Giles led the way with alacrity; he longed to have Jocelyn to himself, with all the concentrated longing of many hours of repression. Mrs. Travis was soon in rapt admiration of the shrubs and flowers; and she impressed Nielsen into her service to make a bargain in French with the florist proprietor, for a weekly provision of flowers to be sent to Mentone, standing by to afford assistance; she had a great and wholly warranted faith in her powers of cheapening things.
Giles and Jocelyn strolled away from them, and were soon hidden by the thick palm foliage. The garden wound up and down in a mass of flowering plants and scented shrubs.
“It’s a kind of paradise,” said Giles, “rather cut and dried in parts.”
“Yes,” Jocelyn assented—“‘the trail of the florist is over it all.’ But the scents are good; I love the dear flowers.” She plucked a spray of roses daringly, and pinned them in the breast of her dress.
“I was always a thief with flowers, you know; I can’t help it, I have to steal them.”
Presently they followed a little path running upwards at the top of the garden. It led them on to a rocky knoll over which, in a ring of spikey aloes and grotesque prickly pears, a shady olive spread its shimmering branches like a tent. Jocelyn seated herself beneath it, looking down upon the wilderness of the garden foliage. In her white skirt and pale silver-green blouse, she looked like the spirit of the tree, as she leant against the trunk with the yellow sunlight playing fantastically on her through the quivering leaves.
A bare and stony hill sloped behind them, planted here and there with vines and rose-trees, which served only to throw into a greater relief its yellow-grey harshness. In front, the tangled masses of palms and plants, the plain, unpretentious white houses straggling along the shore, and the straight line of the railway running beside the sea, gave the scene the unfinished look of some sub-tropical settlement. Across the dipped valley, under the lee of a high, rounded hill covered with olives and glancing green fig-trees, a little church spire rose modestly and incongruously out of a mass of palms.
Giles, who had turned the brim of his Panama hat down, like a mushroom, over his neck, lay on his face in the sun, looking up at Jocelyn. Her beauty, and the impelling, passionate yearning within him, deprived him helplessly of the power of speech. She was sitting with her hand on Shikari’s head, smelling at the flowers in her dress, her figure swaying a little as she hummed to herself.
Her cheeks were still flushed, and her eyes bright from that strange emotion.
She began to sing a little Finnish song that he knew well, with notes that suggested “sobbing” for a refrain. She had a tiny voice, “niedlich,” as the Germans say. But in the middle of a verse she stopped suddenly and pointed with her ungloved hand at a large, yellow-fanged drover’s dog, which had appeared on the side of the knoll. Shikari sprang up with a growl, his teeth showing. The two dogs approached one another snarling, and before Giles could rise to prevent them, had each other by the throat, and were rolling over and over on the ground. He leaped hastily to his feet, and gripped Shikari hard by the collar; getting a purchase with his foot against the other dog’s shoulder, with a violent, pushing kick, he sent him sprawling down the slope.