When they reached the hotel, he took his leave of them. Jocelyn turned on the steps.
“Buona Sera! my friend!” she said. “Buona Sera!” She gave him her hand for a second time. Her eyes looked unnaturally large in the uncertain light. Giles stood with his hat off till she had disappeared—he could not speak.
CHAPTER VIII
The sun sank, leaving a pale glory of silver-green light over the clear-cut edges of the mountain range. Masses of heavy, purple clouds threatened the silver halo, and in the remote west, a smoky, yellow flare lingered over the Esterelles. One little star trembled like a pure spirit above the highest peaks, and under the Tête du Chien the closely coiled ring of lights at Monte Carlo twinkled through the growing darkness.
Far away, up an inland valley, a single splash of crimson light showed where some chance fire raged unchecked among the mountain forest-growth. Through the perfume of orange trees a floating smoke-wrack of burning wood spent itself upon the warm air. The air was full too of early evening sounds—the barking of dogs, the crack of a whip lash, the hardly-caught metallic murmur of human voices, the rattle of a receding train, and over all the croaking of the frogs, and the sighing of the sea.
Giles swung along the road on his way back to the villa like a man in a dream.
“Buona Sera!—buona Sera!”—the words rang in his ears. The blood was coursing through his veins, and his pulses beat wildly. For the time he was no longer conscious of that ever haunting thought, “What the devil was he doing in that galley?” He let himself go on the flood tide of his passion. Jocelyn’s image danced along the road in front of him. He saw her pale face, under her shady hat, looking at him with soft, dark eyes, through the dim shadows of every road-side tree.
He had walked, like a man possessed, up the long hill to the Pont St. Louis. The gendarmes whom he passed at the Customs looked after him curiously.
“Buona Sera! There is one who marches, hein? Diabe enragé d’un Anglais. Peste! he has not stopped for the gambler’s leap. Buona Sera, signore!” In the alternative they decided that he had broken the bank.
“Buona Sera!” Over the bridge, with its sheer descent to the dim caves on the one side, and the twinkling cottage lights on the other, and up and still up the hill. He could smell the perfume of her dress in every evening scent, in the salt whiffs wafted from below, in the fragrance of the lonely pine trees above the road.