Tea being over, he went paddling, with Thomas laughing on his shoulder, till it was Thomas’s bedtime.  Then he put Thomas away in his warm corner of the cart, and Livio joined him, and they had supper together at a trattoria, and then climbed the road between vineyards and lemon gardens up to the new white hotel.

Livio, as they walked, practised his repertory of songs, singing melodious snatches in the lemon-scented dusk.  They came to the hotel, and found that the inhabitants were sitting round little tables in the dim garden, having their coffee by the light of hanging lanterns.

From out of the dusk Livio struck his mandolin and sweetly sang.  Peter meanwhile wandered round from group to group displaying his wares by the pink light of the lanterns.  He met with some success; he really embroidered rather nicely, and people were good-natured and kind to the pale-faced, delicate-looking young man who smiled with his very blue, friendly eyes.  There was always an element in Peter that inspired pity; one divined in him a merry unfortunate.

The people in the hotel were of many races—­French, Italian, German, and one English family.  Castoleto is not an Anglo-Saxon resort; it is small and of no reputation, and not as yet Anglicised.  Probably the one English family in the hotel was motoring down the coast, and only staying for one night.

Peter, in his course round the garden, came suddenly within earshot of cultured English voices, and heard some one laugh.  Then a voice, soft in quality, with casual, pleasant, unemphasised cadence, said, “Considering these vile roads, she’s running extraordinarily well.  Really, something ought to be done about the roads, though; it’s absolutely disgraceful.  Blake says ...” one of the things that chauffeurs do say, and that Peter did not listen to.

Peter had stopped suddenly where he was when the speaker had laughed.  Of the many personal attributes of man, some may become slurred out of all character, disguised and levelled down among the herd, blurred with time, robbed of individuality.  Faces may be so lost and blurred, almost beyond the recognition of those who have loved them.  But who ever forgot a friend’s laugh, or lost the character of his own?  If Ulysses had laughed when he came back to Ithaca, his dog would have missed his eternal distinction.

Soft, rather low, a thing not detached from the sentence it broke into, but rather breaking out of it, and merging then into words again—­Peter had carried it in his ears for ten years.  Was there ever any man but one who laughed quite so?

Looking down the garden, he saw them, sitting under a pergola, half-veiled by the purple drifts of the wistaria that hung in trails between them and him.  Through its twilight screen he saw Denis in a dinner-jacket, leaning back in a cane chair, his elbow on its arm, a cigarette in his raised hand, speaking.  The light from a big yellow lantern swinging above them lit his clear profile, gleamed on his fair hair.  Opposite him was Lucy, in a white frock, her elbows on a little table, her chin in her two hands, her eyes wide and grey and full of the wonder of the twilight.  And beyond her sat Lord Evelyn, leaning back with closed eyes, a cigar in his delicate white hand.