As he speaks he looks down at his boots, too unaffectedly annoyed at the justification of Elizabeth's epithet which its retailing has worked on Byng's countenance to be able to contemplate him with any decent patience. But there is enough evidence in the boy's voice of the effect wrought upon him by Miss Le Marchant's adjective to make his comrade repent very heartily of having repeated it. "I should have been over," says Byng in a low eager way, "every day, every hour, as often as they would have received me, only that I could not leave my mother; and she--she has taken them _en grippe_!" "_En grippe?_ Your mother?" repeats Jim, too honestly and disagreeably startled by this piece of news to be able any longer to maintain his ironical manner; "why?" The other shrugs his shoulders dispiritedly. "I have not an idea; it cannot be because they did not seem to wish to be introduced to her at the Accademia the other day; she is quite incapable of such pettiness, and she admired HER so tremendously at first, did not she? You heard her; but since then she has taken it into her head that there is something--I cannot bear even to say it"--dashing his hat and gloves vehemently upon the table--"something _louche_, as she calls it, about her. Mother thinks that she--she--she"--sinking his voice to an indistinct half-whisper--"has--has gone off the rails some time or other. Can you conceive?"--raising his tone again to one of the acutest pain and indignation--"that anyone--any human being could look in her face and harbour such a notion for a single instant?" He stares with eyes ablaze with wrathful pity at his friend's face, expecting an answering outbreak to his own; but none such comes. Burgoyne only says, in a not much more assured key than that which the young man had employed: "How--how can such an idea have got into your mother's head?" "I do not know, but it is there; and what I wanted you, what I have been searching everywhere for you for, is to ask you to--to set her right, at once, without any delay. It is unbearable that she should go on thinking such things, and nothing could be easier for you, who know them so well, who know all about them!" Burgoyne is at first too much stupefied by this appeal, and by the impossibility of answering it in a satisfactory manner, to make any response at all; but at length: "Know all about them?" he says, in a voice whose surface impatience hides a much profounder feeling. "Who dares ever say that he knows all about any other living soul? How many times must I tell you that, until we met at Genoa, I had not set eyes on Miss Le Marchant for ten good years?" At the tone of this speech, so widely different from the eager acceptance of the suggested task which he had expected, Byng's face takes on a crestfallen, almost frightened look. "But when you knew them," he says, "in Devonshire, they--they were all right then, were not they? they were well thought of?--there was nothing against them?"