"You live at Ronda, Lady Donnisthorpe tells me; my headquarters now are at Algeciras;" and he told her briefly of his business there. "My cousin did not tell me that," said Miranda. Lady Donnisthorpe, in the wisdom of her heart, had, in fact, carefully concealed Charnock's place of abode, thinking it best that Miranda should learn it from Charnock's lips, and be pleasantly surprised thereby. That Miranda was pleasantly surprised might perhaps have been inferred by a more experienced man, from the extreme chilliness of her reply. "Ronda is at the top," she said, "Algeciras at the bottom, and there are a hundred miles of hillside and cork-forest between." "There are also," retorted Charnock, "a hundred miles of railway." "Shall we go back into the room?" suggested Miranda. "If you wish. Only there is something else I am trying to say to you," said Charnock, and at that Miranda laughed, and laughed with a fresh bright trill of amusement. It broke suddenly and spontaneously from her lips and surprised Charnock, who was at a loss to reconcile it with the signs of her distress. He turned towards her. "What is it?" he asked. "Nothing," she said hastily, "nothing at all." "You wished to go in?" "Not now,--not for the world." She was genuinely amused. Her eyes laughed at him in the starlight. Charnock was very content at the change in her, though he did not at all understand it. It made what he meant to say easier, if he could only find the means to say it. He held the means unwittingly in his hand, for he held Miranda's glove. It was that glove which provoked her amusement. Charnock, with a pertinacity which was only equalled by his absence of mind, was trying to force his hand into Mrs. Warriner's glove. He had already succeeded in slipping the long sleeve of it over his palm; he was now engaged in the more strenuous task of fitting his fingers into its slender fingers, as he leaned upon the balcony. "You are laughing, no doubt, at my pertinacity, and it is true that our acquaintanceship is very slight," said he. "In a moment you will irretrievably destroy it," said she, looking at the glove. "I hope you don't mean that," he answered sadly, as he smoothed the finger-tip of the forefinger down upon his own, and at once proceeded to the other fingers. The little finger in particular needed a deal of strenuous coaxing, and caused him to break up his words with intervals of physical effort. "Because--as I say--we shall be neighbours--there!"--The exclamation "there" meant that he was satisfied with the third finger.--"A hundred miles of hill-side--in a foreign country--on a map a thumb will cover it." "Will it cover a thumb, though?" asked Miranda, who took a feminine interest in the durability of her glove. She leaned forward in a delighted suspense, as Charnock proceeded to answer her question by experiment.