; I am not tired now."

"Bored, then?" with a slight accent of pique.

She lifts her sweet look, with a sort of hurry of denial in it.

"Most distinctly not."

"You would like to go on, then?"

"Yes."

"Or back?"

She hesitates, her eye exploring his with, as he feels, a genuine

anxiety in it to discover what his own wishes are, so that her decision

may jump with them.

"Yes--perhaps; I have really no choice."

He both looks at and speaks to her with a streak of exasperation.

"Do you never have a will--a preference of your own?"

It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with

causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in

speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he

himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to

him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not

within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek

shows that she has felt his snub.

"In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say

that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us--let

us"--another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see

that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations--"let us

go home!"

So they go home. It is near sun-setting as they drive along the

Boulevard de la Republique, the fitting end to so princely a day. At the

quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design

against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent

pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of

"watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the

heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes

of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!

"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should

be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile.

It is the first time she had spoken since they had set off on their

return-drive. She is lying back, with her hands carefully shielding in

her lap a few little crockery pots that she has bought of a fat Turk for

some children at her hotel Her face looks tired; and yet over its small

area is spread an expression of content that makes his heart warm. Is it

only the pageant of sky and ocean that has called forth that look of

real, if passing, happiness on the features of her who is always so

tremblingly sensitive an instrument for all influences of beauty and

grandeur to play upon? or has his own neighbourhood anything to say to

it? Before he can give himself an answer to this anxious question, she

speaks again.

"You do not mind my not talking, do you?" she asks, half apologetically,

and yet with a confidence in his sympathy that still further quickens

the beats of his already not very still heart.

"No, I am sure you do not. Somehow--it is a great gift--you always feel

in tune with one, and one does not chatter most when one is most greatly

pleased, does one? Oh, what a treat you have given me!"

As she speaks, her humid eyes travel from his face to where, beyond the

long Atlas range, delicately toothed and cut out, rises the gold-washed

snow of the Kabyle mountains, that retire majestically invisible on dull

days, and only come out, candescent and regal, when the great sun rides

in pomp. Above their heads wild plumes of deep rose, that it seems

ridiculous to call clouds, tuft the sky.

Jim's look has followed his companion's; the chins of both are in the

air; the cheerful _va et vient_ of the boulevard is lost upon them. They

see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside

the cafes, nor the idle _indigenes_ leaning draped against the sea-wall.

(Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)

"Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."

But it is brought back to life with a jump.

"_Arretez! arretez!_" cries a female voice. "Jim! Jim! do you not see

us? _Arretez! arretez!_"

Obedient to his ears, Burgoyne's eyes make one bound from the heavenly

spectacle down to earth, and alight upon the Wilsons' carriage, which,

going in the same direction as himself, has just been brought to a

standstill alongside of his fiacre, by the solemnly beautiful,

yellow-jacketed native coachman.

It is, of course, Cecilia's voice that has apostrophized him, but oh,

portent! does his vision, so lately recalled from the skyey bowers, play

him false? or is it really the moribund Sybilla, stretched beside her,

with only two instead of three cushions at her back, with a bonnet on

her head--he did not even know that she possessed a bonnet--and with a

colour in her cheek and a lustre in her eye that may owe their origin

either to the freshness of the evening air, or to the invigorating

properties of the conversation of the very ordinary-looking young man

seated opposite to her?

In a second Jim has leapt out of his own vehicle, and gone to the side

of the other. It is a perfectly futile impulse that leads him to do so.

Not all the leaping in the world from her side now can alter the fact

that he has been driving _tete-a-tete_ with Elizabeth Le Marchant, and

that the Wilson sisters have seen him so doing; but yet it is a dim

instinct of preservation towards, and shielding of her, that leads him

to adopt this useless course of action. It is Cecilia who has summoned

him, and yet, when he reaches her side, she does not seem to have

anything particular to say to him. Sybilla is the one to address him.

"A miracle! a miracle! I know you are saying to yourself!" cries she, in

a sprightly voice; "and well you may! This is the miracle-monger!"

indicating with a still sprightlier air her _vis-a-vis_. "Dr. Crump, let

me present to you Mr. Burgoyne--Jim, our Jim, whom I have so often

talked to you about."

The person thus apostrophized responds by a florid bow, and an

over-gallant asseveration that any person introduced to his acquaintance

by Miss Sybilla needs no further recommendation.

"It is an experiment, of course; there is no use in pretending that it

is not an experiment," continues she, with a slight relapse into

languor; "but"--lowering her voice a little--"they wished me to make the

effort."

It is a favourite allocation of Sybilla's that any course of action

towards which she is inclined is adopted solely under the pressure of

urgent wishes on the part of her family. Burgoyne has long known, and

been exasperated by, this peculiarity; but at present she may say what

she pleases; he hears no word of it, for his ear is pricked to catch the

sentences that Cecilia is leaning over the carriage-side to shoot at

Elizabeth.

"Oh, Miss Le Marchant! is it you? I beg your pardon, I did not recognise

you at the first moment. One does not recognise people--does one?--when

one is not expecting to see them"--is an intended sting lurking in this

implication? "How are you? How do you like Algiers? I hope Mrs. Le

Marchant is well. What a long time it is since we met! I hope we shall

see something of you."

(No, evidently no sting was meant. Cecilia, with all her faults, is

really a good soul, and he will take her to hear the band play next

Tuesday.)

There seems to him to be a slight falter in the tone with which

Elizabeth responds, and her voice sounds curiously small and low; but

that may be merely owing to its flute quality, following upon and

contrasting the other's powerful organ.

It is not till the two parties have again separated, and that he is once

more seated by her side in the fiacre, that he dares steal a look at her

face to see how plainly written on it are the traces of vexation caused

by a meeting which has produced in his own breast such acute annoyance.

Good heavens! it is even worse than he had expected. Down the cheek

nearest to him two good-sized tears are unmistakably trickling. No doubt

the consciousness of the mysterious story attaching to her past makes

her smartingly aware of how doubly discreet her own conduct should

be--makes her bitterly repent of her present indiscretion.

He is a strait-laced man, and it seems to him as if there were something

gravely compromising to her in this _tete-a-tete_ drive with himself, in

the known absence of her parents at Hammam Rhira. Why was he fool enough

this morning to admit to Cecilia that they had gone thither? He had no

business to have led her into temptation, and she had no business to

have fallen into it. Remorse and irritation give a tartness to his tone

as he says:

"After all, I do not think you need take it so much to heart."

"Take what to heart?" she asks, in unaffected surprise, turning her full

face, and her eyes, each with one hot raindrop dimming its slate-blue,

upon him. "Oh, I see"--a sudden enlightenment coming to her, and

changing her with instant spring from a snowdrop to a carnation--"I see

what you mean; but you are mistaken. I--I--it had not occurred to me; I

was only thinking--only remembering that the last time I saw her was

at--at Vallombrosa."

_Vallombrasa!_ Is he never to hear the last of Vallombrosa?

CHAPTER VII.

