The next morning rises superb in steady splendour, and Jim, on issuing out on the little red-tiled terrace, finds the whole strength of the hotel gathered upon it. Even the worst invalids, who have not shown their noses outside their rooms for a fortnight, are sunning themselves, wrapped in apparently unnecessary furs. The Arabs and Turks have spread their gay rugs and carpets, and displayed their bits of stuff, their brasswork, and their embroidery. They make a charming garden of colour under the blue. One is lying beside his wares, in an azure jacket and a rose-red sash, twanging a "gunébri," or little Arab mandolin. Apart from the rest of the company, at the extreme end of the terrace, in a place which is evidently hers by prescriptive right, close to the balustrade, upon whose blue and white tiled top her books are lying, Elizabeth is sitting--and sitting alone, neither truculent father not frightened mother barring approach to her. He makes his way at once to her. "You were not at dinner last night?" "No." "I hope that did not mean that you were ill?" Her eyes are not lifted to his--resting rather on the balustrade, through whose pierced brickwork little boughs of Bougainvillia are pushing. "No, I was not ill," she replies slowly; "but I had made such a figure of myself by crying that mammy thought I had better stay away. When I looked in the glass," she adds humorously, "I thought so myself." "There was not much sign of tears about you when we parted at Notre Dame d'Afrique," he says brusquely. "No, but"--with a sudden lifting of her pretty lashes--"you know there is never any medium in me; I am always either laughing or crying; and, of course, seeing you again brought--brought things back to me." She looks wistfully at him as she makes this leading remark. He can no longer have any doubt as to her wish to embark upon the subject which, even in the three minutes of their meeting on the previous day, she had sought to approach. If he is kind, he will enter into her wish, he will make her path easier for her; but for the moment he does not feel kind--angry, rather, and rebellious. Is his intercourse with her to be a mere repetition of that which, although now seven months ago, makes him still writhe, in the recollection of his latter intercourse with Byng? Is he again to be spitted upon the skewer of reminiscences of the Vallombrosan wood? _Never!_