In the sense of ill-usage that fills his breast, the fact of how almost entirely oblivious he had been of the persons before him, during the greater part of the long interval that had parted them, has--such is human nature--quite slipped his recollection. It is brought back to him in some degree with a twinge by Mrs. Le Marchant saying in a relenting tone, and with an accent of remorse, "And you have remembered us all these years?" He cannot, upon reflection, conscientiously say that he has; but is yet disingenuous enough to allow a speaking silence to imply acquiescence. "And you are on your way to Florence too?" continues she, mistaking the cause of his dumbness; the tide of compunction evidently setting more strongly towards him, in her womanly heart, at the thought of the entire want of interest she has manifested in the case of one whose long faithfulness to her and her family had deserved a better treatment. "Yes." His face clouds so perceptibly as he pronounces this monosyllable, that his interlocutor inquires, with a growing kindness: "Not on any unpleasant errand, I hope?" He laughs the uneasy laugh of an Anglo-Saxon obliged to tell, or at all events telling, some intimate detail about himself. "I am going to see my young woman--the girl I am engaged to." "Well, that is a pleasant errand, surely?" (smiling). "_C'est salon!_" replies Jim gloomily. "I have a piece of ill-news to tell her;" then, with a half-shy effort to escape into generalities, "which way do you think that ill-news read best--on paper or _vivâ voce_?" She shivers a little. "I do not know. I do not like them either way." Then, taking out her watch, with the evident determination to be surprised at the lateness of the hour, she cries, "It is actually a quarter to two! Are not you famished, Elizabeth? I am!" There is such apparent and imminent departure in her eye that Burgoyne feels that there is no time to be lost. "Have you decided upon your hotel in Florence?" he asks precipitately. "We have decided against them all," is her answer. "We have taken a little apartment--a poor little _entresol_; but it is such a poor little one, that I should be ashamed to ask any of my friends to come and see me there." She accompanies the last words, as if to take the sting out of them, with as sweet and friendly a smile as any he remembers in the Devonshire days. But the sting is not taken out, all the same; it lingers, pricking and burning still, after both the tall, thin, black figure, and the slim, little gray one have disappeared. The moment that this is the case, Byng rejoins his friend; a curiosity and alert interest in his young eyes, which his companion feels no desire to gratify. He is unable, however, to maintain the entire silence he had intended upon the subject, since Byng, after waiting for what, to his impatience, appears a more than decent interval, is constrained to remark--