The latest waking impression left on Jim's fancy is that it is the

golden rule of Elizabeth Le Marchant's life to comply with any and every

request that is made to her; moreover, that in her mind the

boundary-line which parts the permitted from the unpermitted is not so

clearly defined as, did she belong to him (the naked hypothesis makes

his strait-laced heart give a jump), he should wish it to be. If on the

morrow, with the sun shining and the leaf-shadows dancing on the fretted

balcony-wall, he invite her to some fresh junket, he is sure that she

will readily and joyfully acquiesce; that her spirits will go up like

rockets at the prospect; and that her one anxiety will be that she may

be sure to hit in her choice upon the form of dissipation most congenial

to him. He will therefore not invite her. He will have a greater care

for her reputation than apparently she has for it herself. Not until the

return of her parents, not until the difficulties of intercourse with

her are centupled, and the pleasure minimized, will he again seek her.

To put himself beyond the reach of temptation, he sets off immediately

after breakfast on a long walking expedition, which he means to occupy

the whole of the daylight hours. He wanders about the great plain of the

Metidje; he visits a Kabyle village, with its hovels cowering among its

hideous fat-fleshed cactus; later on in the afternoon he finds himself

in the little French hamlet of Biermandreis, and finally drops down upon

the Jardin d'Essai, that delightful botanic garden which is one of the

many blessings for which Algerian France has to thank the

much-vilipended Napoleon III.

It is difficult for even the reddest Republican to think hardly of that

dead ruler as he walks down the avenue of gigantic palms that lead,

straight as a die, to where, like a deep blue gem far away, the

Mediterranean shows

"No bigger than an agate stone

On the forefinger of an alderman."

Jim walks along beneath the huge date-palms that give him a crick in the

neck to gape up at ere he can perceive their towering head of waving

plumes far up against the blue. They remind him absurdly of the pictures

in the missionary books of his youth--the palm-tree, the log cabin, the

blackamoors, and the missionary in a palm hat. Is _he_ the missionary,

and is this inky negress in a black bonnet, scarcely distinguishable

from her face, his one catechumen?

Alternating with the date are superb fan-palms, of which it is difficult

to realize that it is their stunted, puny brothers which, anxiously

tended, sponged, and cosseted, drag out a languid existence in London

drawing-rooms. Among their Titan fans lies their mighty fruit, like a

bunch of grapes, a yard and a half long, strung upon ropes of yellow

worsted.

Half-way down its length the main avenue is intersected by a splendid

alley of bamboos, which lean their smooth-jointed stems and their

luxuriant narrow leaves towards each other across the dimmed interspace,

and unite in a pointed Gothic arch of living green.

Jim paces objectlessly down the long arcade, stooping now and again to

pick up a fragment of the peeled bark that looks so strangely like a

papyrus roll with a mother-of-pearl glaze upon it. He pulls it idly

open, as if expecting to find the secret of some forgotten race written

upon its shining surface; but if he reads any secret there, it is only

his own, which, after all, is not much of a secret. He merely sees

written there that it is too early to go home yet; that there is no

security that Elizabeth may not still be sitting on the terrace

stitching away with her gold thimble and her coloured silks. The sun, it

is true, has left the garden, but he departs thence over-early. It will

be safer to stay away yet half an hour or so.

Thus resolving, he retraces his steps, and explores in a new direction;

saunters down a rose-alley, where, climbing immoderately high up tall

palms, seeming as if they would strangle them with their long bowery

arms, rose-trees wave far above him in the still air; and upon them,

though it is still but the month of January, when people are skating,

blue-nosed, in England, creamy tea-roses show their pale-yellow hearts,

fair and frequent, on the unpruned boughs, rioting in licensed liberty

above his head. The walk ends in a circle of gigantic magnolias, which

take hands round a square fountain-basin. Each huge trunk is, as it

were, a little commonwealth of trees rolled into one, instead of a

single tree. Beneath them benches stand. Upon one his negress sits,

chatting with a French _bonne_; on a second there is also something

female and slender, something with its little white profile--how white

it looks in this deceiving light!--lifted, although white, yet smiling,

animated, and talking to a man standing beside it.

He has dawdled and kicked his heels, and run the chance of contracting a

spiteful Southern chill, in order to avoid Elizabeth; and he has

succeeded in running straight into her arms.

He does not at the first glance recognise her companion, but a second

look shows him that he is one of the inmates of the hotel--a French

Vicomte; and though Jim knows that he is both consumptive and the father

of a family, that knowledge does not hinder the rising in his breast of

the jealous and censorious thought that he has detected Elizabeth in

throwing a great deal more than the necessary modicum of amiability into

her manner to him.

As Jim comes into sight, the Frenchman clicks his heels, doubles up his

body, lifts his hat, and walks away. It is evident, at all events, that

their meeting was a casual one; and the reflection brings with it a

sense of relief, coupled with a feeling of shame at his own rooted

readiness to suspect her, on any or no evidence, which yet, on the other

hand, is not strong enough, when she turns her sweet bright look towards

him, to hinder the thought that it is scarcely, if at all, sweeter or

brighter than that which he had caught her squandering on the casual

_table d'hote_ acquaintance who has just quitted her.

"You, too!" she says; "why, the whole hotel seems to be emptied out into

these gardens; the widow Wadman is buying violets--mark if they do not

appear upon Uncle Toby at dinner to-night. The Vicomte----"

"Yes, I saw you engaged in animated dialogue with him," interrupts Jim,

with slight acrimony; "I had no idea that you were such allies."

"Had not you?" rejoins she innocently. "He was telling me about his

English governess, what a treasure she is"--her face dimpling

mischievously--"and how wonderfully pure her accent. So it is--pure

Cockney. You should hear the little Vicomte talk of the b_i_by and the

p_i_pers."

He rewards her small pleasantry only by an absent smile, and she speaks

again--rather wistfully this time.

"Have you been on another expedition?"

"No, not an expedition; only a walk. If"--yielding to the temptation of

putting a question which no one would have judged more severely than he,

had it been put by anyone else--"if I had invited you to do me the

honour of making another excursion with me to-day, do you think that you

would have consented?"

As he speaks, he departs yet further from the line of conduct he has

marked out for himself by sitting down on the bench at her side.

Her eyes are fixed upon the soaring date-palm, which stands, instead of

a water-jet, in the middle of the fountain-basin, and on which last

year's dead plumes hang sapless, and ready to fall off, in contrast to

this year's verdant vigour.

"Is not that rather a tantalizing question when you did not ask me?"

inquires she, with soft archness. "Yes, I suspect that I should; I was

so very happy yesterday; and although you told me the other

night"--swallowing a sigh--"that you supposed I must love my own

society, in point of fact, I do not think I do."

After all, the sun is not quite gone; there are flashes of light in the

verdant gloom, and green reflections in the water.

"And yet," says Jim thoughtfully, "you seem to have a good deal of it; I

suppose, in your position, it is unavoidable."

He had meant an allusion to her situation as bad third to her uxorious

parents; before his mind's eye has risen a picture of the little forlorn

shawled figure he had seen studying its Italian Grammar with the door

shut upon its loneliness; but almost before the words have left his

lips, he sees of how different, of how cruel, a construction they may be

capable.

He snatches a glance of real terror at her, to see whether she has made

that erroneous, yet all too plausible application--a glance which

confirms his worst fears. She has turned as white as the

pocket-handkerchief which she is passing over her trembling lips.

