As the train moved out of the platform the twilight vanished into daylight, the sky flushed, and he saw a scant land, ragged and torn with twisted plants, cacti and others, gashed and red, and savage as a negress’s lips.  So he saw the South through the breath-misted windows.  He lay back; he dozed a little, and awoke an hour after to feel soft air upon the face, and to see a bush laden with blossom literally singing the spring.  Thenceforth at every mile the land grew into more frequent bloom.  The gray-green olive-tree appeared, a crooked, twisted tree—­habitual phase of the red land—­and between its foliage gray-green brick facades, burnt and re-burnt by the sun.  The roofs of the houses grew flatter and campanile, and the domes rose, silvery or blue, in the dazzling day.  A mountain shepherd, furnished with water-gourd, a seven-foot staff, and a gigantic pipe, lingered in the country railway-station.  This shepherd’s skin was like coffee, and he wore hair hanging far over his shoulders, and his beard reached to his waist.

Nice!  A town of cheap fashion, a town of glass and stucco.  The pungent odour of the eucalyptus trees, the light breeze stirred not the foliage, sheared into mathematical lines.  It was like yards of baize dwindling in perspective; and between the tall trunks great plate-glass windows gleamed, filled with l’article de Londres.

He drove to the hotel from which Mrs. Byril had written, and learnt that she had left yesterday, and that Mrs. and Miss Young were not staying there.  They had no such name on the books.  Looking on the sea and mountains he wondered himself what it all meant.

Having bathed and changed his clothes, he sallied forth in a cab to call at every hotel in the town, and after three hours’ fruitless search, returned in despair.  Never before had life seemed so sad; never had fate seemed so cruel—­he had come a thousand miles to regenerate his life, and an accident, the accident of a departure, hastened perhaps only by a day, had thrown him back on the past; he had imagined a beautiful future made of love, goodness, and truth, and he found himself thrown back upon the sterile shore of a past of which he was weary, and of whose fruits he had eaten even to satiety.  After much effort he had made sure that nothing mattered but Lily, neither wealth nor liberty, nor even his genius.  In surrendering all he would have gained all—­peace of mind, unending love and goodness.  Goodness! that which he had never known, that which he now knew was worth more than gratification of flesh and pride of spirit.

The night was full of tumult and dreams—­dreams of palms, and seas, and endless love, and in the morning he walked into the realities of his imaginings.

Passing through an archway, he found himself in the gaud of the flower-market.  There a hundred umbrellas, yellow, red, mauve and magenta, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, gold, a multi-coloured mass spread their extended bellies to a sky blue as the blouses.