“He wasn’t a beast. He was quite nice. You came near seeing him.”
“I did! When?”
“He was the man who was stopping in Paris at my hotel.—There, now you’re really angry! That’s the worst of telling anything. A woman should keep all her faults to herself.”
“And he saw us?”
She stared at him, surprised at his intuition. “How long have you known that?”
They were entering a tunnel hewn between rocks; they rose up scarred and forbidding, nearly meeting overhead.
She shuddered. “I wish we hadn’t come. It’s——”
Suddenly, like a guilty conscience left behind, the tunnel opened on to a platform. Far below lay a valley, trumpet-shaped and widening as it faded into the distance. It was snow-white with lime-stone, and flecked here and there with blood-red earth. The sides of the hills were monstrous cemeteries, honeycombed with troglodyte dwellings. In the plain, like naked dancing girls with flying hair, olive-trees fluttered. Rocks, strewn through the greenness, seemed hides stretched out to dry. Men, white as lepers, were crawling to and fro in the lime-stone quarries. Straight ahead, cleaving the valley with its shadow, rose a sheer column—a tower of Babel, splintered by the sunset. As they gazed across the gulf to its summit, they made out roofs and ivy-spattered ramparts. It looked deserted. Then across the distance from the ethereal height the chiming of bells sounded.
He drew her to him. It was as though with one last question, he was putting all their doubts behind. “Was it true about that man?”
“Quite true. Fluffy gave him my address. Let’s forget him now, and—and everything.”