Her candid and composed admission of a need for mercy whets yet farther that pained curiosity which has always been one of the strongest elements in his uncomfortable interest in her. But the very sharpness of that interest makes him shy away awkwardly from the subject of her past. "I always think," he says, "that there is something fatuous in a man's apologizing to a lady for not having been to see her, as if the loss were hers, and not his." "Is there? All the same, I am sorry that you did not come." This simple and unsophisticated implication of a liking for him would have warmed again the uneasy heart that her former speech had chilled had not he, under the superficial though genuine regret of her face, seen, still shining with steady lustre, that radiance which has as little been called forth by, as it can be dimmed by him or anything relating to him. And so he passes by in silence the expression of that sorrow which he bitterly knows to be so supportable. The still spirit of the day seems to have touched the very birds. They sing a few low notes in veiled, chastened voices from the fir-wood, and again are silent. The clock tells the hours in quarters to the doomed lives inside the monastery, self-doomed to suffering and penance and incarceration, even with the winning blue of the Tuscan sky above their tonsured heads, with the forget-me-nots pressing their feet, and the nightingales singing endless love-songs to them from the little dark forest nigh at hand. "I suppose," says Elizabeth presently, in a reflective tone, "that the fact is, when people are in your position--I mean on the brink of a great deep happiness--they forget all lesser things?" He snatches a hasty glance of suspicion at her. Is this her revenge for his neglect of her? But nothing can look more innocent or less ironical than her small profile, bent towards the gigantic forget-me-nots and the pulmonaria, azure as gentians. "Perhaps." "The big fish"--her little face breaking into one of her lovely smiles, which, by a turn of her head from side to full, she offers in its completeness to his gaze--"swallows up all the little gudgeons! Poor little gudgeons." "Poor little gudgeons!" he echoes stupidly, and then begins to laugh at his own wool-gathering. "And now I suppose you will be going directly--going home?" pursues she, looking at him and his laughter with a soft surprise. "I hope so; and--and--you too?" She gives a start, and the sky-coloured nosegay in her hand drops into her lap. "We--we? Why should _we_ go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to, and"--looking round with a passionate relish at mountain, and suffused far plain, and sappy spring grass--"we are so well--so infinitely well here!" Then, pulling herself together, and speaking in a more composed key, "But yes, of course we, too, shall go by-and-by; this cannot last for ever--nothing lasts for ever. That is the one thought that has kept me alive all these years; but now----" She breaks off.