For in spite of six years of art in Rome and Paris, he still had a fastidious reverence for women.  If she had loved her husband she would have been safe enough from him; but to be bound to a companionship that she gave unwillingly—­this had seemed to him atrocious, even before he loved her.  How could any husband ask that?  Have so little pride—­so little pity?  The unpardonable thing!  What was there to respect in such a marriage?  Only, he must not do her harm!  But now that her eyes had said, I love you!—­What then?  It was simply miraculous to know that, under the stars of this warm Southern night, burning its incense of trees and flowers!

Climbing up above the road, he lay down.  If only she were there beside him!  The fragrance of the earth not yet chilled, crept to his face; and for just a moment it seemed to him that she did come.  If he could keep her there for ever in that embrace that was no embrace—­in that ghostly rapture, on this wild fragrant bed that no lovers before had ever pressed, save the creeping things, and the flowers; save sunlight and moonlight with their shadows; and the wind kissing the earth! . . .

Then she was gone; his hands touched nothing but the crumbled pine dust, and the flowers of the wild thyme fallen into sleep.

He stood on the edge of the little cliff, above the road between the dark mountains and the sea black with depth.  Too late for any passer-by; as far from what men thought and said and did as the very night itself with its whispering warmth.  And he conjured up her face, making certain of it—­the eyes, clear and brown, and wide apart; the close, sweet mouth; the dark hair; the whole flying loveliness.

Then he leaped down into the road, and ran—­one could not walk, feeling this miracle, that no one had ever felt before, the miracle of love.

III

In their most reputable hotel ‘Le Coeur d’Or,’ long since remodelled and renamed, Mrs. Ercott lay in her brass-bound bed looking by starlight at the Colonel in his brass-bound bed.  Her ears were carefully freed from the pressure of her pillow, for she thought she heard a mosquito.  Companion for thirty years to one whose life had been feverishly punctuated by the attentions of those little beasts, she had no love for them.  It was the one subject on which perhaps her imagination was stronger than her common sense.  For in fact there was not, and could not be, a mosquito, since the first thing the Colonel did, on arriving at any place farther South than Parallel 46 of latitude, was to open the windows very wide, and nail with many tiny tacks a piece of mosquito netting across that refreshing space, while she held him firmly by the coat-tails.  The fact that other people did not so secure their windows did not at all trouble the Colonel, a true Englishman, who loved to act in his own way, and to think in the ways of other people.  After that