His own rendering of the situation was plain—“Ripe fruit, ready to fall to the ground.”
They entered the cab, driving into the great worldwideness. And Riska, with her impatient mouth and pretty face, she also, in her stormy way, had gone in quest of youngness.
CHAPTER XLV—LOVE KNOCKS AT KAY’S DOOR
The castle stood like a gleaming skull, balancing on the edge of a precipice. The centuries had picked it clean. Through empty sockets, about which moss gathered, it watched white wings of shipping flit mothlike across the blue waters of the Gulf of Spezia. It had been the terror of sailors once—a stronghold of pirates, Saracens and Genoese, fierce men who had built the hunchback town that huddled against the rocks behind it. Now it was nothing but a crumbling shell, picturesque and meaningless save to tourists and artists. The tourists came because Byron had written The Corsair in its shadow, and the artists——.
One of them had left his canvas on an easel in a broken archway. Kay tripped across and looked at it—a wild piece of composition, all white and green and orange, splashed in with vigor, with the fierce Italian sky above it. It interpreted the spirit of the place—its loneliness, its lawless past, its brooding sense of unsatisfied passion. She turned away, awed by its power, a little frightened by its intensity. It made her feel that, from behind tumbled mastery, eyes were gazing at her. Climbing the splintered tower, she watched the sunset. In the great stillness she could hear stones dropping down the sheer cliff into the racing tide beneath.
She had forgotten how time was passing. That low bass humming! It was the voice of the sea; it seemed as though the sun’s voice spoke to her. Across the blue of the Mediterranean a golden track led up to the horizon. At its end a fiery disc hung, like a gong against which the waves tapped gently.
It had been a tumultuous day—a day of excited fears, winged hopes and strategies. Harry was coming. Peter had received the astounding telegram that morning.
“Queer chap! This was sent off from Genoa. He’s almost here by now. Why on earth didn’t he let us know earlier?”