"I'll say nothing until he is safe in Normandy," she decided.
PART II
CHAPTER ONE
There is on an olive-covered slope near the Mediterranean a certain shabby pink villa which is remarkable for one thing. In it, years ago, dwelt for a long time a man and a woman who, having no legal right to love, yet not only loved, but were perfectly happy. They lived almost alone, they had little money, the house was shabby even then, they had few servants and but indifferent Italian food, and nothing but old-fashioned tin baths to wash in. Yet they were English, and they were happy because they loved each other so much that nothing else mattered. Now this phrase about nothing else mattering is as common in love affairs as the pathetic abuse of the poor old word eternity; but in the case I instance, it fitted. Nothing else did matter. Not even, to any extent, the presence of the one child that had come to them. Contrary to all ethical and reasonable law, these two sinners were happy in their pink house by the sea, and years after they had left it there seemed to hang about the old place a kind of atmosphere of romance, as if the sun and the moon, that have seen so much changeableness, loved still to look down at the place where two human beings had been faithful to each other.
These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent, ungenial guest.
The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came. He, a slim, blond, exceedingly well-dressed little man, was attached to the Russian Embassy in London, in some more or less permanent quality, having given up his secretaryship after a miserable sojourn in a Continental city that he and his wife both hated.
They had money enough to live comfortably, in the quiet way they both liked, in England, and a year before that November his mother had died, leaving them the richer by a few hundred pounds a year. So they were well-off in the sense that they had plenty of money to spend, and the certainty that their children would one day be in still better circumstances.
One day in January Mrs. de Lensky was sitting on the floor in the brick-floored nursery, building a Moorish palace for her son, aged eighteen months.