"Yes," she says in a hollow whisper; "you are right. In my position it

_is_ unavoidable, and it is cowardly of me not to accept it as such."

"I mean"--he cries desperately--"I only meant--I mean----"

But she does not suffer him to finish his stuttered explanation.

"It is cold," she says, rising. "I will go home."

He does not attempt to accompany or follow her.

After she is gone, he rages about the garden, and passes beyond it to

where--still sunlight-smitten--the blue Mediterranean is breaking in

joyous foam.

He sits down on the shelly strand, and, in futile anger, hurls back the

wet pebbles into the sea's azure lap. Away to the left, the

three-cornered town swarms candescent up the hill, and the white

lighthouse stands out against the lapis-coloured air.

How sharp-cut and intense it all is!--none of our dear undecided grays.

Here, if you are not piercing blue, you are dazzling white or profound

green. There is, indeed, something less sharp-cut and uncompromising--a

something more of mystery in the glory that--bright, too, but not making

its full revelation--envelopes the long hill range that, ending in Cape

Matifou, stretches away to the far right. Round the corner, to the right

too, a party of Arabs, sitting sideways on little donkeys, white draped,

with their _haik_-swathed heads, are disappearing on their small beasts

in the clear air. It is like a page out of the Bible--a flight into

Egypt--and they are going towards Egypt too.

Jim's eye follows the placid Easterns, but without catching the

infection of their tranquillity. "Whenever I see her, I stick a knife

into her! It is impossible! There is no use trying! I will give up the

attempt. It is out of the question to have any happy relations with a

woman who has a past!"

* * * * *

After all, Mr. Le Marchant does not like Hammam Rhira. He thinks the

hotel cold and the roads bad. Jim overhears him telling someone this,

and his own heart leaps.

It is true that he takes it to task for doing so. Perhaps, after all,

Elizabeth's removal would have been the best solution of his problem.

Had she left Algiers, he could scarcely have followed her, and she would

have been freed from the chance of his clumsy stabs.

But all the same his heart leaps. It leaps yet higher a day or two later

when he discovers that, though Hammam Rhira has not met with Mr. Le

Marchant's approbation, yet that, by his trip to it, he has been bitten

with a taste for travel, the outcome of which is his solitary departure

on an expedition to Constantin, Tunis, etc., which must occupy him at

least a week. His wife accompanies him to the station, but his daughter

is not allowed to go beyond the hotel steps.

Jim surreptitiously watches her hovering with diffident affection round

her father, unobtrusively and unthanked fetching and carrying for him.

He sees the cold kiss that just brushes her cheek, and hears the chill

parting admonition to look well after her mother and see that she does

not overtire herself.

It is accepted with ready meekness, but leaves the recipient so

crestfallen, as she stands looking after the departing vehicle, that

Burgoyne cannot forbear joining her, with some vague and, as he knows,

senseless velleity of championship and consolation.

"He is gone for a week, is not he?" is the form that his sympathy takes,

in a tone which he is at but small pains not to render congratulatory.

"Yes, quite a week."

"Are you"--he is perfectly conscious while asking it that he has not the

slightest right to put the question--"are you glad or sorry?"

She starts perceptibly.

"Why should I be glad? Do you mean"--with an unconquerable streak of

satisfaction in her own voice--"because I shall have mammy all to

myself? You must not think"--with an obvious rush of quickly following

compunction--"that I am not fond of him, because he sometimes speaks a

little roughly to me." After a pause, in a lowered voice: "You see, when

you have broken a person's heart, you can scarcely blame him for not

having a very high opinion of you."

So saying, she suddenly leaves him as she had left him in the Jardin

d'Essai. He does not again approach her that day, but at dinner-time he

has the answer to his question as to her being glad or sorry at her

father's departure. She is apparently in the best of spirits, sitting

nestled close up to her mother for the better convenience of firing a

series of little jokes and comments into that parent's appreciative ear.

"They make fun of the whole hotel," observes Miss Strutt with

exasperation. "I do not believe that one of us escapes! When he is not

there to check them, there is no holding them!"

_No holding_ Elizabeth! The phrase recurs to him several times during

the next few days, as not without its justness, when he sees its object

flitting about the house, gay as a linnet; when he meets her singing

subduedly to herself upon the stairs; when he watches her romping with

the French children, and mischievously collecting flowers of Clapham

eloquence from their governess, which she is good enough to retail for

his own and her mother's benefit when evening unites the three in the

retirement of their little salon. For, strange and improbably blissful

as it seems, he has somehow, ere three days are over, effected an

entrance into that small and fragrant sanctuary.

Mrs. Le Marchant's first fears that the meeting with him again would

re-open sorrow have disappeared in the light of her daughter's childish

gaiety, and are even exchanged for a compunctious gratitude to him for

having been in part the cause of her new light-heartedness. The weather

has again broken, a fact which he alone of the whole hotel does not

deplore, since it was his own ostentatiously displayed wet-day

dreariness that was the cause of his first admission within the doors

that are closed upon all others. Moreover, had it not been wet weather,

could he have held an umbrella over Elizabeth's head when he met her in

the eucalyptus wood, and they walked among the naked trunks, while the

long, loose, pale foliage waved like dishevelled hair in the rain, and

the pungent asphodels grew thick about their feet in the red earth? And

when, by-and-by, the clouds disperse again, and there comes a fair day,

bracketed between three or four foul ones--the usual Algerian

proportion--it has grown quite natural to all three that he should sit

opposite to them in their drives; that he should haggle with Arabs for

them, and remonstrate with the landlord, and generally transfer all the

smaller roughnesses of life from their shoulders to his own. Brought

into more intimate communion with them than he has ever been before,

Burgoyne realizes how much they belong to the kneeling, leaning,

spoiling type of womankind. Elizabeth would be the easiest woman in the

world to manage. How is it that in her ten years of womanhood no man has

been found to undertake the lovely facile task? He himself knows

perfectly the treatment that would befit her; the hinted wishes--her

tact is too fine and her spirit too meek to need anything so coarse as

commands--the infinitesimal rebukes and the unlimited--oh!

limitless--caresses:

"Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles."

Every day he finds himself repeating Wordsworth's line, and every day,

in his fancied guidance of her, he tells himself that the blame should

be less and the kisses more.

* * * * *

Mr. Le Marchant has been gone more than a week, and February has come

wetly in, with rain wildly weeping against the easements, and

angry-handed rain boxing the unlucky orange-trees' ears. It has rained

for forty-eight hours without a break. The Grand Hotel is at the end of

its resources. Uncle Toby, his struggle ended, lies vanquished in the

widow's net; and there is murder in the lurid eye which Miss Strutt

turns on the votary of Whiteley.

Jim alone, outdoor man as he habitually is, looking upon a house merely

in the light of a necessary shelter, has no quarrel either with the

absent sun or the present deluge? for are not they the cause of his

having spent two whole afternoons in the company of Elizabeth and her

mother? To-day has not Elizabeth been singing to him, and cutting him

orange-flower bread-and-butter, when Fritz brought in the afternoon tea,

and set the real English kettle fizzing over its spirit-lamp? And, in

return, has not he now, after dinner, been helping her to weed out her

own and her mother's photograph-books? As he does so the idea strikes

him of how very meagre her own collection of acquaintances seems to be.

