“Nonsense; looks much better like this,” he declared. “A black-haired woman looks so much more _alive_ than the others. Like red wine, dark grapes, crimson roses ... fairer colours are insipid, washed-out-looking!” “No woman thinks so,” said I. “You never hear of a blonde tinting herself dark. It’s always the other way about!” “I know _one_ girl who wouldn’t change,” he argued, glancing over the shoulder of the wooden woman at the border of dark hair between my bonnet and my face. “You needn’t pretend you would, miss! Now what are you smiling at?” “Only something,” I said, “that I’d just remembered.” “Yes? (You’re an unexpected sex, aren’t you?) Well, what was this?” “Only—look out, Billy, you’ll let that black drop run down the side of her face—only something a girl I know said about fair men being like weak tea!” “Meaning to say, I suppose, that she didn’t think much of _your_ taste in _fiancés_?” suggested Billy Waters, with a mischievous laugh. I laughed too. And for the several score of times since we have been here together, I thought to myself what a delightful and unusual and thoroughly satisfactory arrangement this friendship of ours had turned out to be. I never dreamed that at that very moment _the life of that friendship had about five more minutes to run_. “There!” said Billy, picking himself up and taking a few steps back from the figure, to survey it, with his fair head on one side. “You can’t say it isn’t an improvement. What would your friend say to that coloured hair?” “Strong tea,” I suggested flippantly. “Tea that’s stood too long!” “You aren’t looking at it. Come over here and see!” I straightened myself and went and stood beside him. “As a matter of fact, Nancy, the lady’s got rather a look of _you_!” And actually something in the contrast of the glistening black locks against the creamy-pale face with the now scarlet-tinted lips might have been vaguely characteristic of what, night and morning, I see in my own mirror. “Well, but I hope _I_ don’t look as if I ‘made up’ my mouth!” “Why, you _don’t_ make it up, do you?” “Of _course_ not,” said I. And then I turned from looking at the painted figure to the other deeper, tenderer colour of the sea washing a strip of sand below the cliff. “Oh, it _is_ lovely here,” I sighed, revelling in the beauty of that and the sky. “Did you ever _see_ anything so blue as it is to-day?” “Or so golden?” added Billy, nodding towards the hassocks of gorse in full bloom. “I’ve never seen it like this before. D’you know that there’s a Welsh proverb that calls this county ‘the land of thriftless gold’? Rather pretty, isn’t it? It must have been wonderful here in the spring; this is the second crop, you know. A man I know once told me that it was like falling in love.” “How d’you mean?” I asked, as he stopped. “Aren’t you going to paint the wing in her hat while you’ve that brush full of black paint?”