“Amanda and I are going to marry each other,” said Benham, standing in front of her.

For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.

“But does he know?” Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.

Amanda turned her eyes to her lover.  She was about to speak, she seemed to gather herself for an effort, and then he knew that he did not want to hear her explanation.  He checked her by a gesture.

“I know,” he said, and then, “I do not see that it matters to us in the least.”

He went to her holding out both his hands to her.

She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful gravity of her face broke into soft emotion.  “Oh!” she cried and seized his face between her hands in a passion of triumphant love and kissed him.

And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.

She kissed him thrice, with solemnity, with thankfulness, with relief, as if in the act of kissing she transferred to him precious and entirely incalculable treasures.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON

1

It was a little after sunrise one bright morning in September that Benham came up on to the deck of the sturdy Austrian steamboat that was churning its way with a sedulous deliberation from Spalato to Cattaro, and lit himself a cigarette and seated himself upon a deck chair.  Save for a yawning Greek sailor busy with a mop the first-class deck was empty.

Benham surveyed the haggard beauty of the Illyrian coast.  The mountains rose gaunt and enormous and barren to a jagged fantastic silhouette against the sun; their almost vertical slopes still plunged in blue shadow, broke only into a little cold green and white edge of olive terraces and vegetation and houses before they touched the clear blue water.  An occasional church or a house perched high upon some seemingly inaccessible ledge did but accentuate the vast barrenness of the land.  It was a land desolated and destroyed.  At Ragusa, at Salona, at Spalato and Zara and Pola Benham had seen only variations upon one persistent theme, a dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst the giant ruins of preceding times, as worms live in the sockets of a skull.  Forward an unsavoury group of passengers still slumbered amidst fruit-peel and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid brigands armed with preposterous red umbrellas, a group of curled-up human lumps brooded over by an aquiline individual caparisoned with brass like a horse, his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl.  Benham surveyed these last products of the “life force” and resumed his pensive survey of the coast.  The sea was deserted save for a couple of little lateen craft with suns painted on their gaudy sails, sea butterflies that hung motionless as if unawakened close inshore. . . .