“Yes, that will be nice,” she said, but he perceived that she did not assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readiness with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon.  She clearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned to Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join her father in any conspiracy against her.  He beckoned the carriage which had become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herself at the hotel door, and they set out.

When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatter through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed to feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on one hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high, dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from the commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white and saffron hotels and shops.  Beyond the town their course lay under villa walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finally along a stretch of the old Cornice road.

“But this,” she said, at a certain point, “is where we were yesterday!”

“This is where the doctor was yesterday,” her father said, behind his cigar.

“And wasn’t I with you?” she asked Lanfear.

He said, playfully:  “To-day you are.  I mustn’t be selfish and have you every day.”

“Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday.”

Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.

They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.

World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the spring-time was immortally young in the landscape.  Over the expanses of green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages, was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms.  Above these the hoar olives thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace.  The valley narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing mysteriously together in the distances.

“I think we’ve got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear broke the common silence by saying.  “You couldn’t see much more of Possana after you got there.”

“Besides,” her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger man, “if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won’t want to make the climb again to-day.  Give it up, Nannie!”

“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give it up.”

“Well, then, we must go on, I suppose.  Where do we begin our climb?”

Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the peasants.  He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new town.