The speech is in extremely bad taste, since, whatever may be the posture of affairs between himself and Elizabeth, it is morally impossible that her mother can yet be enlightened as to it; the familiarity of it is therefore premature and the jocosity ill-placed. No one can be more disposed to judge it severely than its unintended auditor; but even he is startled by the effect it produces. Without making the smallest attempt at an answer, Mrs. Le Marchant instantly turns her shoulder upon the young man--a snub of which Jim would have thought so gentle-mannered a person quite incapable, and walks away from him with so determined an air that not even a person in the seventh heaven of drunkenness can mistake her meaning. Nor does Elizabeth's conduct offer him any indemnification. She follows her mother a little more slowly; and, as she passes Jim, he sees that she is shaking violently, and that her face is as white as chalk. A sort of generous indignation against the mother for spoiling the poor little soul's first moments of bliss mixes curiously in his mind with a less noble satisfaction at the reflection that there are undoubtedly breakers ahead of Byng. "How--how are we to divide?" cries Cecilia, as they all stand at the door while the two carriages drive up. No one answers. The arrangement seems planned by no one in particular, and yet, as he drives down the hill, Burgoyne finds himself sitting opposite the two Misses Wilson. He is thankful that the raised hood and unfurled umbrellas of the second equipage prevent his having any ocular evidence of the ecstasy that that wet leather and that dripping silk veil. But even this consolation is not long left him. As they leave the fir-wood, they come out of the clouds too, into clear, lower air. Hoods are pushed back and umbrellas shut. The horses, in good heart, with homeward-turned heads, pricked with emulation by another carriage ahead of them, trot cheerfully down the road--the road with all its bent-elbow turnings--down, down, into the valley beneath. But the clouds that have rolled away off the evening sky seem to have settled down with double density upon the spirit of Burgoyne and his companions. Even the fountain of Cecilia's chatter is dried. Once she says suddenly _à propos de bottes_: "She must be years older than he!" To which Amelia quickly rejoins-- "But she does not look it." It is almost the only remark she makes during the long drive, and Burgoyne is thankful to her for her silence. Conscious of and grateful for her magnanimity as he is, there is yet something that jars upon him in her intuition of his thoughts, and in her eager championship of that other woman. He looks out blankly at the flowers, wetly smiling from field and bank, at the endless garden of embracing vines and embraced mulberries, joining their young leafage; at the stealing river and the verdurous hill-sides. In vain for him Italy's spring laughter broadens across the eternal youth of her face.