"Oh, my dear old chap, how good it is to see your ugly old mug again! If you had known--oh, if you had only known!--what I went through during the twenty-four hours after I sent you that telegram, when through every hour, through every minute and second of every hour, I said to myself, 'It may come _now_--my death-warrant may come _now_! In five minutes it may have come!' But it did not, it did not! I ought to have known"--with an accent of ecstasy--"that of her pitifulness she would relent at last. She is infinitely pitiful, is not she? but I shall upbraid her a little--oh, do not be afraid; it will be gently, _most_ gently--for having kept me so long, so inhumanly long, upon my gridiron! I had always"--breaking into a rather wild laugh--"something of a tenderness for St. Lawrence, but during the last seven months I have loved him like a brother!" He goes on again, with scarcely a pause, or apparently any consciousness of the unresponsive silence of his auditor: "But what does it matter now?" beginning to stride about with his eyes cast up to the beamed ceiling and his lifted hands locked together--"what does it matter? 'After long grief and pain, to feel the arms of my true love round me once again!' You may think that I word it extravagantly," returning to Jim as he leans downcast and shocked upon one of the chairs of the monotonous _table-d'hôte_ row; "but in the hope itself, the more than hope, there is nothing extravagant; you must own that yourself. If she had not meant to put an end to my long agony, she would not have sent for me; _not_ to stop me was to send for me." "You are labouring under a mistake," says Jim coldly, and yet with an inward quaking as to the effect that his words may produce; "she had not the option of stopping you. By some accident I did not receive your telegram till four hours ago. She could not have stopped you if she had wished." The idea, as I have already said, has occurred to Burgoyne that his companion is under the influence of intoxication; but either this is not the case, or the shock of the last words has the effect of instantly sobering him. "I--I--do not understand," he says in a voice out of which all the insane exhilaration has been conjured as if by magic; "I do not follow you. What do you mean?" "I mean," replies Jim, in a matter-of-fact, level tone, meant to have a calming effect upon his auditor, "that owing, I suppose, to my name being spelt wrongly--Bourgouin instead of Burgoyne--your telegram was given to someone else, and did not reach me till nine o'clock this evening." Byng puts up his hand to his throat, and, unfastening the collar of his fur coat as if it were strangling him, throws back the coat itself. Now that he sees him freed from enveloping wrap and concealing hat-brim, Jim can realize the full amount of change and deterioration that are visible in his appearance; can see how bloodshot his eyes are; how lined his mouth; and how generally ravaged and dimmed his good looks.