Nino grinned. “Molto, molto!” he said cheerfully. “But I slept well, and I shall bathe, and then it will be as if I had drunk no more than a glass of water.”
“And will you confess that to the priest?” asked Colin.
“It may have gone from my mind,” said Nino. “God only remembers everything. And indeed I do not know much about last night, but that I enjoyed myself.”
“That’s all that is worth remembering about anything,” remarked Colin.
A long bathe followed, and a bask on the beach and again a bathe. Then came lunch, lying in a strip of shadow and stories from Nino, and sleep, and it was not till late in the afternoon that Colin found himself reluctantly loitering back to the villa where Violet awaited him. He beguiled himself with wondering what he would do if she were not there; if, as in some fairy-tale, she had disappeared leaving no trace behind. But hardly had he come within sight of the white garden wall when he saw her out on the balcony of his room. She waved at him, as if she had gone there to catch the first sight of him, and then disappeared. Next moment she was at the garden-gate, walking down to meet him. Was there news, perhaps from England. Raymond? His father?
“What is it?” he asked, as he came within speaking distance. “Nothing wrong?” (“Nothing right?” would have expressed his thought more accurately.)
“Nothing,” said she, “I only came to meet you. Nice day?”
“Delicious. Long bathe, good lunch, long sleep. Stories from Nino.”
Colin hesitated a moment. He was rather curious to see what Violet would think of last night.
“Nino’s an amusing youth,” he said. “He came up here as I told you, for the money I owed him, and so I gave him a glass of wine, two in fact. He told me the most horrible tales about Tiberius and others, and then got frightfully drunk. He simply couldn’t walk, and slept on the sofa in the dining-room.”