Our friends have reached the haven of the stone seat, and, thanks to the earliness of the hour, have it all to themselves, save for a trio of sunburnt women of the people, with handkerchiefs tied over their tanned heads, who tease them to buy straw hand-screens. And when they have bought a couple, and made it kindly but distinctly evident that no amount of worrying will induce them to buy any more, even these leave them in peace and descend the hill again, in search of newer victims. They are alone under the sky's warm azure. Beneath their eyes spreads one of those nobly lovely spectacles that Italy and spring, hand in hand, alone can offer. To some, indeed, it may seem that the prospect from the Bellosguardo side of the valley is even more beautiful, since Fiesole, sitting so high as she does, dwarfs the opposite hills, and makes the looker lose their wavy line. They seem flat in comparison, the plain appears wider, the beloved city more distant, and does not show the same exquisite distinctness of separate tower and spire and palace. But yet such comparison is mere carping. Who can wish for a sight more divinely suave and fair than this from the bench above Fiesole? Not a breath of smoke dares to hang about the glorious old town, dimming its lustre, and between them and it what a spread of manifold colour, of more "mingled hue" than the rainbow's "purfled scarf doth show!" The moon-tinted olives, twilight and ghostly, even in the dazzling radiance of this superb morning hour, with the blinding green of the young corn about their gray feet, the cypress taper-flames, the gay white houses, terrace gardened, and, above all, the vast smile of the Tuscan heaven. At first Amelia's muteness seems natural and grateful to Jim, as the outcome of the awe and hush that exceeding beauty breathes on the human heart, but by-and-by, as it is prolonged beyond the limits that seem to him fit or agreeable, it begins to get on his nerves. After having so genuinely and wantonly alarmed him, has she brought him here, without any expressions of regret or remorse, simply to steep herself in a silent luxury of selfish enjoyment? After brooding resentfully on this idea for a considerable time, he translates it into speech. "I thought that you had something to say to me?" It seems as if her soul had gone out into the sun and April-painted champaign country, and that it is only with an effort and a sigh that she fetches it home again: "So I have." "And how much longer am I to wait for it?" There is no indication of any capacity for patience in his tone. She brings her look back from the shining morning city, and fixes it wistfully upon him. "Are you in such a hurry to hear?" The pathetic streak in her voice, instead of conciliating, chafes him. What is the sense of this paraphernalia of preliminaries? Why not come to the point at once? if indeed there is a point--a fact of which he begins to entertain grave doubts.