She is down in the world; there can be no mistake about that. Even her father, who has returned from his wanderings, must be aware of this fact. Perhaps that is the reason why he no longer snubs her as much as he did; why he even accepts, with some semblance of graciousness, those affectionate and watchful ministrations which she tenders him with as gentle an assiduity as in her brighter days. But he has still no great appetite for her society; and she, unresentfully divining it, gives up to him, without repining, the one great solace of her melancholy--her mother's company. If Jim were gone, the more part of her life would be spent alone. She tells him so--tells him, with a sweet flattering smile, how much his comradeship is to her. Has he any right to rob her of that last prop? It is only to himself that the breathless clamberings up the steep short cut to El Biar, deep and brambly as her own Devonshire lanes, that the gazings in common over the pigeon-necked sea and the amaranth hills, can do any harm. They may put a sting into his own after-life--a sting that all the empty years that follow may be powerless to extract; but to her they serve only as a narcotic to numb the intensity of that ache which the cured madness of Byng has left behind it. Some day, of course, he must leave her; he cannot pass his whole life at her side; some day soon leave her to walk and sit and study her Italian Grammar forlornly alone. But it must not be until she has a little plucked up her spirits. As soon as he sees any signs of this occurring, he will quit Algiers--quit it comfortably, with the consciousness of having done a good-natured thing, by which nobody is the worse. This is the compromise at which he arrives with the inward adviser--conscience, common-sense, what you will--that is hourly admonishing him to be gone. Does Elizabeth guess that her retention of the companion, to whom she so desolately clings, hangs on her remaining always as crushed as the first ten days after those cruel interviews with the Byngs, mother and son, had left her? If she did, she would probably seek to check the first faint revivings of cheerfulness in her inveterately gay spirit. Instead, while her heart is yet at its sickest, she earnestly tries to foster the tiny seeds of cheerfulness, saying to herself that it is mere selfishness in her to inflict her dismalness upon her one friend; seeking rather to lift his spirits, which seem scarcely less drooping than her own. Does he enter into her motive? Does not it rather strike him with a species of shock how superficial must be the nature, how on the surface the suffering, of one who can already begin again to take a mischievous interest in the Widow Wadman's amours, and to mimic afresh the Cockney twang of the French Vicomte's English governess?