"If I was rude to you just now," she says, rather tremulously; "if I am ever rude to you in the future, I hope you will understand--I hope you will put it down to the fact that I--I--am very ignorant of--that I know very little of the world." * * * * * The two men are gone; so is the child; so is the dog; and Elizabeth is shutting up the piano and removing the score. "What a noise we made!" she says, smiling at the recollection. "If you make such a shocking noise again, the signora and the other lodgers will infallibly interfere." Mrs. Le Marchant has followed her daughter, and now throws one arm about her slight neck, with a gesture of passionate affection. "If you knew," she says, in a voice of deep and happy agitation, "what it was to me to hear you laugh as you did to-day!" "I have a good many arrears in that way to make up, have not I, mammy? And so have you too," answers the younger woman, laying her sleek head down caressingly on her mother's shoulder; then, in a changed and restless voice: "Oh, if we could stop that man talking about the Moat! Why does he go on hammering about it?" "Why indeed?" replies Mrs. Le Marchant with a shrug. "Men are so thick-skinned; but it is rather touching, his having remembered us all these years, is not it? For my part, I had almost entirely forgotten his existence--had not you?" "Absolutely!" replies Elizabeth, with emphasis; "and if he will only let me, I am more than willing to forget it over again. Oh, mammy" (turning her face round, and burying it on her mother's breast), "why can't we forget everything? begin everything afresh from now--this delightful _now_?" CHAPTER XI. A reconciliation is seldom effected without some price being paid for it. Jim's with Elizabeth, if it can be called such, is bought at the cost of a small sacrifice of principle on his part. No later than this morning he had laid it down as a Median rule that he should avoid opportunities of finding himself in Miss Le Marchant's company; and yet, not only has he spent the major part of the afternoon in her society, but, as he walks away from her door, he finds that he has engaged himself to help Byng, on no distant day, in doing the honours of the Certosa Monastery to her and her mother. On reflection, he cannot quite explain to himself how the arrangement has come about. The proposal certainly did not originate with him, and still less with the two ladies so strangely shy of all society. The three have somehow been swept into it by Byng, who, either with the noblest altruism, or because he feels justly confident that he has no cause for jealousy of his friend (Jim's cynical reflection is that the latter is the much more probable reason), has insisted on drawing him into the project.