 matter what I call her?" cries the mother, fast becoming frantic at the delay in answering her passionate questions. "I will call her what you please; you know perfectly whom I mean; she has got hold of him, I suppose. I always knew she would! Did not I tell you so? but is it too late? is there no way of getting him off?"

Now that Burgoyne has a nearer view of Mrs. Byng, he sees that she has a more fagged and travel-worn air than he had at first supposed, and her dusty eyes are fastened upon him with such a hunger of interrogation, that, angered and jarred as he is by her tone, he has not the heart any longer to keep her in suspense.

"If you are alluding to Miss Le Marchant, I may as well tell you at once that she has left Florence."

"Left Florence! Do you mean to say that she has run away with someone else?"

She puts the question in all good faith, her lively imagination having easily made the not very wide jump from the fact already established in her own mind of Elizabeth being an adventuress, to the not much more difficult one to swallow, of her having devoured another fils de famille, as well as Mrs. Byng's own.

For a moment, Burgoyne turns away, voice and countenance alike beyond his control. He has by no means perfectly recovered either, when he answers—

"Yes, with someone else—she has reached the pitch of turpitude of leaving Florence with her mother."

"She is gone?" cries Mrs. Byng, with an accent of the highest relief and joy; "gone away altogether, do you mean?—oh, thank God!"—then, with a sudden lapse into affright, she adds rapidly—"and he is gone after her?—he is not here?"

"No, he is here."

"Then why has not he come to meet me?"—suspiciously.

"He did not know you were expected."

"You did not tell him?"

"No."

"Why did not you tell him?"

"I did not know how he would take it."

"Do you mean to say"—falling from her former rapidity of utterance to a dismayed incredulous slowness—"that he will not be glad to see me?—that Willy will not be glad to see me?"

"I mean to say that I am afraid you will not find him very much in sympathy with you; I do not think he
