"Good Heavens--no!" replies Jim heartily, thankful that the appeal is now so worded as to enable him to give a warm testimony in favour of his poor friends. "There was not a family in all the neighbourhood that stood so high. Everybody loved them; everybody had a good word for them." Byng's countenance clears a little. "And there is no reason--you have no reason for supposing anything different now?" Jim stirs uneasily in his chair. Can he truthfully give the same convinced affirmative to this question as to the last? It is a second or two before he answers it at all. "The facts of life are enough for me; I do not trouble myself with its suppositions." He gets up and walks towards the door as he speaks, resolved to bring to an end this to him intolerable catechism. "But you must have an opinion--you must think," cries the other's voice, persistently pursuing him. He turns at bay, with the door-handle in his hand, his eyes lightening. "I asked her permission to bring Amelia to see her," he says, in a low moved voice; "if I had thought as ill of her as your mother does, do you think I should have done that?" CHAPTER XIX. CAMILLE.--"Que me conseilleriez-vous de faire le jour où je verrais que vous ne m'aimez plus?" There is no greater fiction than that for time to go quickly implies that it must needs go pleasantly. Jim has seldom spent a more disagreeable period than the hours which follow his conversation with Byng, and which he passes in his own bedroom, with his elbows on the window-ledge, looking blankly out at the Piazza, and at the great "Bride" of Arnolpho's planning, the church of Santa Maria Novella. And yet, when the city clocks, which have chimed unnoticed by him several times, at length convey to his inattentive ear what the hour is, he starts up, shocked and confused at its lateness. He had meant to have reached the Villa Schiavone in time to receive Amelia, and now she must have long preceded him, and be attributing his tardiness to some fresh neglect and indifference. In five minutes he has rearranged his dress, and jumped into a fiacre. Through the Porta Romana, and up between the straight row of still and inky cypresses, up and up to where the villa door, promising so little and performing so much, opens as so many do, straight upon the road.