Burgoyne would no doubt have made some answer in time; though the "she," the implication of Elizabeth's willingness for an indefinite amount of her lover's company, the "God bless her," gave him a sense of choking. "But I do not blame Mrs. Le Marchant," pursues Byng, in a rapt, half-absent key. "Who would not wish to monopolize her? Who would not grudge the earth leave to kiss her sweet foot? "'All I can is nothing To her whose worth makes other worthies nothing. She is alone!'" "That at least is not your fault," replies Burgoyne dryly; "you have done your best to avert that catastrophe." But to speak to the young man now is of as much avail as to address questions or remonstrances to one walking in his sleep. "If she had allowed me, I would have lain on her threshold all night; I would have been the first thing that her heavenly eye lit on; I would--" But Burgoyne's phial of patience is for the present emptied to the dregs. "You would have made a very great fool of yourself, I have not the least doubt. Why try to persuade a person of what he is already fully convinced? But as Miss Le Marchant happily did not wish for you as a doormat, perhaps it is hardly worth while telling me what you would have done if she had." The sarcastic words, ill-natured and unsympathetic as they sound in their own speaker's ears, yet avail to bring the young dreamer but a very few steps lower down his ladder of bliss. "I beg your pardon," he says sweet-temperedly; "I suppose I am a hideous bore to-night; I suppose one must always be a bore to other people when one is tremendously happy." "It is not your being tremendously happy that I quarrel with," growls Burgoyne, struggling to conquer, or at least tone down, the intense irritability of nerves that his friend's flights provoke. "You are perfectly right to be that if you can manage to compass it; but what I should be glad to arrive at is your particular ground for it in the present case." The question, sobering in its tendency, has yet for sole effect the setting Byng off again with spread pinions into the empyrean. "What particular ground I have?" he repeats, in a dreamy tone of ecstasy. "You ask what particular ground I have? Had ever anyone cause to be so royally happy as I?" He pauses a moment or two, steeped in a rapture of oblivious reverie, then goes on, still as one only half waked from a beatific vision: "I had a prognostic that to-day would be the culminating day--something told me that to-day would be the day; and when you gave me up your seat in her carriage--how could you be so magnificently generous? How can I ever adequately show you my gratitude?" "Yes, yes; never mind that."