"Doris, dear, forgive me if I am looking at this bay instead of you, but I've never seen anything like this before," and feeling I was doing very poor justice to the emotions I was experiencing, I said: "Is it not strange that all this is at once to me new and old? I seem, as it were, to have come into my inheritance." "Your inheritance! Am I not----" "Dearest, you are. Say that you are my inheritance, my beautiful inheritance; how many years have I waited for it?" As I took her in my arms she caught sight of the waiter, and turning from her I looked across the bay, and my desire nearly died in the infinite sweetness blowing across the bay. "Azure hills, not blue; hitherto I have only seen blue." "They're blue to-day because there is a slight mist, but they are in reality red." "A red-hilled bay," I said, "and all the slopes flecked with the white sides of villas." "Peeping through olive trees." "Olive trees, of course. I have never yet seen the olive; the olive begins at Avignon or thereabouts, doesn't it? It was dark night when we passed through Avignon." "You'll see very few trees here; only olives and ilex." "The ilex I know, and there is no more beautiful tree than the ilex." "Were not the crocuses that grew Under that ilex tree, As beautiful in scent and hue As ever fed the bee?" "Whose verses are those?" "Shelley's. I know no others. Are the lines very wonderful? They seem no more than a statement, yet they hang about my memory. I am glad I shall see the ilex tree." "And the eucalyptus--plenty of eucalyptus trees." "That was the scent that followed us this morning as we came through the gardens." "Yes, as we passed from our hotel one hung over the garden wall, and the wind carried its scent after us." The arrival of the waiter with _hors d'oeuvres_ distracted our attention from the olive tree to its fruit, I rarely touch olives, but that morning I ate many. Should we have mutton cutlets or lamb? Doris said the Southern mutton was detestable. "Then we'll have lamb." An idea came into my head, and it was this, that I had been mistaken about Doris's beauty. Hers was not like any face that one may find in a panel by Memline. She was like something, but I could not lay my thoughts on what she was like. "A sail would spoil the beauty of the bay," I said when the waiter brought in the coffee, and left us--we hoped for the last time. Taking hands and going to the window we sat looking across the sailless bay. "How is it that no ships come here? Is the bay looked upon as a mere ornament and reserved exclusively for the appreciation of visitors? Those hills, too, look as if they had been designed in a like intent.... How much more beautiful the bay is without a sail--why I cannot tell, but----" "But what?"