"But we should not have gone out sight-seeing this morning--we were not at all in a junketing mood--if it had not been for Mr. Byng; he came in and took us both by storm. It is difficult," her face dimpling and brightening with a much more confirmed smile than the tiny hovering one which is all that Jim has been able to call forth--"it is difficult to resist a person who brings so much sunshine with him--do not you find it so? He is so very sunshiny, your Mr. Byng. We like sunshine; we--we have not had a great deal of it." It is on the very edge of his lip to tell her that when he had known her she had had and been nothing but sunshine. But he recollects in time her prohibition as to the past, and restrains himself. "When you look so kind and interested," she cries impulsively, sitting up in her chair, with a transparent little hand on each arm of it, "I feel a fraud." She stops. "I look interested because I feel interested," returns he doggedly; "fraud or not--but" (in a distressed voice) "do not, even in joke, call yourself ugly names--fraud or not, you cannot hinder me." "Do not be interested in me," says she, in her plaintive cooing voice; "we are very bad people to get interested in, we are not repaying people to be interested in. I think--that perhaps" (slowly and dreamily) "under other circumstances we might have been pleasant enough. Mammy has naturally excellent spirits, and so have I; it does not take much to make us happy, and even now I often feel like poor little Prince Arthur-- "'By my Christendom, So I were out of prison and kept sheep, I should be as merry as the day is long.' But then," sighing profoundly, "the moment that we begin to feel a little cheerful, something comes and knocks us down again." There is such a blank hopelessness in the tone with which she pronounces the last words, and, in his almost total ignorance of the origin of her despair, it is so impossible to put his compassion into fit words, that he can think of nothing better than to pull his chair two inches nearer her, to assure her by this dumb protest of how little inclined he is to accept her warning. "Are you sure that he is really gone--going, I mean," she asks, in an excited low voice, "going to-morrow morning, as you say? Oh, I wish it were to-morrow morning! But perhaps when to-morrow morning comes, he will have changed his mind. Was he quite, quite sure about it?" "He said he was going to-morrow morning," replies Jim, repeating Cecilia's quotation from her new friend's conversation with conscientious exactness; "that it was not worth while to change his hotel, as he was leaving Florence to-morrow morning." "He will not go," she says, shaking her head with restless dejection; "nobody but would be loth to leave this heavenly place"--glancing out affectionately through the open window, even at the commonplace and now almost night-shaded Piazza garden--"we shall find that he is not gone after all."