She looks at him rather wistfully, and although but two minutes ago she had been confessing to him her passion for another man, he sees that she is anxious he should tell her that her sympathy would have been precious to him. He feels the same sensation as before of mixed anger and fascination at the ductility of her nature. What business has she to care whether he would have liked to hear from her or not? "It seemed such a pity that it was she, and not I!" Again her eye interrogates his, as if asking for acquiescence in this suggestion, but he cannot give it. With a shock of surprise--nay, horror--at himself, he finds that he is unable to echo the wish that Elizabeth had died and Amelia lived. "I said so to mammy at the time. Ah, here is mammy!" And, indeed, as she speaks the door opens, and Mrs. Le Marchant enters in her walking-dress. At the sight of Jim, a look, which certainly does not betoken pleasure, though good breeding prevents its representing the opposite emotion, crosses her handsome, worn face. "I brought Mr. Burgoyne in here," says Elizabeth, in what seems rather precipitate explanation, "because we could not talk comfortably out on the terrace; they listen to everything we say: they have such long ears--the Widow Wadman and Miss Strutt!" "I do not know what State secrets you and Mr. Burgoyne can have to discuss," replies the mother, with a smile that, though courteous, but ill disguises the underlying anxiety. "Yes, dear child, I shall be very much obliged if you will take my bonnet upstairs for me"--this in answer to little tender overtures from Elizabeth, overtures that remind Jim of 12 _bis_, Piazza d' Azeglio. "I do not know whether you have yet found it so" (to Jim); "but this _is_ a slack place." No sooner has the door closed upon her daughter than her tone changes. "What have you been talking about to her," she inquires rapidly; "not, I hope, about _him_?" "I could not help it; she asked me." Mrs. Le Marchant strikes her hands together, and gives utterance to that short and shapeless monosyllable which has a prescriptive right to express vexation. "Th! th!" A moment later, "I am sure you will understand that I do not mean to imply any ill-will to you; but it _is_ unlucky that we should have happened to meet you here; it has brought it all back to her, and she was just beginning to pluck up her spirits a little." "Did she--did she take it so much to heart?" inquires Jim, in a tone of almost as awed concern as Elizabeth had employed but a quarter of an hour before in putting nearly the same question with regard to Byng. "_Did she take it to heart!_" repeats Mrs. Le Marchant, with the irritation of one to whom a perfectly senseless and superfluous inquiry is put; "why, of course she did! I thought at one time that she would have gone out of her mind!" No one can feel less merry than Jim; and yet his lips at this juncture cannot resist the impulse to frame themselves into a gloomy smile.