"It makes me sick!" cries she energetically; "let us go into the garden." So into the garden they go; both the new one, whose luxuriant growth of verdure is the outcome of but eight or nine years; and the old one, along whose straight walks the feet of the Moorish ladies used to patter under the orange-trees. Beneath them now there are no white bundles of muslin; only on the ground the oranges lie thick, no one in this plenteous land thinking it worth while to pick them up. Jim and his companion pace rather silently to a pretty Moorish summer-house, dug, a few years ago, by the English architect out of a farm-house, into which it had been built. It is dainty and cool, with a little dome and lovely green and blue tiles; and an odd small spring, which is taught to wander by tiny snaky channels into a little basin. They go into the summer-house and sit down. "Yes, it is pretty," says the girl absently! but her mind is evidently preoccupied by some other subject than the beauty of the giant bignonia which is expanding the multitude of its orange-red clusters all over a low wall, making it into one burning hedge, and has called forth an exclamation of delight from Burgoyne. What that subject is immediately appears. "Do you know who is in Algiers--whom I saw driving through the Place Bressant on Sunday afternoon?" "Who?" "The Le Marchants. Ah, you are not surprised!"--rather suspiciously. "You knew already!" Jim hesitates a second; then, reflecting that, whether or not he acknowledges the fact now, Cecilia is certain to learn it in a day or two at latest, he answers with a slight laugh: "It would be odd if I did not, seeing that they are staying at my hotel." "You knew that when you went there?"--very quickly. "Of course not!"--with a movement of impatience. A pause. "I suppose," says Cecilia, rather cautiously, as if aware that she is treading on dangerous ground, "that you have not found out why they stampeded from Florence in that extraordinary way? Oh no, of course not!"--as this suggestion is received with a still more accented writhe than her former one. "It is not a thing upon which you could question them; and, after all, it was their own affair; it was no business of ours, was it?" "Not the slightest." "I always used to like them," continues Cecilia pensively; "at least"--becoming aware of an involuntary movement of surprise at this statement on the part of her neighbour--"at least, they never gave me the chance of _liking_ them; but I always _admired_ them. I wonder are they more accessible than they were in Florence? There are so few nice English here this year; everybody says that there never was a year when there were so few nice English!"