"What--what do you mean? What are you talking about? Her past? What"--soaring into extravagance again--"what can there be written on that white page?--so white that it bedazzles the eyes of even the angels who read it." "I do not know what there is," replies Jim miserably, irritated almost beyond endurance by this poetic flight, and rendered even more wretched than he was before by the _rôle_ that seems to be forced upon him, of conjecturally blackening Elizabeth's character. "How many times must I tell you that I _know_ no more than you, only from--from various indications I have been led to believe that she has _something_--some great sorrow behind her?" There is a silence, and when it is broken it is infringed by what is not much more than a whisper. "What--what do you mean; what--what sort of a sorrow?" "I tell you, I do not know." Byng's tears have stopped flowing, and he now lifts his eyes, full of a madness of exaltation, to the ceiling. "I will go to her," he cries; "if sorrow has the audacity to approach her again, it will have to reckon with me. There is no sorrow, none, in the whole long gamut of woe, for which love such as mine is not a balm. Reciprocal love!"--trailing the words in a sort of slow rapture--"no one that had seen her in the wood could have doubted that it _was_ reciprocal." "No doubt, no doubt." "I will go to her!"--clasping his hands high in the air--"I will pour the oil and spikenard of my adoration into her gaping wounds! I will kiss the rifts together, though they yawn as wide as hell--yes, I will." "For heaven's sake, do not talk such dreadful gibberish," breaks in Jim, at length at the end of his patience, which had run quite to the extreme of its tether indeed at the last mention of that ever-recurring wood. "It _is_ a knockdown blow for you, I own, and I would do what I could to help you; but if you will keep on spouting and talking such terrible bosh----" "I suppose I am making an ass of myself," replies Byng, thus brought down with a run from his heroics. "I beg your pardon, I am sure, old man. I have no right to victimize you," his sweet nature asserting itself even at this bitter moment; "but you see it is so horribly sudden. If you had seen her when I parted from her last night at the door! She lingered a moment behind Mrs. Le Marchant--just a moment, just time enough to give me one look, one wordless look. She did not speak; she was so divinely dutiful and submissive that nothing would have persuaded her by the lightest word to imply any censure of her mother; but she gave me just a look, which said plainly, 'It is not _my_ fault that you are turned away! _I_ would have welcomed you in!' Upon that look I banqueted in heaven all night." He stops, choked. "Well?"