She picked up the glasses again and set them with her gaze seaward before answering. Thus the shadow of her hands screened any emotion—if emotion there were—on her face.
"I have not been happy here, all the time," she answered softly, readjusting the glass, or pretending to. "Not by any means. San Ramon to me is a hole.… Yes," she went on deliberately, "I know well what you are going to say. I have you: but I want something more—something I have always wanted and, it seems to me, every woman always wants—something beyond the sky-line. In Sydney, now—"
"You'll find there's a sky-line waiting for you at Sydney," said Farrell; "as like to this one as two peas—and just as impossible to get beyond"—which mayn't seem very good grammar, but is how he said it. "Now to me a sky-line's a sky-line—just something to have you standing against."
"You shall have a kiss for that, caballero—in a moment," she purred, and slanted the binoculars down to bear on the beach. "Only one passenger," she announced.
"Usual inspector, no doubt," said Farrell, rolling a cigarette.
"Ye-es—by the look of him.… Oh, there's Ylario, all right, talking to the boatman!… He must be a stranger, I think—by the way he's staring up at the town."
"Ylario was bred and born here; of uncertain parents, to be sure—"
She laughed. "Foolish!… I meant the inspector, of course."
"What's he like?" asked Farrell. "Report."
She lowered the glass, twisted the screw of it idly, and returned to her hammock-chair, beside which she set it down on the veranda floor.