Peter stood and looked, and a little faint, doubtful smile twitched at his lips, as at a dear, familiar sight long unseen.  Should he approach?  Should he speak?  For a moment he hung in doubt.

Then he turned away.  He had no part with them, nor they with him.  His part—­Rodney had said it once—­was to clear out.

Livio, close to him, was twanging his mandolin and singing some absurd melody: 

  “Ah, Signor!”
  “Scusi, Signora?”
  “E forae il mio marito,
  Da molti anni smarrito?...”

Peter broke in softly, “Livio, I go.  I have had enough.”

Livio’s eyebrows rose; he shrugged his shoulders, but continued his singing.  He, anyhow, had not yet had enough of such a good-natured audience.

Peter slipped out of the garden into the white road than ran down between the grey mystery of the olive groves to the little dirty fishing-town and the dark, quiet sea.  In the eastern sky there was a faint shimmer, a disturbance of the deep, star-lit blue, a pallor that heralded the rising of the moon.  But as yet the world lay in its mysterious dusk.

Peter, his feet stirring on the white dust of the road, drew in the breath of the lemon-grown, pine-grown, myrtle-sweet hills, and the keen saltness of the sea, and the fishiness of the little, lit, clamorous town on its edge.  In the town there was singing, raucous and merry.  Behind in the garden there was singing, melodious and absurd.  It echoes fleeted down the road.

  “Ah, Signor!”
  “Scusi, Signora?”
  “E forse il mio marrito...”

Peter sat on the low white wall to watch the moon rise.  And for a moment the bitter smell of the soft dust on the road was in his nostrils, and he was taken back into a past bitterness, when the world had been dust to his feet, dust to his touch, dust in his throat, so that he had lain dust-buried, and choked for breath, and found none.  This time a year ago he had lain so, and for many months after that.  Those months had graved lines on his face—­lines perhaps on his soul—­that all the quiet, gay years could not smooth out.  For the peace of the lee shore is not a thing easily won; to let go and drift before the storms wheresoever they drive needs a hard schooling; to lose comes first, and to laugh long after.

The dust Peter’s feet had stirred settled down; and now, instead of its faint bitterness, the sweetness of the evening hills stole about.  And over the still sea the white moon rose, glorious, triumphant, and straight from her to Peter, cleaving the dark waters, her bright road ran.

Peter went down into the little, merry town.

He and Thomas slept at an inn that night.  Livio joined them there next morning at breakfast.  He said, “You were foolish to leave the hotel so soon.  I got a good sum of money.  There was an English family, that gave me a good reward.  My music pleased them.  The English are always generous and extravagant.  Oh, Dio, I forgot; one of them sent you this note by me.  He explained nothing; he said, ’Is he that was with you your friend?  Then give him this note.’  Did he perhaps know you of old, or did he merely perceive that you were of his country?  I know nothing.  One does not read the letters entrusted to one for one’s friends.  Here it is.”