“Never!  I can’t conceive of it.  I suppose if this were written down, nobody would believe it.”

“No, nobody could,” said Isabel, musingly, and she added after a pause, “I wish you would tell me just what you thought of me, dearest.  Did you feel as you did when our little affair was broken off, long ago?  Did you hate me?”

“I did, most cordially; but not half so much as I despised myself the next moment.  As to its being like a lover’s quarrel, it wasn’t.  It was more bitter, so much more love than lovers ever give had to be taken back.  Besides, it had no dignity, and a lover’s quarrel always has.  A lover’s quarrel always springs from a more serious cause, and has an air of romantic tragedy.  This had no grace of the kind.  It was a poor shabby little squabble.”

“O, don’t call it so, Basil!  I should like you to respect even a quarrel of ours more than that.  It was tragical enough with me, for I didn’t see how it could ever be made up.  I knew I couldn’t make the advances.  I don’t think it is quite feminine to be the first to forgive, is it?”

“I’m sure I can’t say.  Perhaps it would be rather unladylike.”

“Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get at is this:  whether we shall love each other the more or the less for it.  I think we shall get on all the better for a while, on account of it.  But I should have said it was totally out of character it’s something you might have expected of a very young bridal couple; but after what we’ve been through, it seems too improbable.”

“Very well,” said Basil, who, having made all the concessions, could not enjoy the quarrel as she did, simply because it was theirs; “let ’s behave as if it had never been.”

“O no, we can’t.  To me, it’s as if we had just won each other.”

In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness to that ride round the mountain, and shed a beneficent glow upon the rest of their journey.  The sun came out through the thin clouds, and lighted up the vast plain that swept away north and east, with the purple heights against the eastern sky.  The royal mountain lifted its graceful mass beside them, and hid the city wholly from sight.  Peasant-villages, in the shade of beautiful elms, dotted the plain in every direction, and at intervals crept up to the side of the road along which they drove.  But these had been corrupted by a more ambitious architecture since Basil saw them last, and were no longer purely French in appearance.  Then, nearly every house was a tannery in a modest way, and poetically published the fact by the display of a sheep’s tail over the front door, like a bush at a wine-shop.  Now, if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the cheeps’ tails had vanished from the portals.  But our friends were consoled by meeting numbers of the peasants jolting home from market in the painted carts, which are doubtless of the pattern of the carts first built there two hundred years ago.  They were grateful for the immortal old wooden, crooked and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded in these vehicles; when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart, and showed the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could only sigh out their unspeakable satisfaction.