From that weeding have they not, by an easy transition, at her

suggestion, passed to the more playful and ingenious occupation of

amputating the heads of some of the rejected friends and applying them

to the bodies of others? Each armed with a pair of scissors, and with

Mrs. Le Marchant for umpire, they have been vying with each other as to

who can produce the most startling results by this clever process.

The palm has just been awarded to Elizabeth for a combination which

presents the head of an elderly lady, in a widow's cap, mounted upon the

cuirass and long boots of a Life Guardsman. Jim's application of the

cornet's discarded head to the body of a baby in long clothes, although

allowed to be a pretty conceit, commands but little real admiration--an

instance of nepotism which he does not allow to pass without protest.

Elizabeth, elated by her triumph, has flown out of the room to examine

her private stores for fresh material, and Jim and her mother--for the

first time, as it happens, since that early meeting, when her anxious

eye had so plainly implored him to leave Algiers--are _tete-a-tete_. Her

changed aspect towards him as she sits, with a lingering laugh still on

her face, beside the wood fire--which, after having twice gone out, as

it almost always does, the souches being invariably wet, burns bright

and crackly--strikes him with such a feeling of warm pleasure that he

says in a voice of undisguised triumph:

"What spirits she is in, is not she?"

"Yes; is not she?" assents the mother eagerly. "Oh, I cannot say how

grateful I am to you for having cheered her up as you have done! Oh,"

with a low sigh that seems to bear away on its slow wings the last

echoes of her late mirth, "if it could only last!"

"Why should not it last?"

"If nothing fresh would happen!"

"Why should anything fresh happen?"

She answers only indirectly;

"'Fear at my heart, as at a cup,

The life-blood seemed to sip.'

"Sometimes I think that Coleridge wrote those lines expressly for me."

After a pause, in a voice of anxious asking: "She has not mentioned him

to you lately, has she?"

"No."

"That is a good sign. Do not you think that that is a good sign? I think

that she is getting better; do not you?"

For a moment he cannot answer, both because he is deeply touched by the

confidence in him and his sympathy evidenced by her appeal, and for a

yet more potent reason. Little she guesses how often, and with what

heart-searchings and spirit-sinkings, he has put that question to

himself.

"I do not know," he replies at last, with difficulty; "it is hard to

judge."

"You have not told him that we are here?" in a quick, panic-struck tone,

as of one smitten with a new and sharp apprehension.

"Oh no!"

"You do not think that he is at all likely to join you here?"

"Not in the least!" with an almost angry energy, which reveals to

himself how deeply distasteful the mere suggestion of Byng's

reappearance on the scene is to him.

Mrs. Le Marchant heaves a second sigh. This time it is one of relief.

"Then I do not see," with a sudden bound upwards into sanguineness which

reminds him of her daughter, "why we should not all be very

comfortable."

Jim is pondering in his mind upon the significance of this "all,"

whether it is meant to include only Mr. Le Marchant, or whether, under

its shelter, he himself may creep into that promised comfort, when she

of whom they have been speaking re-enters. She has a packet of

photographs, presumably suitable for amputation, in her hand, in which

is also held a telegram, which she extends to Burgoyne.

"I met M. Cipriani bringing you this. It seems that you ought to have

had it two days ago, but, by some mistake, it was put into another

gentleman's room--a gentleman who has never arrived--and there it has

remained. He was full of apologies, but I told him what culpable

carelessness it showed. I do trust," with a sweetly solicitous look,

"that it is not anything that matters."

"It cannot be of much consequence," replies Jim indifferently, while a

sort of pang darts through him at the thought of how strangely destitute

he is of people to be uncomfortably anxious about, and so tears it open.

An English telegram transmitted by French clerks often wears a very

different air from that meant to be imparted to it by the sender, which

is, perhaps, the reason why Jim remains staring so long at his--so long

that the two women's good manners prompt them to remove their

sympathetic eyes from him, and to attempt a little talk with each other.

"I hope you have no bad news?"

The elder one permits herself this inquiry after a more than decent

interval has elapsed, during which he has made no sign.

He gives a start, as one too suddenly awaked out of deep sleep.

"Bad news?" he repeats in an odd voice--"what is bad news? That depends

upon people's tastes. It is for you to judge of that; it concerns you as

much or more than it does me."

So saying, he places the paper in her hand, and, walking away to the

little square window--open, despite the wildness of the weather--looks

out upon the indigo-coloured night.

Although his back is turned towards them, he knows that Elizabeth is

reading over her mother's shoulder--reading this:

"BOURGOUIN,

"Grand Hotel,

"Algiers.

"Have heard of Le Marchants. If you do not wire to the

contrary, shall cross to-morrow.--BYNG, Marseille."

He is not left long in doubt as to their having mastered the meaning of

the missive.

"He is coming!" says Mrs. Le Marchant with a species of gasp; "and you

told me--not five minutes ago you told me"--with an accent of

reproach--"that there was not the remotest chance of it. Oh, stop him!

stop him! Telegraph at once! The office will be open for two or three

hours yet! There is plenty, plenty of time! Oh, telegraph at once--at

once!"

"It is too late," replies Jim, retracing his steps to the table; "you

forget that it is two days old. You see, they have spelt my name wrong;

that accounts for the mistake. _Bourgouin!_ It looks odd spelt

_Bourgouin_, does not it?"

He hears himself giving a small, dry laugh, which nobody echoes.

"He must have sailed yesterday," continues the young man, wishing he

could persuade his voice to sound more natural; "he may be here at any

moment. If the weather had been decent, he would have arrived ere now."

"Then there is nothing to be done!" rejoins Mrs. Le Marchant in a tone

of flat desperation, sitting down again on the chair out of which she

had instinctively risen at the little stir of the telegram's arrival.

Elizabeth is dead silent. Though there is no direction by the eye to

show that Jim's next remark is aimed at her, there can be no doubt that

it is awkwardly thrown in her direction.

"If this had not been delayed--if it had not been too late, would you

have wished, would you have decided to stop him?"

"What is the use of asking me such a question now that it _is_ too

late?" replies she, with more of impatience, almost wrath, in her voice

than he has ever before heard that most gentle organ express.

But besides the ire and irritation, there is another quality in it which

goads him to snatch a reluctant glance at her. She is extremely

agitated, but underlying the distress and disturbance of her face there

is an undoubted light shining like a lamp through a pale pink shade--a

light that, with all her laughter and her jokes, was not there half an

hour ago. He had often reproached himself that, by his clumsiness, he

had stuck a knife into her tender heart. She is even with him to-night.

To-night the tables are turned. It is she that has stuck a knife into

him. It is clear as day that she is _glad_ it is too late.

CHAPTER VIII.

"After all," says Mrs. Le Marchant presently, rallying a little, her

naturally buoyant temperament--that temperament which she has

transmitted with such curious fidelity to her child, coming to her

rescue; "after all, there is no reason why you should see him,

Elizabeth. There is no reason why she should see him, is there, Mr.

Burgoyne? It could serve no possible end--could it?--and only be

exceedingly painful to them both. You will explain to him, will not you?

