Burgoyne holds the paper in his fingers, but for a moment or two he is unable to read it. There is an ugly swimming before his eyes for one thing; for another, Byng's treatment has not improved it as a specimen of caligraphy; but it never in its best days could have been a very legible document. And yet it is not long. Its few words, when at length he makes them out, ran thus: "_Good-bye, I was mad yesterday. I shall never marry you; I have no right to marry anyone. For God's sake do not ask me what I mean; and oh! don't, don't, DON'T come after me!_" There is neither date nor signature. As Jim stands staring at the five crooked, straggling sentences, a great swelling compassion fills his heart. Did ever poor little scribble make it so easy to construct the small shaking hand, and the tender breaking heart that penned it? An immense pity fills his soul; yet does it quite fill it? Is there room besides, in one corner, for a small pinch of devilish joy? "There's many a slip 'Twixt the cup and the lip." His own words of ill-natured croaking, uttered not an hour ago, to Cecilia Wilson, recur to his mind. How little he thought that that prophecy would so soon be fulfilled! He remains so long motionless and silent, his fingers still holding the paper, whose contents he has long ago mastered, that Byng--the violence of his paroxysm of grief at length exhausted--struggles to his feet and speaks--speaks as well as the catch in his sobbing breath and his quivering lips will let him. "It is not her doing! You may think it is her doing, but I know it is not! I know her better than you do." "I never made any pretensions to knowing her well," replies the other sadly, and relinquishing as he speaks the note to its owner. "Is it likely, I ask you?" cries Byng excitedly. "I put it to you fairly: is it likely that she, with her seraph nature, all love and burning, she that is tender over drowning flies, would have put me to this horrible pain?--O God, you do not know what pain it is" ["Do not I?" aside]--"of her own free will?" "I do not know; as you say, I do not know her well." "'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'" says Byng, beginning to walk up and down the room with the tears still rolling down his cheeks, but in his spouting voice--a voice which at once assures Jim of an amelioration in his friend's condition, and hardens his heart against him. As a broad rule, indeed, it may be laid down that that sorrow which courses through one of the numberless channels cut by the poets for it will not bring its owner to Waterloo Bridge.