His eye strayed into the courtyard and moved about the green penumbra created by the fig tree’s massy foliage; it glanced over fragments of statuary half buried under a riot of leaves and nodding flowers, and rested with complaisance upon the brickwork flooring of herring-bone pattern, coloured in a warm, velvety Indian-red.  It was worn down here and there by tread of feet, and pleasantly marked with patches of emerald-green moss and amber-tinted streaks of light that played about its surface wherever the sunbeams could pierce the dense leafage overhead.

From where he sat he could see the Locri Faun on its pedestal.  The figure was drowned in twilight.  It seemed to slumber.

Meanwhile Andrea, looking uncommonly ceremonious in white tie and white cotton globes, was handing round the coffee.  It was pronounced an unqualified success.  “Absolutely harmonious,” declared the bishop, who had no hesitation, after a critical sip or two, in extending his approval to a curiously flavoured liqueur of unknown ingredients.

“From my little property on the mainland,” the Count explained.  “If it were a clear day I would take you up to my roof and show you the very site, although it is leagues and leagues away.  But the south wind always casts a haze over the mainland at this time of day—­a kind of veil.”

Mr. van Koppen, connoisseur of cigars, opened his capacious case and offered its contents, without disclosing the fact that they were specially manufactured for him at a fabulous price.

“You will find them smokable, I hope.  As a matter of fact it’s no use trying to keep a cigar in good condition on the yacht.  And it must be the same on an island like this.  So far as tobacco is concerned, Nepenthe can be nothing but a ship at anchor.”

“True,” said the Count.  “The moist sirocco is injurious to the finer growths.”

“This south wind!” exclaimed Mr. Heard.  “This African pest!  Is there no other wind hereabouts?  Tell me, Count, does the sirocco always blow?”

“So far as I have observed it blows constantly during the spring and summer.  Hardly less constantly in autumn,” he added.  “And in winter, often for weeks on end.”

“Sounds promising,” observed the bishop.  “And has it no influence on the character?”

“The native is accustomed, or resigned.  Foreigners, sometimes, are tempted to strange actions under its influence.”

The American said: 

“You spoke of amalgamating our cuisine with yours, or vice versa.  It can doubtless be done, to the profit of both parties.  Why not go a step further?  Why not amalgamate our respective civilizations?”

“A pleasant dream, my friend, with which I have occasionally beguiled myself!  Our contribution to human happiness, and that of America—­are they not irreconcilable?  What is yours?  Comfort, time and labour saving contrivances; abundance; in a word, all that is summed up under the denomination of utility.  Ours, let us say, is beauty.  No doubt we could saturate ourselves with each other’s ideals, to our mutual advantage.  But it would never be an amalgam; the joints would show.  It would be a successful graft, rather than a fusion of elements.  No; I do not see how beauty and utility are ever to be syncretized into a homogeneous conception.  They are too antagonistic to coalesce.”