You will take any message from her? You will tell him that she really is

not up to it, will not you? It is quite true, I am sure. You are not,

are you darling? She is not, is she?"

The mother turns as she speaks eagerly from one to the other, addressing

each in turn; but from neither does she obtain any answer.

"Or I would speak to him myself; if you thought that better," continues

she, still interrogating them with her handsome, careworn eyes. "I would

say anything you wished said to him, and I would be careful to say it as

kindly as possible. I am sure he would understand; he would see the

sense, the justice of it, would not he? There is no need for her to

expose herself to such useless suffering, is there, Mr.

Burgoyne?"--appealing desperately to him by name, since he will not

respond to any less direct address--"when either you or I are more than

ready to shield her from it, are not we?"

Thus apostrophized, Jim is compelled to break the silence, which seems

to himself to wall him round like a petrifaction. It is to Elizabeth

that he offers his hardly-won speech.

"I think I need not tell you," he says gravely, and with passable

steadiness, "that I would help you in any way I could."

She stands a moment or two irresolute, her features all quivering as if

with pain; and yet, underlying and under-shining the pain, something

that is not pain. Then she puts out a hand impulsively to each. If the

one that gives itself to Burgoyne had struck him on the mouth, instead

of offering itself with affectionate confidence to his clasp, it could

not have hurt him more than do those small fingers that lie in his,

trembling with a passion that is not for him.

"You are both very good to me," she says brokenly. "As to you, mammy,

that is an old story. But I really believe that there is nothing

disagreeable that you, too"--with a slight grateful pressure of the

lifeless hand that so slackly keeps possession of hers--"would not do

for me. But do not think me obstinate if I say that I think--I am

sure--that it would be better--that it would hurt him less--if I spoke

to him myself."

"It is not a question of what will hurt him least," cries Mrs. Le

Marchant, with an agony of impatience in her tone. "The thing to be

considered is what will hurt _you_ least. Mr. Burgoyne, am I not right?

Do tell her that I am! Ought not she to think of what will hurt her

least?"

But Jim is incapable of coming a second time to her rescue. His eyes are

painfully fastened upon Elizabeth, and he is watching the pain fall off,

as it were, from her face, and the light spread rosily over it. Some

instinct makes her withdraw that hand of hers which he has shown so

little eagerness to retain, ere she says, in a low but perfectly firm

voice:

"Well, then, I think it will hurt me least, too."

Five minutes later Jim has left the room--ostensibly to make

arrangements for his friend's arrival, in reality because he cannot

count upon his own self-control if he remain in it. The survivors of

Elizabeth Le Marchant's acquaintance remain undecapitated. The

widow-headed Life Guardsman and the baby-bodied cornet lie unregarded on

the table, while Elizabeth herself is stretched along the floor, with

her face pressed against her mother's knees. Jim has decided to sit up

for his friend. He is perfectly aware that neither will the two women go

to bed. But he has no desire that their vigil should be shared in

common. It is equally impossible to him to take part in the noisy mirth

of the rest of the hotel, which, having taken the place of their

measureless daylight ennui, now boils over in ebullient laughter, in

dancing, squeaking, and noisily scampering out of the public

drawing-room into the hall and up the stairs. It is not till the clamour

has declined, until, indeed, its total cessation tells him that the

promiscuous revellers have retired to their apartments, that he issues

from his, and takes possession of the now empty smoking-room, whence he

can hear more distinctly than from his own bedroom any noise of wheels

approaching the hotel. The wind has risen again, and it needs an ear

very finely pricked to dissever from its mad singing, and from the

storming of the frantic rain, any lesser and alien sound. What a

terrific night in which to be out on the raging sea! Worse even than

that one last week, when the _Moise_ broke her shaft, and tossed for

twenty-four hours at the mercy of the waves. Possibly the weather may

have already yesterday been so rough at Marseille as to prevent his

setting off. But the idea--at the first blush eagerly welcomed by

him--is dismissed from his mind almost as soon as entertained. If the

boat has started--and it is only under such heavy penalties that the

mail-boats do not start, that this contingency hardly ever occurs--Byng

will have started too. A terrific bang at the casement seems to come as

a comment upon this conviction. He will have started; but will he ever

arrive? It is said that in eight years during which they have been

running no catastrophe has ever sent one of this line of steamers to the

bottom; but yet they are cranky little craft, with engines too big for

them--built rather for speed than safety. The clock has struck, with a

repetition that seems strangely frequent through the sleeping house: 11,

11.30, 12, 12.30.

"I will give him half an hour more," says the watcher to himself, "and

then I will turn in."

Of this allotted half-hour only five minutes are yet left to run, when,

in a lull in the hurricane, the sound which Jim's hearing has been so

long stretched to catch--the sound of wheels on the gravel--is at length

audible. During the last two hours he has heard many phantom

wheels--many of those ghostly coaches that the wind drives shrieking

through the winter nights. But these are real ones. Before the drowsy

porter, nodding in his little den, can reach the hall-door, Jim has

opened it--opened it just in time to admit a man who, his pace still

further accelerated by the mighty hands of the pushing blast, is

bounding up the steps. If any doubt as to this person's identity

lingered in Jim's mind, his first words would dispel it.

"She is here? There is no mistake? She is here?"

"How late you are!" cries the other, apparently regarding the new

arrival's utterance more as an ejaculation than as a question expecting

or needing an answer. "Why are you so late? Did the engines break down?"

"She is here?" repeats Byng insistently, taking no notice of the queries

addressed to him. "You have not deceived me? For mercy's sake say that

you have not deceived me!"

"Why should I deceive you?" rejoins Jim impatiently. "Yes; certainly she

is here."

They are in the hall by now--the hall which, the Grand Hotel being

gasless, is lit by only one weak paraffin lamp, which the gust from the

door, necessarily still open to admit of the carrying in of the

traveller's bags and rugs, is making even more faint and flickering than

its wont.

"You must have had a fine tossing!"

"I believe you; they all thought we were going to make a dinner for the

fishes--ha, ha! All but I. I knew better. I knew that I could not come

to grief when _she_ had called me to her."

Byng's hat is rammed down over his brows, and his fur coat turned up so

high round his ears that it is impossible in the obscurity to see his

face; but there is something in the tone of his voice--a loud, wild

rollicking--that makes the idea cross Jim's mind that he has been

drinking. What a shock it will give to Elizabeth if, in her covert

vigil--he has no more doubt that she has been watching than that he has

been doing so himself--she overhears that thick, raised voice! Prompted

by this thought, he says hastily:

"Come into the dining-room. I told them to put something to eat for you

there."

Byng complies; and when they have reached the empty _salle a manger_,

whose whitewash looks weird and unnatural in the chill of the night, he

sends his hat skimming down one of the long tables, and, grasping both

Jim's hands in his, cries out, in the same loud tone of intoxicated

triumph:

"Oh, my dear old chap, how good it is to see your ugly old mug again! If

you had known--oh, if you had only known!--what I went through during

the twenty-four hours after I sent you that telegram, when through every

hour, through every minute and second of every hour, I said to myself,

'It may come _now_--my death-warrant may come _now_! In five minutes it

may have come!' But it did not, it did not! I ought to have known"--with

an accent of ecstasy--"that of her pitifulness she would relent at last.

