But her answer being longer and more voluble, he can't take in its drift, seeing which she retreats a step, and, motioning him with her hand to enter, points down the passage. He does not require to have the dumb-show of invitation twice repeated, but, rushing past her, hurries down the well-known little corridor to the _salon_ door. It is open, and he stands within. At the first glance it seems to him to wear much its usual air. There is even a score of music standing on the piano, the copper pots are full of rose-branches, and the _scaldini_ brimming with Firenze's own lilies, the bit of red Venetian brocade, with the little old tinsel fringe, still hangs over the arm-chair by the fireplace, and the blue Neapolitan table-cover still disguises the vulgarity of the sofa. He has misunderstood Annunziata--it is really monstrous to be so helplessly ignorant of the language of the country you are living in--or she has lost her wits, or----He had thought the room empty, but as he advances a step further into it, he discovers that he is not the sole occupant: that lying stretched upon the floor, with his fair head buried in a little pillow, against which both men have often seen Elizabeth's small white cheek resting, is Byng!--the Byng whose riotous, insolent happiness he had doubted his own powers of witnessing without murdering him!--the splendid felicity of whose lot he has been so bitterly laying beside his own destiny--the Byng whom he had been gnashing his teeth at the thought of--at the thought of him lying in Elizabeth's arms! CHAPTER XXVI. "Cressid, I love thee in so strained a purity, That the blest gods--as angry at my fancy, More bright in zeal than the devotion which Cold lips blow to their deities--take thee from me." "What does this mean?"