found a New York paper at the news-stand; and he listened with
an apparent postponement of interest.

"I think," Lanfear said, "that she has some shadowy recollection, or
rather that the facts come to her in a jarred, confused way--the
elements of pictures, not pictures. But I am afraid that my inquiry has
offended her."

"I guess not," Gerald said, dryly, as if annoyed. "What makes you think
so?"

"Merely her manner. And I don't know that anything is to be gained by
such an inquiry."

"Perhaps not," Gerald allowed, with an inattention which vexed Lanfear
in his turn.

The elderly man looked up, from where he sat provisionally in the hotel
veranda, into Lanfear's face; Lanfear had remained standing. "_I_ don't
believe she's offended. Or she won't be long. One thing, she'll forget
it."

He was right enough, apparently. Miss Gerald came out of the hotel door
towards them, smiling equally for both, with the indefinable difference
between cognition and recognition habitual in her look. She was dressed
for a walk, and she seemed to expect them to go with her. She beamed
gently upon Lanfear; there was no trace of umbrage in her sunny gayety.
Her face had, as always, its lurking pathos, but in its appeal to
Lanfear now there were only trust and the wish of pleasing him.

They started side by side for their walk, while her father drove beside
them in one of the little public carriages, mounting to the Berigo Road,
through a street of the older San Remo, and issuing on a bare little
piazza looking towards the walls and roofs of the mediaeval city,
clustered together like cliff-dwellings, and down on the gardens that
fell from the villas and the hotels. A parapet kept the path on the
roadside nearest the declivities, and from point to point benches were
put for the convenient enjoyment of the prospect. Mr. Gerald preferred
to take his pleasure from the greater elevation of the seat in his
victoria; his daughter and Lanfear leaned on the wall, and looked up to
the sky and out to the sea, both of the same blue.

The palms and eucalyptus-trees darkened about the villas; the bits of
vineyard, in their lingering crimson or lingering gold, and the orchards
of peaches and persimmons enriched with the varying reds of their
ripening leaves and fruits the enchanting color scheme. The rose and
geranium hedges were in bloom; the feathery green of the pepper-trees
was warmed by the red-purple of their grape-like clusters of blossom