“Yes,” she assented.  “They are something like that.  But I should not call them illusions.”

“No.  And they represent scenes, events?”

“You said yourself they were not dramatic.”

“I meant, represent pictorially.”

“No; they are like the landscape that flies back from your train or towards it.  I can’t explain it,” she ended, rising with what he felt a displeasure in his pursuit.

IV

He reported what had passed to her father when Mr. Gerald came back from his stroll into the town, with his hands full of English papers; Gerald had even 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 blossoms; the perfume of lemon flowers wandered vaguely upwards from some point which they could not fix.