"What powers of hell"--banging his head down upon the table again--"could have wrought such a hideous change in so few hours? Only ten! for it was eight in the evening before I left them, and they were off at six this morning. They could have seen no one; they had received no letters, no telegrams, for I inquired of Annunziata, and she assured me that they had not. Oh no!"--lifting his face with a gleam of moist hope upon it--"there is only one tenable hypothesis about it--it is not _her_ doing at all. She wrote this under pressure. It is her handwriting, is it not?--though I would not swear even to that. I--I have played the mischief with my eyes"--pulling out his drenched pocket-handkerchief, and hastily wiping them--"so that I cannot see properly; but it _is_ hers, is not it?" "I do not know; I never saw her handwriting; she never wrote to me." "It was evidently dictated to her," cries Byng, his sanguine nature taking an upward spring again; "there are clear traces, even in the very way the letters are formed, of its being written to order reluctantly. She did it under protest. See how her poor little hand was shaking, and she was crying all the while, bless her! There, do not you see a blister on the paper--here on this side?" Burgoyne does not see any blister, but as he thinks it extremely probable that there was one, he does not think himself called upon to wound his friend by saying so. "I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not nearly so incomprehensible: '_I shall never marry you, I have no right to marry anyone._' Of course, I see now! What an ass I was not to see it at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?" Jim shakes his head. "I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation." "I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing forced about it. You do not know as well as I do--how should you?--her power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I grant you; but there it is--she thinks she has no right to leave her mother now that she is all alone." "She is not alone; she has her husband." "I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There are plenty more--are not there?--though I never could get her to talk about them." "There are two sisters and two brothers." "But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng, clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she is concerned they are non-existent." "I do not know what right you have to say that."