Below the slight eminence where they sit, the road winds white, and upon the opulent low green hills on its further side, what a banquet of colour! On one steep slope the plough is driving its difficult furrows, turning up the rich red earth, shaded with deeper claret and lighter pink stains. Beneath, a square of stone-pines looks like a green velvet handkerchief spread on the hillside, and over the rest of the upland eucalyptus, and olive, and cactus hold their riot of various verdure; while, on the tiptop of everything, against a weirdly pale-blue sky-field, a Moorish villa lifts its white flank. How long have they both been staring dully at that fair prospect before Elizabeth again speaks!-- "You were a very good friend to me!" She had not meant that past tense as an arrow to shoot into his heart; but it sticks there, barbed. "I do not know how." "And friends--real, good friends--should not have concealments from each other, should they? They should tell one another about themselves?" "Yes." A pause. "I have often wished--often tried to tell you about myself; but I could not. I never could! I can tell you to-day if you wish, if you care to hear. Do you care?" "_Do I care?_" What a small battlefield those three words make for the anger and agony they express to fight upon! Another longer pause. She has taken off her hat, and now passes her handkerchief over her damp forehead. "I shall be all right when I have once begun, but it is bad to make a start." "Do not make it! do not tell me! I adjure you not to tell me! it hurts you too much!" "It would hurt me more to let you go without telling you. Do you remember"--rushing desperately into her subject--"at the time you stayed with us at the Moat, that there was a great talk among us of my having my portrait painted?" He knits his brow in an eager straining of his memory. "Yes, I recollect." "Father was wonderfully proud of me in those days; it seems impossible to believe it now"--with a passing look of incredulity at her own statement--"but he was." "Yes, yes." "Do you remember all the arranging and planning as to who was to be the artist, and that he was to come and stay in the house to paint it?" Jim has put his hand up to his forehead as if to quicken the return of those faint and distant impressions which are coming out in stronger and stronger colours on memory's surface. "Yes, yes; he was not an Englishman, was he? We used to laugh about him"--adding stroke to stroke in order to convince her of the accuracy of his recollections--"used to call him the 'distinguished foreigner.'" "Did we? Yes"--slowly--"I remember now that we did. Well"--gathering herself up for a supreme effort, panting painfully, and turning her head quite aside so that he may have no glimpse of her face--"he came, and he stayed two months, and at the end of those two months I--I--ran away with him!" CHAPTER XIV. VALE?