The question has to be twice repeated before the person to whom it is addressed gives any sign of having heard it. His ears must be so deeply embedded in the pillow that the passage to his hearing is blocked. It is not till the interrogation is put a second time, in a louder key, and accompanied by a not very gentle shake of the shoulder, that he at length looks up, and reveals what Jim knows to be, and yet has some difficulty in recognising, as the features of Byng--features so altered, so distorted, so swollen by excessive weeping, that no one less intimately acquainted with them than the person who has been already contemplating them, under the influence of a variety of circumstances for a couple of months, could possibly put the owner's name to them. Jim has expected that his young friend would spend some portion of this day in crying, knowing well both his powers of, and his taste for, "turning on the water-works," as he but lately cruelly and uncivilly phrased it to his own mind. But the warm tears of emotion, few and undisfiguring, with which he had credited him, have not much kinship with the scalding torrents that have made his handsome young eyes mere red blurs on his ashen face, that have furrowed his cheeks, and damped his disordered curls, and taken all the starch out of his immaculate "masher" collar. They have wetted, too, into a state of almost pulp, a crumpled sheet of note-paper, which his head seems to have been burrowing in, upon the pillow. "What does it mean?" repeats Burgoyne, for the third time, a hideous fear assailing him, at the sight of the young man's anguish, that he himself may have mistaken Annunziata's meaning; that her "gone" may have stood for the final one; that some instant stroke may have snatched lovely Elizabeth away, out of the world. Surely no catastrophe less than death can account for such a metamorphosis as that wrought in Byng. "Why do you look like that?" he goes on, his voice taking that accent of rage which extreme fear sometimes gives. "Why do not you speak?" The other, thus adjured, plainly makes a violent effort for articulation; but his dry throat will let pass nothing but a senseless sob. "What does that paper mean?" goes on Burgoyne, realizing the impotence of his friend to obey his behest, and rendered doubly terrified by it; "what is it? what does it say? Does it--does it--explain anything?" He points as he speaks to the blurred and rumpled _billet_, and Byng catches it up convulsively, and thrusts it into his hand. "It is the first letter I ever had from her," he says, the words rushing out broken and scarcely intelligible upon a storm of sobs, and so flings his head violently down upon the floor again in a new access of furious weeping.