The train is punctual, and almost at its due moment draws up in dusty length at the platform. Its passengers are comparatively few; for at this latening season most of the English are winging home to their rooky woods; and he has no difficulty in at once discovering among them the tall smart figure--smart even after forty-eight hours of the unluxurious luxury of a _wagon-lit_--of the lady he is awaiting. As he gives her his hand to help her down the high step, the admiring thought crosses his mind of what a large quantity of fatigue, dust, and uneasiness of mind a radically good-looking Englishwoman, in radically good clothes, can undergo without seeming much the worse for them. Before her neat narrow foot has touched the pavement, a brace of eager questions shoots out of her mouth. "Am I in time? Am I too late?" "In time for _what_? Too late for _what_?" "Has he--has he done anything--anything irrevocable? Is he--is he? I suppose that horrid woman has got hold of him? I suppose that is why you sent for me!" By this time she is safely landed at his side, which is possibly the reason why he at once lets fall her hand. "I am not aware that there is any 'horrid woman' in the case." "Oh, what does it matter what I call her?" cries the mother, fast becoming frantic at the delay in answering her passionate questions. "I will call her what you please; you know perfectly whom I mean; she _has_ got hold of him, I suppose. I always knew she would! Did not I tell you so? but is it too late? is there no way of getting him off?" Now that Burgoyne has a nearer view of Mrs. Byng, he sees that she has a more fagged and travel-worn air than he had at first supposed, and her dusty eyes are fastened upon him with such a hunger of interrogation, that, angered and jarred as he is by her tone, he has not the heart any longer to keep her in suspense. "If you are alluding to Miss Le Marchant, I may as well tell you at once that she has left Florence." "Left Florence! Do you mean to say that she has run away with someone else?" She puts the question in all good faith, her lively imagination having easily made the not very wide jump from the fact already established in her own mind of Elizabeth being an adventuress, to the not much more difficult one to swallow, of her having devoured another _fils de famille_, as well as Mrs. Byng's own. For a moment, Burgoyne turns away, voice and countenance alike beyond his control. He has by no means perfectly recovered either, when he answers-- "Yes, with someone else--she has reached the pitch of turpitude of leaving Florence with her mother." "She is gone?" cries Mrs. Byng, with an accent of the highest relief and joy; "gone away altogether, do you mean?--oh, thank God!"--then, with a sudden lapse into affright, she adds rapidly--"and he is gone after her?--he is not here?" "No, he is here." "Then why has not he come to meet me?"--suspiciously. "He did not know you were expected." "You did not tell him?"