kly.

"What has happened to you, Seer Marcous? You have never spoken to me
like that before."

"The very deuce seems to have happened," said I, angrily--though why I
should have felt angry, heaven only knows. "First you turn yourself into
a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable umbrella of yours and the
trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and make my sentimental soul ache; and
then you--"

"It's a very pretty umbrella," said Carlotta, looking upwards at it
demurely.

"Give it to me," I said.

She yielded it with her usual docility. I cast it upon the desert. Being
open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay still. Carlotta reined
up her mule.

"Oh-h!" she said, in her old way.

I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm through
the two bridles.

"My dear child," said I, "what is the meaning of all this? Here we have
been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled existence, and
now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities and the impossibility
of getting there, and I turn angry and heave parasols about Africa. What
is the meaning of it?"

The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating Carlotta
as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a modern French
novel. Perhaps I was younger than I thought.

She kept her eyes fixed downward.

"Why are you angry with me?" she asked in a low voice.

"I haven't the remotest idea," said I.

She lifted her eyelids slowly--oh, very, very slowly, glanced
quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round her lips.
I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine heart. I turned
away, leading the two animals, and picked up the parasol which I closed
and restored to her.

"I thought you wanted to cry," I remarked.

"I can't," said Carlotta, plaintively.

"And you won't tell me why you exclude me from your universal hatred?"

Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot. The sight of it
recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my eyes on the
second day of her arrival in London. An old hope, an old fear, an old
struggle renewed themselves. She was more adorably beautiful even than
the Carlotta of the pink tus, and spiritually she was reborn. I heard
her whisper:

"I can't."

Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that I
should be Carlotta's grandfather to the end of time. Hitherto I had
felt the part. Now suddenly grey beard and slippered pan