“Find out what?” cry I, standing still, raising my voice a little, and growing even redder than the sun, the flies, the brown-paper parcel, and the heavy umbrella, have already made me.  “There was nothing to find out!  I wish you would leave things alone; I wish you would let me manage my own business.”

The smile disappears rather rapidly.

“You have not been telling the general,” continue I, in a tone of rapid apprehension, “that I did not want to go with him? because, if you have, it was a great, great mistake.”

“I told him nothing of the kind,” replies Mr. Musgrave, looking, like me, fierce, but—­unlike me—­cool and pale.  “I was not so inventive.  I merely suggested that sunstroke would most likely be your portion if you went now, and that it would be quite as easy, and a great deal pleasanter, to go three hours later.”

“Yes? and he said—­what?”

“He was foolish enough to agree with me.”

We are standing in a little quiet street, all shade and dark shops.  There are very few passers-by.  I feel rather ashamed of myself, and my angry eyes peruse the pavement.  Neither does he speak.  Presently I look up at him rather shyly.

“How about the gallery? the pictures?”

“Do you wish to go there?” he asks, with rather the air of a polite martyr.  “I shall be happy to take you if you like.”

“Do!” say I, heartily, “and let us try to be friends, and to spend five minutes without quarreling!”

* * * * *

We have spent more than five, a great deal more—­thirty, forty, perhaps, and our harmony is still unbroken, uncracked even.  We have sat in awed and chastened silence before the divine meekness of the Sistine Madonna.  We have turned away in disgust from Jordain’s brutish “Triumphs of Silenus,” and tiresome repetitions of Hercules in drink.  We have admired the exuberance of St. Mary of Egypt’s locks, and irreverently compared them to the effects of Mrs. Allen’s “World-wide Hair Restorer.”  We have observed that the forehead of Holbein’s great Virgin is too high to please us, and made many other connoisseur-like remarks.  I have pointed out to Mr. Musgrave the Saint Catherine which has a look of Barbara, and we have both grown rather tired of St. Sebastian, stuck as full of darts as a pin-cushion of pins.  Now we are sitting down resting our eyes and our strained powers of criticism, and have fallen into easy talk.

“I am glad you are coming to dine at our table d’hote to-night,” say I, in a friendly tone.  “It will be nice for the general to have an Englishman to talk to.  I hope you will sit by him; he has been so much used to men all his life that he must get rather sick of having nothing but the chatter of one woman to depend upon.”

“At least he has no one but himself to blame for that,” replies the young fellow, laughing.  “I suppose it was his own doing.”