“Isn’t it enough?”
He seemed to be striving either to say something or not to say something, Nancy did not know which. Then he shivered.
“Come along, it’s beginning to turn chilly as the sun gets behind the hills. Let’s go and have a fashionable tea at the Victoria, and book a table for to-night.”
After dinner they sat in the lounge and watched the sophisticated tarantella that was splashed on the tourists three times a week as from a paint-pot of gaudy local colour. Followed luscious songs and mandolinades, and shortly before midnight the capo d’anno procession arrived to sing the song of the New Year. It was accompanied by a band of queer primitive instruments; but the most important feature of the celebration was a bay-tree, which was banged on the floor to mark the time of the rhythmical refrain throughout the song’s many verses. Everybody drank everybody’s else health; the elderly English and American women twinkled at the inspiration of an extra glass of vermouth; all was music and jollity.
The moonlight was dazzling when Kenrick and Nancy left the hotel, the air coldly spiced with the scent of mandarins. He proposed a walk to shake off the fumes, and, though she was feeling sleepy after a long day in the open air followed by the long evening’s merrymaking, Nancy had not the heart to say that she would rather go home to bed. They wandered through the alleys now in darkness, now in a vaporous sheen of grey light, now full in the sharp and glittering eye of the moon. The naked arms of the walnut-trees and figs shimmered ashen-pale. Here and there a gust of perfume from the orange-groves waylaid them to hang upon its sweetness like greedy moths. After twenty minutes of meandering through these austere blazonries of argent and sable they turned back toward the albergo and followed their shadows away from the soaring moon, their little shadows that hung round their feet like black velvet, so rich seemed they and so substantial upon the dusty silver of the path.
All was still when they reached the albergo, and the porcelain tiles of the balcony were sparkling in the moonshine like aquamarines.
“Good night,” said Nancy, pausing in the doorway of her room. “And once more a happy New Year!”
Kenrick stood motionless for an instant. Then he stepped forward quickly into the doorway and caught Nancy to him.
“You can’t say good night like this,” he gasped.
She struggled to free herself from the kiss he had forced upon her. In her physical revolt against him the lips pressed to hers felt like the dry hot hide of some animal.