I relapse into silence, and fish for the sprigs of woodruff floating in my Mai-Trank, while the talk passes to Sir Roger.  Presently I become aware that the stranger is addressing me by that new title which makes me disposed to laugh.

“Lady Tempest, have you seen those lamps that they have here, in the shape of flowers?  Cockney sort of things, but they are rather pretty.”

“No,” say I, eagerly, dropping my spoon and looking up; “in the shape of flowers? Where?”

“You cannot see them from here,” he answers; “they are over there, nearer the river.”

“I should like to see them,” say I, decisively; “shall we, general?”

“Will you spare Lady Tempest for five minutes?” says the young man, addressing my husband; “it is not a hundred yards off.”

At my words Sir Roger had made a slight movement toward rising; but, at the stranger’s, he resettles himself in his chair.

“Will you not come, too?  Do!” say I, pleadingly; and, as I speak, I half stretch out my hand to lay it on his arm; then hastily draw it back, afraid and ashamed of vexing him by public demonstrations.

He looks up at me with a smile, but shakes his head.

“I think I am lazy,” he says; “I will wait for you here.”

We set off; I with a strongish, but unexplained feeling of resentment against my companion.

“Where are they?” I ask, pettishly; “not far off, I hope!  I do not fancy I shall care about them!”

“I did not suppose that you would,” he replies, in an extremely happy tone; “would you like us to go back?”

“No,” reply I, carelessly, “it would not be worth while now we have started.”

We march on in solemn silence, not particularly pleased with each other.  I am staring about me, with as greedily wondering eyes as if I were a young nun let loose for the first time.  We pass a score—­twoscore, threescore, perhaps—­of happy parties, soldiers again, a bourgeois family of three generations, the old grandmother with a mushroom-hat tied over her cap—­soldiers and Fraeuleins coketteering. The air comes to our faces, dry, warm, and elastic, yet freshened by the river, far down in whose quiet heart all the lamps are burning again.

“Have you been here long?” says Mr. Musgrave, presently, in a formal voice, from which I see that resentment is not yet absent.

“Yes,” say I, having on the other hand fully recovered my good-humor, “a good while—­that is, not very long—­three, four, three whole days.”

“Do you call that a good while?”

“It seems more,” reply I, looking frankly back at him in the lamplight, and thinking that he cannot be much older than Algy, and that, in consequence, it is rather a comfort not to be obliged to feel the slightest respect for him.

“And how long have you been abroad altogether?”

We have reached the flower-lamps.  We are standing by the bed in which they are supposed to grow.  There are half a dozen of them:  a fuchsia, a convolvulus, lilies.