She is infinitely pitiful, is not she? but I shall upbraid her a

little--oh, do not be afraid; it will be gently, _most_ gently--for

having kept me so long, so inhumanly long, upon my gridiron! I had

always"--breaking into a rather wild laugh--"something of a tenderness

for St. Lawrence, but during the last seven months I have loved him like

a brother!"

He goes on again, with scarcely a pause, or apparently any consciousness

of the unresponsive silence of his auditor:

"But what does it matter now?" beginning to stride about with his eyes

cast up to the beamed ceiling and his lifted hands locked

together--"what does it matter? 'After long grief and pain, to feel the

arms of my true love round me once again!' You may think that I word it

extravagantly," returning to Jim as he leans downcast and shocked upon

one of the chairs of the monotonous _table-d'hote_ row; "but in the hope

itself, the more than hope, there is nothing extravagant; you must own

that yourself. If she had not meant to put an end to my long agony, she

would not have sent for me; _not_ to stop me was to send for me."

"You are labouring under a mistake," says Jim coldly, and yet with an

inward quaking as to the effect that his words may produce; "she had not

the option of stopping you. By some accident I did not receive your

telegram till four hours ago. She could not have stopped you if she had

wished."

The idea, as I have already said, has occurred to Burgoyne that his

companion is under the influence of intoxication; but either this is not

the case, or the shock of the last words has the effect of instantly

sobering him.

"I--I--do not understand," he says in a voice out of which all the

insane exhilaration has been conjured as if by magic; "I do not follow

you. What do you mean?"

"I mean," replies Jim, in a matter-of-fact, level tone, meant to have a

calming effect upon his auditor, "that owing, I suppose, to my name

being spelt wrongly--Bourgouin instead of Burgoyne--your telegram was

given to someone else, and did not reach me till nine o'clock this

evening."

Byng puts up his hand to his throat, and, unfastening the collar of his

fur coat as if it were strangling him, throws back the coat itself. Now

that he sees him freed from enveloping wrap and concealing hat-brim, Jim

can realize the full amount of change and deterioration that are visible

in his appearance; can see how bloodshot his eyes are; how lined his

mouth; and how generally ravaged and dimmed his good looks.

"I am to understand, then, that--that she would have stopped my coming

if she could."

Jim is silent. He cannot answer that question with any certainty even to

himself.

"She would have escaped me again if she had had the chance! What am I

saying?"--with a sudden access of terror in his tone--"she may have

escaped me already! She may be gone! Tell me the truth--do not dare to

tell me anything but the bare truth. I saw that you hesitated when I

asked you whether she was really here. Is she gone?"

"Gone!" repeats Jim, with an exasperated jerk of the head towards the

window, against which the rain and wind are hurling themselves with

threefold rage, as if to recapture the victim just escaped them.

"To-night--in this storm? How likely! Come, be rational; try to keep

your head, and let us have a truce to this ranting. I give you my word

of honour that she is here, under this roof; asleep, I should hope, if

your bellowings have not awoke her."

The latter clause may perhaps come under the head of a pardonable

fiction; at all events, it has, despite its incivility, the desired

effect of soothing, to some extent, the agitation of him to whom it is

addressed.

"Asleep!" he repeats, while an ecstatic smile breaks over his handsome,

dissipated face. "Good angels guard her slumbers! But"--with a rather

ominous return of excitement--"are you sure that she _is_ asleep--that

she has gone to bed yet? They used to sit up very late in Florence

sometimes. If she has not gone to bed, why should not I see her; why

should not I fall at her feet _now_--to-night?"

"My dear boy," rejoins Jim, with a praiseworthy attempt to answer this

modest and sensible proposal with patient good-humour, "have you any

idea what time it is? I should have thought it might have occurred even

to you that 1.30 A.M. is scarcely a suitable hour for paying a morning

call! Do not be a fool! Pull yourself together. I swear to you that she

has every intention of seeing you to-morrow. Come"--trying to

laugh--"you will not have long to wait! It is to-morrow already; and,

meantime, sit down and eat something; you must be as empty as a drum."

But to this prudent if homely counsel Byng opposes an obstinate

negation, adorned with excited asseverations that food shall never cross

his lips until they have pastured upon his lady's pardoning hand.

The same prohibition does not, however, apparently apply to drink, as he

pours more than half the bottle of happily not very potent wine,

prepared for his refreshment, into a tumbler, and tosses it off at a

draught. He offers an even stouter refusal to Burgoyne's suggestion that

he should go to bed; and as he utters it a flash of cunning suspicion

comes into his eyes, shocking his friend with a gleam as of possible and

scarcely latent madness. Across the latter's brain darts the query,

which had proposed itself more than once to him last spring at Florence:

"Is there insanity in Byng's blood"

Not certainly on the distaff side, the side of his eminently sane and

wholesome mother; but can he be throwing back to some distempered

ancestor?

"What security have I if I go to bed that she will not steal away from

me in the night? It was in the night--almost in the night--that she

stole away from me before."

From this logic it is impossible to move him; and although, with some

return to his old sweet-natured kindliness of manner, he begs his friend

not to think it necessary to keep him company, yet the latter is far too

ill at ease as to his condition, both of mind and body, to comply.

The porter, having drawn the natural inference that as soon as the

traveller has refreshed his body he will wish to retire to rest, has put

out the lights in the smoking-room; the _salle a manger_ is therefore

the only room in the hotel where lamps still burn, and in it the two men

spend the dreary remaining hours of the night, Byng walking up and down

like a captive beast, frequently going to the door, opening it, putting

his head out into the darkness, and listening suspiciously if,

perchance, he may hear the footfall of Elizabeth fleeing away from him

even through the hurricane. As the time goes on, his restlessness

increases rather than diminishes. Jim has vainly tried to distract his

thoughts by putting questions to him as to his pursuits and companions

since their last parting--by inquiries as to the extent and direction of

his travels.

Did he get as far as Palestine? How long is it since he left Cairo? etc.

But to all his interrogations Byng gives brief and unsatisfactory

answers, putting a final stop to them by breaking out excitedly:

"Why do you go on questioning me as to where I have been, and what I

have done? I tell you I have been nowhere, and done nothing; I believe

that my body has been here and there, but my soul has been nowhere; it

has been lying dead! Would you expect a man who has been lying six

months in his coffin to give you a catalogue of his adventures? My soul

has been dead, I tell you--dead and putrescent. What is the use of

putting me through a catechism about its doings?"

Before the long-delaying dawn shows its pale profile upon the deep

obscurity, it seems to Jim as if six midwinter nights must have pieced

themselves end to end. But it comes at last; and at last also, by dint

of strenuous representations to his companion as to how unfit he is, in

his present travel-stained and disordered condition, to offer himself to

Elizabeth's eyes, he induces him to let himself be led to the bedroom

prepared overnight for him, and to refresh himself with a bath and a

change of clothes. Even this concession he obtains only in exchange for

an exacted promise to seek out Elizabeth at the earliest possible hour

at which she may be presumed accessible, and urgently to entreat of her

an instant interview with his friend.

