"It is an awful facer for you, I know," says Burgoyne, standing over him, and, though perfectly dry-eyed, yet probably not very much less miserable than the young mourner, whose loud weeping fills him with an almost unbearable and yet compunctious exasperation. "What is he made of? how can he do it?" are the questions that he keeps irefully putting to himself; and for fear lest in an access of uncontrollable irritation he shall ask them out loud, he moves to the door. At the slight noise he makes in opening it Byng lifts his head. "Are you going?" "Yes; if it is any consolation to you, you have not a monopoly of wretchedness to-day. Things are not looking very bright for me either. Amelia is ill." "Amelia," repeats the other, with a hazy look, as if not at first able to call to mind who Amelia is; then, with a return of consciousness, "Is Amelia ill? Oh poor Amelia! Amelia was very good to her. Amelia tried to draw her out. She liked Amelia!" "Well"--with an impatient sigh--"unfortunately that did not hinder Amelia from falling ill." "She is not ill _really_?"--his inborn kind-heartedness struggling for a moment to make head against the selfishness of his absorption. "I do not know"--uneasily--"I am going back to the hotel to hear the doctor's verdict. Will you walk as far as to the Anglo-Américain with me? There is no use in your staying here." But at this proposition the lover's sobs break out louder and more infuriating than ever. "I will stay here till I die--till I am carried over the threshold that her cruel feet have crossed. "'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'" Against a resolution at once so fixed and so rational, Jim sees that it is useless to contend. CHAPTER XXVII. The sun rides high, as Burgoyne issues into the open air, and beats, blinding hot, upon the great stone flags that pave the Florentine streets, and seem to have a peculiar power of absorbing and retaining light and heat. He must have been longer in the Piazza d'Azeglio than he had thought, and the reflection quickens his steps as he hurries, regardless of the midsummer blaze--for, indeed, it is more than equivalent to that of our midsummer--back to the Anglo-Américain. As he reaches it, he hears, with annoyance, the hotel clocks striking one. He is annoyed, both because the length of his absence seems to argue an indifference to the tidings he is expecting, and also because he knows that it is the Wilsons' luncheon hour, and that he will probably find that they have migrated to the _salle-à-manger_. In this case he will have to choose between the two equally disagreeable alternatives of following and watching them at their food, or that of undergoing a _tête-à-tête_ with Sybilla, who, it is needless to say, does not accompany her family to the public dining-room; a _tête-à-tête_ with Sybilla, which is, of all forms of social intercourse, that for which he has the least relish.