"We are at 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio." She is looking doubtfully and half uneasily in his face, as she gives this answer, but he has scarcely time for a flash of self-congratulation at having obtained the information, which he had never realized the eagerness of his desire for until this moment, before he becomes aware that his interlocutor's eyes are no longer meeting his, but have wandered to some object over his shoulder. What that object is he is not long left in doubt. Whether it is a genuine accident, or one of those spurious ones, of which those who profit by them are the artificers, Jim does not know; and, as he is at the time, and will be when he thinks of the circumstance to the end of his life, too angry to question Byng on the subject, it is pretty certain that he never _will_ know; but so it is that at this moment the voice of his _protégé_ breaks upon his ear: "You are not going to give us the slip like this, old chap--oh! I beg your pardon!" But begging pardon ever so sweetly does not alter the fact that he has rushed, like a bull in a china shop, into the middle of the dialogue. All four look at each other for a second; then, since there is no help for it, Jim presents his disciple, and the next moment the latter has slid into talk with Elizabeth, and she is responding with an ease and freedom from embarrassment such as had never marked her sparse and hardly won utterances to the elder man. Byng has the advantage of him, as he somewhat bitterly thinks. Byng has no connection with "old times;" those poor old times which she and her mother have so unaccountably taken _en grippe_. He seems suddenly relegated, as by some natural affinity, to the mother. On their two last meetings the eagerness to converse has been all on his side; yet now he has nothing to say to her. It is she who addresses him. "I hope that you found your young lady flourishing," she says civilly. He gives a slight inward start, though--as he is thankful to feel--his body is quiet. "His young lady!" Yes, of course he has a young lady! Has there been any danger during the last five minutes of his forgetting that fact? and has Mrs. Le Marchant done him an unnecessary service in recalling it? "Oh, yes, thanks, she is all right!" "Is she still in Florence?" "Yes, she is here; by-the-bye"--looking round with a sudden sense that he ought to have missed her--"what has become of her? Oh, here she is!" For even while the words are on his lips, Amelia and Cecilia come into sight. Amelia with a shut Baedeker, and the serene look of an easy conscience and a thoroughly performed duty on her amiable face; Cecilia with a something of search and disquiet in her large rolling eye, which would have made him laugh at another time.