The day has changed its ravishing blue gaiety for a pensive cloudy gloom, and the guests at the villa are walking about without any sunshades. They are numerous, though few indeed in comparison of the Banksia roses on the laden wall, over which, too, a great wistaria--put in, as the host with a just pride relates, only last year--is hanging and flinging its lilac abundance. And seen above its clusters, and above the wall, what a view from this raised terrace! Jim is really in a hurry to find Amelia, and yet he cannot choose but stop to look at it--from Galileo's tower on the right, to where, far down the plain of the Arno, Carrara loses itself in mist. It is all dark at first, sullen, purple-gray, without variation or stir--city, Duomo, Arno, Fiesole, and all her chain of sister-hills--one universal frown over every slope and jag, over street and spire, over Campanile with its marbles, and Santa Croce with its dead. But now, as it draws on towards sun-setting, in the western sky there comes a beginning of light, a faint pale tint at first, but quickly broadening across the firmament, while the whole huge cloud canopy is drawn aside like a curtain, and, as a great bright eye from under bent brows, the lowering sun sends arrows of radiance over plain, and river, and city. All of a sudden there is a vertical rain of dazzling white rays on the plain, and the olive shadows, merged all the afternoon in the universal gray, fall long and soft upon the blinding green of the young corn. He has forgotten Amelia. Oh, that that other, that creature herself made out of sun-rays and sweet rain-drops, were beside him, her pulses beating, as they so surely would, to his tune, her whole tender being quivering with delicate joy at this heavenly spectacle. Someone touches him on the shoulder, and he starts violently. Has the intensity of his invocation called her spirit out of her light body, and is she indeed beside him? "What a bad conscience you must have! Did you think that I was a bailiff?" cries Mrs. Byng, laughing. "Where is Amelia?" he asks, rather curtly, the memory of Byng's communication about his mother being too fresh in his mind to make it possible for him to answer her in her own rallying key. "What have you done with Amelia?" "What a 'Stand-and-deliver' tone!" says she, laughing still, but looking not unnaturally surprised. "Well, where is she?" glancing round. "She was here five minutes ago with Willy. Poor Amelia!" lowering her voice to a more confidential key. "I am so glad you have come at last; she is patience personified. I must congratulate you upon the excellent training into which you have got her, but I think that she was beginning to look a little anxious." "And _I_ think that you have been giving the reins to your imagination, as usual," replies he, walking off in a huff.