The step of youth is always light, but there is something aggressively springy in Byng's this morning; and though he does not _say_ anything offensively cheerful, there is a ring in his voice that makes his kind friend long to hit him. He, the kind friend, is thankful when their ways part, without his having done him any bodily violence. "You are late to-day," says Cecilia, as he enters the _salon_, giving him a nod of indifferent friendliness, while Sybilla crossly asks him to shut the door more quietly, and Amelia lays her hand lingeringly in his, with a silent smile of rapture; "we began to think you had had a relapse. I was just telling Amelia that the pace had been too good to last--ha, ha!" Burgoyne has always found it difficult to laugh at Cecilia's jokes, and his now perfect intimacy with her relieves him from the necessity of even feigning to do so. "I have been seeing Mrs. Byng off," he replies, with that slight shade of awkwardness in his tone which has accompanied his every mention of the mother or son since his explanation with his betrothed. "You let her go without getting that wedding present out of her, after all?" cries Cecilia, who is in a rather tryingly playful mood. "Gone, is she?" says Sybilla, with a somewhat ostentatious sigh of resentful relief; "well, I, for one, shall not cry. I am afraid that she was not very _simpatica_ to me; she was so dreadfully robust. Perhaps, now that she is no longer here to monopolise him, we shall be allowed to see something more of that nice boy." No one answers. Not one of her three listeners is at the moment disposed to chant or even echo praises of the "nice boy." Sybilla perversely pursues the subject. "I dare say that he has a delicacy about coming without a special invitation," she says, "where there is an invalid; but you might tell him that on my good days no one is more pleased to see their friends than I; it does not even send my temperature up; you might tell him that on my good days Dr. Coldstream says it does not even send my temperature up!" Again no one answers. "You do not seem to be listening to what I am saying," cries Sybilla fractiously; "will you please tell him, Jim?" Jim lifts his heavy eyes from the ugly carpet on which they have been resting, and looks distastefully back at her. "I do not think that I will, Sybilla," he replies slowly; "I do not think he cares a straw whether your temperature goes up or down. I think that he does not come here because--because he has found metal more attractive elsewhere."