He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.

Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps, but uncommonly upright—­Sandra Williams got Jacob’s head exactly on a level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles.  The comparison was all in his favour.  But before she could say a single word he had gone out of the Museum and left her.

Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening.  Thus she was arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in.  Very beautiful she looked.  With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.

“But he is very distinguished looking,” Sandra decided.

And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees, envied them.  The best thing he could do would be to publish, with Macmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham.  But confound this tumid, queasy feeling—­this restlessness, swelling, and heat—­it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never to feel again.

“Come with us to Corinth, Flanders,” he said with more than his usual energy, stopping by Jacob’s chair.  He was relieved by Jacob’s reply, or rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he would like very much to come with them to Corinth.

“Here is a fellow,” thought Evan Williams, “who might do very well in politics.”

“I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live,” Jacob wrote to Bonamy.  “It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from civilization.”

“Goodness knows what he means by that,” Bonamy sighed.  For as he never said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob’s made him feel apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the definite, the concrete, and the rational.

Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over rougher ground by her side.  She had been left motherless at the age of four; and the Park was vast.

“One never seemed able to get out of it,” she laughed.  Of course there was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things.  “I used to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler’s knees,” she laughed, sadly though.

Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself, “People wouldn’t understand a woman talking as she talks.”