“It will be more beautiful still when the moon rises,” said San Miniato.  “I am glad you are pleased.”

She liked the simple words better, perhaps, than some of his rather artificial speeches.

“Thank you,” she said.  “Thank you for bringing us here.”

He had certainly taken a great deal of trouble, she thought, and it was the least she could do, to thank him as she did.  But she was really grateful and for a moment she felt a sort of sympathy for him which she had not felt before.  He, at least, understood that one could like something better in the world than the eternal terrace of a hotel with its stiff orange trees, its ugly lanterns and its everlasting gossip and chatter.  He, at least, was a little unlike all those other people, beginning with her own mother, who think of self first, comfort second, and of others once a month or so, in the most favourable cases.  Yet she wondered a little about his past life, and whether he had ever spoken to any woman with that ringing passion she had heard in Ruggiero’s voice, with that flashing look she had seen in the sailor’s bright blue eyes.  It would be good to be spoken to like that.  It would be good to see the colour in a man’s face change, and come and go, red and white like life and death.  It would be supremely good to be loved once, madly, passionately, with body, heart and soul, to the very breaking of all three—­to be held in strong arms, to be kissed half to death.

She stopped, conscious that her mother would certainly not approve such thoughts, and well aware in her girlish heart that she did not approve them in herself.  And then she smiled faintly.  The man of her waking vision was not like San Miniato.  He was more like Ruggiero, the poor sailor, who sat perched on the stern close behind her.  She smiled uneasily at the idea, and then she thought seriously of it for a moment.  If such a man as Ruggiero appeared, not as a sailor, but as a man of her own world, would he not be a very lovable person, would he not turn the heads of the languid ladies on the terrace of the hotel at Sorrento?  The thought annoyed her.  Ruggiero, poor fellow, would have given his good right arm to know that such a possibility had even crossed her reflections.  But it was not probable that he ever would know it, and he sat in his place, silent and unmoved, steering the boat to her destination, and thinking of her.

It was not dusk when the boat was alongside of the low jagged rocks which lie between the landward needle and the cliffs, making a sort of rough platform in which there are here and there smooth flat places worn by the waves and often full of dry salt for a day or two after a storm.  There, to the Marchesa’s inexpressible relief, the numberless objects inscribed in the catalogue of her comforts were already arranged, and she suffered herself to be lifted from the boat and carried ashore by Ruggiero and his brother, without once murmuring or complaining of fatigue—­a truly wonderful triumph for San Miniato’s generalship.