"Will not you sit down?" she asks presently, adding, with a low, timid laugh, "I do not know why I should invite you, as if"--glancing round at the sun-steeped panorama--"this were my drawing-room." He complies, taking care to occupy a quite different six feet of herbage from that which still bears the imprint of Byng's lengthy limbs. The grass grows cool and fresh, full of buttercups and tall blue bugle; out of them the gray monastery wall rises, in its utter lifeless silence, with its small barred windows. Was ever any building, within which is human life, so unutterably still? As he leans his elbow among the king-cups, Jim says to himself that the lovers had chosen their place well and wisely--that the consciousness of the austere, denied lives going on so close behind them, in their entire joylessness, must have given an added point, a keener edge to the poignancy of their own enjoyment of the sweet summer day outside. "You have not been to see us for a long time," says Elizabeth presently, in a small and diffident voice, after having waited until the probability of his speaking first has become a mere possibility, and even that a faint one. He replies baldly, "No." His look is fixed on a knoll, whence the monks must have gathered their leopard's bane. They cannot have gathered much, so bounteously do the gay yellow flowers still wave on the hillock. Nearer stands a colony of purple orchises, and from them the eye travels away to the silent fir-wood, to the range of misty hills and the distant plain, touched now and again by a vague hint of sunshine, that makes one for the moment feel sure that one has detected Duomo or Campanile. How many hill ranges there are! One can count six or seven, like the ridges in a gigantic ploughed field, one behind another--all solemnly beautiful on this windless day of grave and ungaudy sweetness. Has the young man been reckoning the ranks of the Apennines, that it is so long before he adds a low-voiced, mocking question to his monosyllable? "Have you missed me very much?" The woman addressed seems in no hurry to answer. She has drawn her narrow brown brows together, as if in the effort to hit truth in her nicest shade in her answer. Then she speaks with a sort of soft self-remonstrance: "Oh, surely! I _must_ have missed you--you were so extraordinarily, so unaccountably kind to us!" There is not one of us who would not rather be loved for what we _are_ than for what we _do_; so it is perhaps no wonder if the young woman's reply strikes with an unreasonable chill upon the asker's heart. "You must have been very little used to kindness all your life," he says, with some brusqueness, "to be so disproportionately grateful for my trumpery civilities." She hesitates a moment, then: "You are right," she replies; "I have not received any great kindness in my life--justice, well, yes, I suppose so--but no, not very much mercy."