Jim feels that he is keeping his word handsomely when, not a minute

later than nine o'clock, he finds himself knocking at the door of the Le

Marchants' apartment--that door with which of late his knuckles have

grown so pleasantly and friendlily familiar. It is opened to him by

Elizabeth herself, and he follows her silently through the ante-room

into the little _salon_. Arrived there, he looks mournfully round with a

sort of feeling as of taking farewell of the familiar objects.

It is impossible that Elizabeth can have spent the just-past stormy

night in gathering flowers, and yet the flowers have a freshened air.

She must have been carefully rearranging them. The bits of brocade, too,

the Turkish embroideries, the _haiks_, and the praying-carpets, wear a

more festal appearance than usual. The little room looks decked as if

for a gala. His jealous fancy cannot but admit that Elizabeth herself is

dressed in her ordinary morning gown, but even over it some holiday

transmutation has passed. He cannot trust himself to verify whether that

holiday look is on her face too.

"He has come; you know that, I suppose?"

"Yes."

What a catch in her breath! He must steal a glance at her. She will

think it unnatural if he does not; and perhaps his eye may not be

offended by so much radiance as he feared. In her voice there was

something not very distant from a sob. The result of his glance shows

itself in what sounds like a reproach.

"I do not believe that you went to bed at all."

"Yes, I did! yes, I did!" hurrying away eagerly from the subject of

herself, as from something irrelevant and importunate; "and--he--how is

he? How does he look? Had not he a dreadful crossing? Does he want to

see me? to see me soon? to-day?"

There is such a breathless passion in her tone, coupled with something

so apologetic for putting her questions to him, that his heart, hitherto

half touched, half angered by the pathos of her little preparations,

melts wholly towards her.

"Of course he wants to see you--wants it very, very much," replies he;

and, to his credit, replies without any harshness marring the cordial

kindness of his tone. "As much as"--with a rather melancholy smile--"you

want to see him. No, do not be angry. Why should not you wish to see

each other?"

"Oh, there is every reason!" cries she miserably--"the same reason that

there always was. But"--with rising agitation--"where is it to be? How

soon? When does he wish it?"

"He is waiting outside now."

She starts painfully.

"_Now!_ Oh, poor fellow! we must not keep him waiting; and

yet"--stretching out her hand in detention--"tell me, before he comes

in--tell me, is he changed? Is he? Is he the same as he was?"

Jim hesitates, and the painful perplexity written on his brow is misread

by her.

"You are vexed with me for teasing you with so many tiresome questions.

Oh, forgive me! I ought not to take advantage of your kindness; but we

have grown to depend upon you so; and I will promise not to worry you

with any other, if you will only answer me this one. Is he changed--much

changed?"

"I am afraid," replies Jim, with the slowness of one who is trying to

convey unpleasant tidings in the least unpleasant terms, "that you must

be prepared to find him a good deal altered."

"Altered! How?"

"I do not quite know how to describe it"--uneasily--"but you must not be

shocked if you find him a good deal changed in looks; and he is--he

seems, in a very excited state."

She makes a clutch at his hand.

"Do you mean"--her voice has sunk to a horror-struck whisper--"that he

is--mad?"

"Mad! Oh, of course not," with a strained laugh; "you must not jump to

such conclusions. But I do not think he is quite himself, that is all.

He looks as if he had not eaten or slept for a fortnight; and if you

play such tricks as that with yourself, you must expect to get a little

off your balance."

She is still terrifiedly clutching his hand, though with no

consciousness of doing so, nor that the fingers so tightly gripped by

her are not made of dry stick.

"You must not look so frightened," he says soothingly. "I would not have

said anything to you, only that I thought it better you should be

prepared--that it should not take you quite by surprise; and also

because I wanted to give you a hint, that you might be a little careful

what you say to him, or, at all events, how you say it."

Still she does not speak, and there is scarcely any diminution of the

horror of her look.

"If you do not mind, I think it would be as well to have someone within

call, if he--he--became--unreasonable."

"Do you think," she asks, with a sort of scorn, "that I am afraid of

him--afraid for myself?"

"No, that I am sure you are not; but I cannot shake off the idea

that--poor fellow!--he may be on the verge of some grave illness; and in

that sort of case one never knows what may happen. So, if you do not

mind----"

"As you please," she answers, docile even now. "Do as you think best;

and will you tell him that I am ready to see him?"

The misgivings with which Jim complies with this request are not much

allayed by the manner and voice of him who receives it, and who has been

raging up and down the narrow corridor.

"She will not see me, I suppose?"

"On the contrary, she will see you now. But stay!" catching him by the

arm as he springs past him. "One moment! For God's sake control

yourself! Behave like a gentleman. Do not make her a scene; she is not

up to it."

Byng's answer is to fling resentfully away the detaining hand of his

Mentor, while he says, with a furious look coming into his bloodshot

eyes:

"What do you mean by keeping me here, preaching to me, while _she_ is

waiting for me?"

The rudeness of both words and actions is so unlike the real Byng, that

it is with an even more sinking spirit than before that Jim follows him

with his eyes as he passes out of sight into the _salon_. As soon as the

door is shut behind him, he himself takes up the position he had

suggested in the ante-room.

CHAPTER IX.

There are few things more trying to an active-minded person than to sit

occupationless, vaguely waiting. At first, it is true, the keenness of

Jim's alarm prevents his feeling the ennui which would be the natural

result of his situation. Poignantly anxious questions succeed each other

in his mind. Has he had any right to permit the interview at all? How

far is Byng accountable for his actions? What chance is there that his

already rocking reason will stand the shock of a meeting which, even in

his sanest moments, would have so wildly excited him? And if not, what

may be the consequences? Grisly headings of newspaper paragraphs write

themselves in the air before him--"Homicidal Mania," "Murder and

Suicide."

The details of a tragic story which, illustrated by sensational

woodcuts, he had idly read a day or two ago in a venerable _Police

News_, left lying on the smoking-room table, recur to his memory. It was

a tale of a groom who, in an access of jealous madness, had shot a

scullion sweetheart through the head, and then blown his own brains out.

The tale had made but little impression on him at the time--unhappily,

it is scarcely possible to take up a journal without the eye alighting

upon some such--but it comes back to him now with terrifying vividness.

What security is there that such tragedies may be confined to grooms and

kitchen-maids? How does he know that Byng has not a revolver hidden in

his breast-pocket? How can he tell that he is not at this very moment

drawing it out? He (Jim) ought to have made sure, before exposing her to

such a peril, that the danger was minimized by Byng's being weaponless.

Is it too late to make sure of that even now?

He takes one step towards the _salon_ door, then hastily retraces it.

Pooh! he is growing as mad as Byng. They will come out and find him

eavesdropping.

He retreats to the table, which is at the greatest distance allowed by

the room's narrow enceinte from the scene of the drama whose

_denouement_ he is expecting, and, sitting down, takes up a book. It

happens to be Elizabeth's Italian exercise-book, and the sight of it

conjures up before his memory her forlorn figure stooping disconsolately

over the page, wrapped in her brown furs, as he had seen it on that

rainy night that seems now so distant. He had pitied her for being

lonely then. Well, whatever else she may be, she is not lonely now.

