It was at Ventimiglia that the capostazione himself appeared at the door of their compartment, accompanied by a uniformed official. The two fugitives, with their hearts in their mouths, leaned back on their cushions with assumed unconcern, cooing and chattering hand in hand among their flowers, while a volley of quick and angry questions, in Italian, was flung in at them from the opened compartment door. To this they paid not the slightest attention, for several moments. Frank turned to her interrogators, smiled at them gently and impersonally, and then shook her head impatiently, with an outthrust of the hands which was meant to convey to them that each and every word they uttered was quite incomprehensible to her.
The capostazione, who, by this time, had pushed into their compartment, was heatedly demanding either their passports or their tickets.
Frank, who had buried her face raptly in her armful of jonquils, looked up at him with gentle exasperation.
"We are English," she said blankly. "English! We can't understand!" And she returned to her flowers and her husband once more.
The two uniformed intruders conferred for a moment, while the conduttore, on the platform outside, naturally enough expostulated over the delay of the train.
"These fools—these aren't the two!" Frank heard the capostazione declare, in Italian, under his breath, as they swung down on the station platform. Then the shrill little thin-noted engine-whistle sounded, the wheels began to turn, and they were once more speeding through the white moonlight, deeper and deeper into Italy.
"I wonder," said Frank, after a long silence, "how often we shall be able to do this sort of thing? I wonder how long luck—mere luck, will be with us?"
"Is it luck?" asked her husband. She was still leaning back on his shoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousness of escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come over her, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentient and mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could both command and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional hunger in her own heart.
"Yes," she answered, as she laughed a little, almost contentedly; "we're like the glass snake. We seem to break off at the point where we're caught, and escape, and go on again as before. I was only wondering how many times a glass snake can leave its tail in its enemy's teeth, and still grow another one!"
And although she laughed again Durkin knew how thinly that covering of facetiousness spread over her actual sobriety of character. It was like a solitary drop of oil on quiet water—there was not much of it, but what there was must always be on the surface.