"Do you never have a will—a preference of your own?"
It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek shows that she has felt his snub.
"In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us—let us"—another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations—"let us go home!"
So they go home. It is near sun-setting as they drive along the Boulevard de la République, the fitting end to so princely a day. At the quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of "watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!
"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile.
It is the first time she had spoken since they had set off on their return-drive. She is lying back, with her hands carefully shielding in her lap a few little crockery pots that she has bought of a fat Turk for some children at her hotel Her face looks tired; and yet over its small area is spread an expression of content that makes his heart warm. Is it only the pageant of sky and ocean that has called forth that look of real, if passing, happiness on the features of her who is always so tremblingly sensitive an instrument for all influences of beauty and grandeur to play upon? or has his own neighbourhood anything to say to it? Before he can give himself an answer to this anxious question, she speaks again.
"You do not mind my not talking, do you?" she asks, half apologetically, and yet with a confidence in his sympathy that still further quickens the beats of his already not very still heart.
"No, I am sure you do not. Somehow—it is a great gift—you always feel in tune with one, and one does not chatter most when one is most greatly pleased, does one? Oh, what a treat you have given me!"
As she speaks, her humid eyes travel from his face to where, beyond the long Atlas range, delicately toothed and cut out, rises the gold-washed snow of the Kabyle mountains, that retire majestically invisible on dull days, and only come out, candescent and regal, when the great sun rides in pomp. Above their heads wild plumes of deep rose, that it seems ridiculous to call clouds, tuft the sky.
Jim's look has followed his companion's; the chins of both are in the air; the cheerful va et vient of the boulevard is lost upon them. They see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside the cafés, nor the idle indigènes leaning draped against the sea-wall. (Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)