He catches his breath. It is quite a quarter of an hour since he began

his watch. How quiet they are! There is a murmur of voices, but there is

nothing that in the least indicates violence. Before his eyes there

flashes in grotesque recollection the hideous picture in the _Police

News_ which illustrates the high words with which the catastrophe of the

groom and kitchenmaid had been heralded. He has been making a mountain

out of a mole-hill; has been exaggerating his friend's emotional

temperament, naturally further heightened by sleeplessness and want of

food, into incipient insanity. If he were mad, or at all tending that

way, would he be talking in the low rational key which he obviously must

be? It is evident that her presence, her eye, her--yes, what more

likely?--her touch have soothed and conjured away what of excessive or

perilous there was in his emotion.

They have been together half an hour now. All danger is certainly over.

Why should he any longer continue his officious and needless

watch?--superfluously spying upon them?

Relieved as to what he had thought his worst fear, and yet with an

uncommon bitterness about his heart, he turns to withdraw, and his hand

is already on the lock of the door which leads into the corridor, when

suddenly, without any warning, there reaches his ear the noise of a

loud, crashing fall, followed--accompanied, rather--by a piercing

scream.

In infinitely less than a second he finds himself on his knees beside

the prostrate body of Byng, who, with blood pouring from his forehead,

is stretched upon the floor of the _salon_. Even at this second there

flashes upon him, ludicrous and dreadful, the memory of the _Police

News_. This scene has a grotesque likeness to the final one of the groom

and kitchenmaid series, only that in the present case the heroine,

instead of staggering backward with the top of her head flying up to the

ceiling, is hanging unharmed over her fallen lover.

"Are you hurt?" cries Jim in frantic anxiety, looking at her across the

prostrate figure, and unable to eradicate from his mind the revolver

idea. "Did he hit you? I did not hear a shot."

"Oh no, no! but he," fetching her breath in terrible gasps, and hanging

over the bleeding man with that utter abandonment of all disguise, in

which a great naked grief sweeps away our sophistications--"he is dead!"

"Oh no, he is not," answers Jim hastily, tearing open Byng's waistcoat

and laying his hand upon his heart. "He has only fainted. Get some

water! Have you got any salts? No; do not lift his head"--seeing that

she is agonizedly trying to raise his prone head and rest it upon her

knees--"he had better be as flat as he can. Quick, some water!"

She does not need to be twice told. In an instant she has sprung to the

table, and brought thence the china jug out of which she is wont to

water her flowers, and also the big cut-glass bottle of smelling-salts

with which Jim has often seen poor Mrs. Le Marchant solacing herself

when racked with that neuralgic headache which means worry. He splashes

water out of the one upon Byng's ashy face, and holds the other to his

pale nostrils; while Elizabeth, once more flinging herself upon her

knees, wipes the blood from his temples with her little useless gossamer

inch of handkerchief.

"How did it happen?" asks Jim rapidly. "What did he do to himself?"

The heads of the two ministrants are very close to each other as they

bend together over the swooned youth. Jim can see a little smear of

Byng's blood upon one of her white cheeks. The sight gives him a

shudder. Byng seems to have made her more his own by that gory baptism

than by all his frenzied vows and tears.

"Oh, I do not know," she answers, still fetching both breath and words

with difficulty. "He was standing up, and he seemed quite right; and

then, all of a sudden, in a minute, he went down like a log, and hit his

forehead against the sharp corner of the table"--with a convulsive

shiver at the recollection. "I ought to have saved him! I ought; but I

was not quick enough. I stood stock-still, and now he is dead! You say

that he is not; but I am sure he is dead!"

"Oh no, nonsense! he is not," replies Jim brusquely, thinking a certain

harshness of manner the best recipe for her. "He is alive, sure enough;

and as for the cut on his forehead, now that you have wiped the blood

away, you can see for yourself that it is not at all a deep one. It is

merely a big scratch. I have often had a worse out hunting from a

bramble, in jumping through a hedge. Oh, Mrs. Le Marchant, here you are!

That is all right. We have had an accident, you see. He has fallen down

in a faint, and given himself a bit of a knock. That is all; do not be

frightened. It looks worse than it is--Oh, M. Cipriani, vous voila!

Envoyez chercher un medecin tout de suite! Il y a un M. Crump"--catching

in his destitution at the thought of even Sybilla's objectionable

friend.

But hereupon half a dozen voices--for by this time even more than that

number of inmates of the hotel have thronged into the little room--raise

themselves to pronounce another name--the name of one who both stands

higher in medical fame and is more quickly procurable. In search of him

Zameth, the porter, is instantly despatched, and meanwhile about the

inanimate body sympathizers stand three deep, until reluctantly

dispersed by a hint of a nature so broad as not to be misunderstood from

Jim, to the effect that the patient would have a better chance of coming

to himself if he were allowed to have a breath of air. By the time the

doctor arrives--there is some small delay before he appears--all are got

rid of, and, Mrs. Le Marchant having gone to give directions for having

Jim's room arranged for the sick man, both because it is on the

ground-floor and also of a better size than that allotted to him, Jim

and Elizabeth are once again left _tete-a-tete_.

Once again they kneel on either side of the prone figure. How dreadfully

dead and how extravagantly long it looks! Once again he sees that

blood-smear on her face. It is just above her one dimple, and stands out

in ghastly incongruity over that little pitfall for love and laughter.

How passionately he wishes that he might ask her to go and wash it off!

If he did she would not hear him. She has no ears left, no eyes, no

sense, save for that livid face, splashed with the water which has not

brought him back to life, and with the red drops still slowly trickling

from the wound on his brow, and which have stained here and there the

damp tendrils of his hair--for that livid face and for the flaccid

hands, which she rubs between her own with an ever more terrified

energy, as he still gives no sign of returning consciousness.

By-and-by he is taken out of her custody. She is robbed even of the

wretched satisfaction of chafing his poor senseless fingers. On the

arrival of the doctor he is carried off, and laid upon the bed that has

been made ready for him. She follows them miserably as they bear him

staggeringly across the hall--a powerfully-built young man of over six

feet high, in the perfect inertness of syncope, is no light weight--and

looks hungrily over the threshold of the bedroom; but when she attempts

to cross it Jim puts her gently back.

"No, dear, no!" he says. (He is almost sure afterwards that for that

once in his life he calls her "dear.") "You had better not. We think he

is coming round, and if you are the first person he sees when he comes

to himself it might be bad for him--might hurt him. You would not hurt

him, would you?"

"No, I would not hurt him," she answers slowly. And so turns in her

utter tractableness, and goes away meekly without a word.

* * * * *

It is evening again now, almost the same hour at which Jim and Elizabeth

were beheading photographs twenty-four hours ago. Twenty-four hours! It

feels more like twenty-four years. This is what he says to himself as he

once again opens the door of the Le Marchants' apartment. It is the

first time during the whole day, except to snatch a couple of mouthfuls

of food, that he has left Byng's side; and it is only due to the fact

that Mrs. Le Marchant is supplying his place, and has sent him on a

message to her daughter, that he has quitted his post. He knows that she

has meant to do him a kindness in despatching him upon this errand; but

he is not sure that it is one.