"At least----" But she interrupts him before he can add his conscience clause. "To-morrow, then?" Again he hesitates. The same objections apply with even greater force to the morrow. "But the band does not play to-morrow." "Oh! what does that matter?" rejoins she impatiently. "I had just as soon go somewhere else--the Arab town, the Kabyle village, anywhere." He is driven into a corner, and remains there silent so long that there is a distinct element of offence in the tone and large sigh with which the girl resumes. "Well, times are changed! I always used to make one in those happy excursions at Florence; and somehow--thanks to her, I suppose--I never felt a bad third." She rises as she speaks, and takes a couple of huffy steps towards the house; but he overtakes and stops her. The allusion to Amelia has annoyed and yet stirred in him the sea of remorse, which is always lying but a very little way below the surface in his soul. "Why, Cis!" he says, in a tone of affectionate rallying, "are we going to quarrel at this time of day--you and I? Of course I will take you to the band and the Kabyle village, and any other blessed sight you choose to name, only tell me by which of them you would like to begin to ride round." As he leaves the house and the appeased fair one, after luncheon, an hour and a half later, he tells himself that he has got off cheaply in having vaguely sacrificed the whole of his Algerian future, but having preserved to-day and to-morrow. CHAPTER VI. "And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre, Making sweet solace to herself alone. Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre, Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan." Jim's first care on returning to his hotel is to ascertain that the departure for Hammam Rhira has really taken place, and, having been reassured on this point, retires to his own bedroom to reconnoitre the terrace, upon which it gives. The sun has long drunk up the rain from the tiles, and the chairs have been set out again. The hotel guests, in all the sociability of their after-luncheon mood, are standing and sitting about. The widow Wadman, with great play of eyebrow and lip, is pacing up and down in arch conversation with her habitual victim. Snatches of her alluring talk reach Jim behind his muslin curtain as she comes and goes: "I think that caged birds ought to be _loved_!" "The Prophet was a wise man, was not he? he knew a little about us," etc.