“If this fine weather holds,” said Staniford, “and you continue as obliging as you are to-night, you can say, when people ask you how you went to Europe, that you walked the greater part of the way. Shall you continue so obliging? Will you walk with me every fine night?” pursued Staniford. “Do you think I'd better say so?” she asked, with the joy still in her voice. “Oh, I can't decide for you. I merely formulate your decisions after you reach them,--if they're favorable.” “Well, then, what is this one?” “Is it favorable?” “You said you would formulate it.” She laughed again, and Staniford started as one does when a nebulous association crystallizes into a distinctly remembered fact. “What a curious laugh you have!” he said. “It's like a nun's laugh. Once in France I lodged near the garden of a convent where the nuns kept a girls' school, and I used to hear them laugh. You never happened to be a nun, Miss Blood?” “No, indeed!” cried Lydia, as if scandalized. “Oh, I merely meant in some previous existence. Of course, I didn't suppose there was a convent in South Bradfield.” He felt that the girl did not quite like the little slight his irony cast upon South Bradfield, or rather upon her for never having been anywhere else. He hastened to say, “I'm sure that in the life before this you were of the South somewhere.” “Yes?” said Lydia, interested and pleased again as one must be in romantic talk about one's self. “Why do you think so?” He bent a little over toward her, so as to look into the face she instinctively averted, while she could not help glancing at him from the corner of her eye. “You have the color and the light of the South,” he said. “When you get to Italy, you will live in a perpetual mystification. You will go about in a dream of some self of yours that was native there in other days. You will find yourself retrospectively related to the olive faces and the dark eyes you meet; you will recognize sisters and cousins in the patrician ladies when you see their portraits in the palaces where you used to live in such state.” Staniford spiced his flatteries with open burlesque; the girl entered into his fantastic humor. “But if I was a nun?” she asked, gayly. “Oh, I forgot. You were a nun. There was a nun in Venice once, about two hundred years ago, when you lived there, and a young English lord who was passing through the town was taken to the convent to hear her sing; for she was not only of 'an admirable beauty,' as he says, but sang 'extremely well.' She sang to him through the grating of the convent, and when she stopped he said, 'Die whensoever you will, you need to change neither voice nor face to be an angel!' Do you think--do you dimly recollect anything that makes you think--it might--Consider carefully: the singing extremely well, and--” He leant over again, and looked up into her face, which again she could not wholly withdraw. “No, no!” she said, still in his mood.