Sandra opened her eyes very slightly.  Possibly her nostrils expanded a little too.

“At half-past six then,” said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their backs to the window.

Sandra smiled at him.

And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in broken half-sentences: 

“Well, but how lovely—­wouldn’t it be?  The Acropolis, Evan—­or are you too tired?”

At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress—­not that she would pity him.  Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for anything he could do, cease its tortures.

They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the Square of the Constitution.

“Evan is happier alone,” said Sandra.  “We have been separated from the newspapers.  Well, it is better that people should have what they want....  You have seen all these wonderful things since we met....  What impression ...  I think that you are changed.”

“You want to go to the Acropolis,” said Jacob.  “Up here then.”

“One will remember it all one’s life,” said Sandra.

“Yes,” said Jacob.  “I wish you could have come in the day-time.”

“This is more wonderful,” said Sandra, waving her hand.

Jacob looked vaguely.

“But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time,” he said.  “You couldn’t come to-morrow—­it would be too early?”

“You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?”

“There were some awful women this morning,” said Jacob.

“Awful women?” Sandra echoed.

“Frenchwomen.”

“But something very wonderful has happened,” said Sandra.  Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour—­that was all the time before her.

“Yes,” he said.

“When one is your age—­when one is young.  What will you do?  You will fall in love—­oh yes!  But don’t be in too great a hurry.  I am so much older.”

She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.

“Shall we go on?” Jacob asked.

“Let us go on,” she insisted.

For she could not stop until she had told him—­or heard him say—­or was it some action on his part that she required?  Far away on the horizon she discerned it and could not rest.

“You’d never get English people to sit out like this,” he said.

“Never—­no.  When you get back to England you won’t forget this—­or come with us to Constantinople!” she cried suddenly.

“But then...”

Sandra sighed.

“You must go to Delphi, of course,” she said.  “But,” she asked herself, “what do I want from him?  Perhaps it is something that I have missed....”

“You will get there about six in the evening,” she said.  “You will see the eagles.”

Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner and yet composed.  He was suffering, perhaps.  He was credulous.  Yet there was something caustic about him.  He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life.  Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him—­this disillusionment from women in middle life.