Chesney grasped it willingly. All his blood was beating in little pleasant hammer-strokes of exultant health and strength. Yet as the first chill breaths of the coming breeze played over him, he felt a shivery sensation not altogether agreeable.
"Going to be a bit of a blow—eh?" he asked, screwing up his eyes against the sun to watch the iron-blue band that was widening every second. "Think I'll just get my coat on in that case," he added.
Amaldi took the tiller while Chesney got into his coat. Now there came white flashes from the band of blue.
"Un Invernung, Scior Marchese," grinned Peppin.
"What's he say?" asked Chesney.
"That we're going to have an 'Invernung'—'a big Inverna'—'a stiff breeze,'" translated Amaldi patiently.
And indeed the South Wind pounced on them in a few moments, blowing more than a capful. As the full gust struck her, the little Wind-Flower heeled till her shrouds were under water. The spray came from her dipping bows in a silver sluice, drenching them even where they sat. Against the wind they ran, and the sails bulged full and hard as though carved from marble—only a slight flutter near the mast showed how close to the wind Chesney was holding her. He shouted like a Viking with the fierce fun of it, as the spume slapped his face now and then with the topping of a bigger wave—exultant with that exultation in sheer health known only to the lately redeemed morphinomaniac. Amaldi thought him strangely effusive in his pleasure, for an Englishman. The more he saw of him the more distasteful he found Chesney. He sat balanced on the upper side of the cock-pit, gazing steadily forward. Peppin lay flat on deck to windward. The whole lake was now one welter of white and indigo.
But though for a while his delight in this wild game with wind and water shut out lesser things, by the time that the Inverna had romped with him for half an hour, Chesney felt chilled to the bone. Pride kept him from admitting it. He was vexed to think that Amaldi's warning had been justified. Also, it annoyed him that he should not have sufficient vital force to resist getting chilled by a whiff of wind on a day so mild as this. Anne Harding had told him that he was not yet so "almighty strong as he thought himself, by a long shot."
He reached Villa Bianca two hours later, feeling rather moody, and with a nasty, teasing pain in his legs and the small of his back.