“Gone to tea.”
“Oh, tea!”—she looked at her watch.
“And what brought you here? Were you afraid I should be briganded between the Messina gate and the hotel?”
“Not in the least. I should as soon expect you to have an encounter with the shade of Dionysios.”
She began to stroll round the face of the grass slope which sweeps up to where the poorer people stood to see the plays.
“Nina would not agree with you,” she said suddenly; “she throws out mysterious hints of bad characters in Sicily.”
“I daresay. If one went into the interior and out of the beaten track, for instance; but here, where strangers are their best harvest, they wouldn’t be disposed to snipe them. Self-interest would go hand-in-hand with law and order, you see.”
“And that’s the best you’ll say?”
“Oh, well,” he allowed carelessly, “I own they’re wretchedly poor and I shouldn’t like to live myself on a hunch of bread and a root of fennel. Won’t you sit down?”
She turned to answer, hesitated, finally dropped on the grass. A lighter, tenderer view lay before them here. For now the sea filled the openings between the brickwork—the many-coloured sea along which Ulysses rowed—and there was the line of coast above which Polyphemus herded his flocks, and flung Cyclopean rocks at his tormentors.