"What should I do when I got there?" asks Byng impatiently. "If I tried to swallow food, it would stick in my throat; no food shall pass my lips till I learn where she is; after that"--breaking out into a noisy laugh--"you may do what you please with me--we will make a night of it with all my heart, we will-- "'Drink, drink, Till the pale stars blink!'" Jim looks blankly at him. Is he going mad? "If you think that you will get me to go back to the hotel to-night, you are very much mistaken," continues Byng recklessly; "no roof less high than this"--jerking back his head, to throw his fevered look up to the cool stars--"shall shelter my head; and besides, where would be the use of going to bed when I should have to be up again so early? I shall be off by one of the morning expresses: until I have learnt--as, of course, I shall do to-night--where she has gone, I cannot tell which; but neither of them starts much later than seven." For a moment Jim stands dumb with consternation at the announcement of this intention; but, reflecting that it would not be a whit more irrational to attempt to reason with a madman who had reached the padded-room stage of lunacy, than with his present companion, he contents himself with saying: "And supposing that you do not learn to-night where she has gone?" "There is no use in supposing anything so impossible!" But as the hours go by, the possibility becomes a probability, the probability a certainty! Midnight comes, and the closed telegraph-office puts a final extinguisher upon the expectation, which no one but the unhappy lover had ever entertained, that Florence would be enlightened before the dawn of another day as to the place whither her two truants have fled. Burgoyne has accompanied his friend upon his last importunate visit to the now-going-to-bed and justly-incensed 12 bis. He has been ashamed again to present himself at the so-often-attacked door, so has awaited at the bottom of the stairs, has heard Byng's hoarse query, and the negative--curter and less suave than the last one--that follows it; has heard the door shut again, and the hopeless footsteps that come staggering down to him. "You will go home now?" "'Perchance, Iago, I shall ne'er go home!'" replies Byng; and, though he is compelled to admit that there is no longer any possibility of his to-night obtaining the information for which he so madly hungers, that there can consequently be no question of his setting off by one of the early trains, since he would not know in which direction to go, and might only be fleeing further from her whom he would fain rejoin, yet he still keeps with fevered pertinacity to his project of spending the night _à la belle étoile_.