When they left, Signorina Rosalia accompanied them down to the little landing. The engine of the Fretta took up its busy hum again. Swiftly they backed away from Isola Pescatori, and spun round towards Pallanza.
"Buona sera, Signora! Buona sera, Signor Marchese!" called the Padrone's daughter in her high, fluting voice. She stood on the little quay in the moonlight till they were some distance out upon the lake. "Gli amanti—gli amanti," she was thinking sentimentally. She stood there thrilled with the romance that she felt rushing away from her into the ecstatic moonlight....
And out there in the soft magnificence of the summer night Sophy and Amaldi sat silent, with only the little steering wheel between them. They felt the sense of exhilaration that comes from being close to the prow of a boat speeding low on the water: they were so intimately breast to breast with the vastness of air and lake. Stresa lay behind them, a tangle of yellow sparks. The Barromean Islands brooded sleeping on their shadows. Pallanza was a faint spangle to the left. Far away in front, towards Switzerland, what seemed a silvery mist shaped like mountains, floated against the pearl dust of the sky.
Sophy leaned towards him suddenly. Her eyes looked dark and mysterious under her white, moonlit brow.
"Need we go quite so fast?" she said. "It seems a pity to hurry through such beauty."
Her obvious faith in him gave him joy and pain at the same time. If she had felt one hundredth part for him what he felt for her, she could not have suggested so simply a thing that meant their being longer together. He set the engine to a slower speed. They had passed Pallanza, and were running near enough the shore to see the ghostly loveliness of white roses and oleanders pouring above the walls of villa gardens. Where the shore was wild and overgrown, tangles of honeysuckle showered them with voluptuous fragrance. Above, on the hills, the little villages shone in the moonlight, like handfuls of scattered mica.
Now they had passed Intra. The dark foliage of the Villa Bianca came into view. They could see the colonnade of its old eucalyptus trees, above the retaining-wall of granite.
"Oh, why should such lovely hours have to end—when they need not," sighed Sophy. "I hate convention when it lops off such hours as these like a grudging old Procrustes. Don't you hate the sheer tyranny of convention, Marchese?"
"Indeed—yes," said Amaldi.
Glancing back at their evening together, as he spoke, Sophy thought that he had been unusually taciturn. He was not a talkative man, but it really seemed to her, now that she thought of it, that he had been almost oddly silent most of the time. She wondered if he were worried about something.