LITMIR.BIZ

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henceforth he will never have the right to be alone; henceforth he will never have the right to go anywhere without his wife. Strange and terrible word to which he tries in vain to accustom his mental ears; and, thanks to the narrowness of their means, neither of them will be able to stir from the strait precincts of their pinched home.

      He comes back to his hotel, through the Piazza of the Duomo. All the infinite richness of cupola and arch, high up, are still wrapped in the fiery rose cloak of sunset, while below the body of the great church, with all its marbles and traceries and carved wonders, is clad in the sobriety of twilight.

      On reaching the Minerva, he finds that Byng has not yet returned, or rather that he has been in and gone out again. He waits dinner half-an-hour for him, and then dines without him; dines in solitude, since it is not till his cup of coffee is before him, and his cigarette between his lips, that his young friend appears. It is evidently no unpleasant errand that has detained him, for he arrives beaming, and too excited even to perceive the menu which a waiter offers him.

      "They have arrived!" he cries. Oddly enough it never occurs to Burgoyne to inquire who "they" may be; it seems as much a matter-of-course to him as to the handsome pink and white boy before him, that the pronoun must relate to Elizabeth Le Marchant and her mother.

      His only answer, however, is an "Oh!" whose tone is rather more eagerly interested than he could have wished.

      "I thought that they could not stay more than another day in Genoa," continues Byng, at length becoming aware of the menu at his elbow; but only to wave it impatiently away. "So I thought I would just run down to the station to meet the evening train, the one we came by last night; however, it must have been more punctual than yesterday, for before I reached the station, I met them; I mean they passed me in a fiacre. I only caught a glimpse of her face, but I saw her hand; it was lying on the carriage door like a snow-flake."

      "Like my grandmother!" cries Burgoyne in a rage, for which he cannot quite account to himself, at this ingenious and novel simile.

      Byng laughs; the laugh of a thoroughly sweet-natured person, who, in addition, has some special cause for good-humour.

      "I do not know what colour your grandmother was; but she must have been very unlike most people's if she was like a snow-flake."

      Jim's cross mouth unbends into a reluctant smile. It is not the first time that he has discovered how useless, and also impossible, it is to be out of humour with Byng.

      "I had a good mind to tell my fiacre man to follow them," continued Byng, in an excited voice; "but, in the first place, I did not know how to say it – really, Jim, we must get up a little of the lingo – and, in the second place, I thought it would perhaps be rather too much in the private detective line."

      "I think it would have been extremely ungentlemanlike!" rejoins Jim severely.

      Byng reddens; but still without losing his temper.

      "That is coming it rather strong, is not it? but anyhow, I did not do it." And then, by tacit agreement, they both drop the subject.

      During the next three or four days it is not named between them, nor indeed do they see much of each other. Burgoyne spends the greater part of his days with Amelia. Whatever cause for the accusation he may have given during the previous eight years, nobody can say that he neglects her now. He passes long hours at her side, on the same hard chair that had supported him on their first interview, in the little dismal dining-room; going into calculations of house-rent and taxes, drawing up lists of necessary furniture. He even makes a bid for Cecilia's drawing-room grate; but that young lady, whose forecasting mind can look beyond present grief to future sunshine, refuses to part with it. The lovers are not always, however, studying Maple's and Oetzmann's lists. Sometimes Jim varies the diversion by taking his future wife to picture-galleries and churches, to the Uffizi, the Accademia, San Lorenzo. It is doubtful whether Amelia enjoys these excursions as much as she does the selection of bedsteads and saucepans, her pleasure being in some degree marred by a feverish anxiety to say what she thinks her lover expects of her as they stand before each immortal canvas. In her heart she thinks the great statues in the Medici Chapel frightful, a heresy in which she is kept in countenance by no less a light than George Eliot, who in one of her letters dares to say of them, "they remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original, as in copies and casts." To Amelia many of the frescoes appear lamentably washed out, nor are her efforts to hide these sentiments attended with any conspicuous success, since nothing is more hopeless than for one utterly destitute of a feeling for works of art to feign it, without having the imposture at once detected.

      Burgoyne's mind during these expeditions is a battle-ground for pity and rage; pity at the pathos of his poor love's endeavours; rage at their glaring failure. Cecilia sometimes accompanies the lovers, but this does not make matters much better. Cecilia devotes but a very cursory notice to the pictures; her attention being almost wholly centred on the visitors, and on finding resemblances for them among the inhabitants of her own village at home, for the accuracy of which she appeals at every moment to her sister. Every day she asks Burgoyne to fulfil his promise – a promise which he as punctually assures her that he never made – to introduce his friend to her. He has a strangely strong reluctance to comply with this simple request, which yet, he knows, will have to be complied with some day. When Amelia is his wife, Byng will have to know Cecilia, for she will probably spend a great deal of her time with them – make their house a second home, in fact.

      And meanwhile Jim is keenly, and for some reason sorely, conscious of the fact that, during the hours in which he is stooping his weary head over catalogues of fenders and fire-irons, carving-knives and fish-slices, blankets and ticking, Byng is searching Florence through her length and breadth for their two countrywomen. It is not indeed necessary to credit his friend with any special quest to account for his wanderings through the "adorable little city," as Henry James most truly calls it, since he is a young man of a wide and alert curiosity, with a large appetite for pleasure both intellectual and the reverse. Jim, whose acquaintance with him has chiefly been with his rowdy undergraduate side, bear-fighting, and proctor-defying, is astonished at his almost tremulous appreciation of the Ghirlandajos, the Lorenzo di Credis, the Giottos, that in a hundred chapels, from a hundred walls, shine down in their mixed glory of naïve piety and blinding colour upon him.

      One day the elder man is sitting in his bedroom with a despatch-box and a sheet of paper before him. He is embarked upon a dreary calculation as to what his guns will fetch. He has made up his mind to sell them. Of what further use can they be to him? He will not be allowed to shoot at the Bayswater omnibuses, which will be the only game henceforth within his reach. While he is thus employed upon an occupation akin to, and about as cheerful as, that of Rawdon Crawley before Waterloo, Byng enters.

      "You look as if you had a headache, old chap," he says, sitting down upon his friend's bed.

      "If you had been going through as many kitchen-ranges as I have this morning, perhaps you would have a headache," replies Jim gravely. "You know that I am going to be married as soon as I get home."

      Byng nods; and Burgoyne, while inwardly blessing the tact that spares him any congratulations, takes himself to task for having made the announcement so lugubriously as to render felicitation obviously inapplicable.

      "When are you going to introduce me to Miss Wilson?" asks Byng presently. "If you shirk it much longer, I shall think that you are ashamed of me."

      Jim glances affectionately, yet not quite comfortably, at his young friend, and the thought dashes across his mind that, in his last remark, the latter has put the saddle on the wrong horse.

      "You have so large an acquaintance in Florence already," he says, with some stiffness, "that I did not know that you would care to add to it."

      "One cannot have too much of a good thing," replies the other joyously. "You know I love my fellow-creatures; and in this case," he adds civilly, "I do care very much."

      Burgoyne's eyes are bent on the paper before him, which contains the melancholy enumeration of his firearms – "A 500 double-barrelled express, by Henry, of Edinburgh; a 450 single-barrelled ditto, by same maker," etc., etc. – as he says slowly:

      "I shall be very happy."

      His

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