“Buona Sera! Buona Sera!” The words were in the distant croaking of the frogs, on every murmur of the breaking waves.
As he drew his breath freely again after the steep ascent, he looked far out over the cliffs, to the westward, in the still evening light, and his thoughts flew to the girl as she had stood on the hotel steps waving her hand to him. How he loved the delicate, dainty figure, the turn of the slender neck, the pure line of her profile, the softly pointed chin! He pictured her as she had sat under the olive in the afternoon, looking up at the sky through the delicate tracery of its leaves—the creamy white line of the pretty throat bent back, the long, supple hands lying in her lap. He felt an intense, unreasoning delight that, for good or evil, he had told her of his love; then an infinite, tender compassion for her tremulous silence, for the little, swaying, helpless motion of her head and hands, for the swift, dewy glance of her dark eyes.
She knew—nothing could take that from him; she knew, and she had been glad to know.
Now that the keynote had been struck, all the deep chords, unstirred for so many years in his mind, sounded with a full consonance; all the great, unsatisfied longing hitherto unshadowed in his deeply affectionate nature had taken to itself shape, all the vast gambling possibility in him was fiercely aroused.
The latent force, the unspent passion of the years that he had idled away, shallow and indifferent, in a long, unbroken compromise with life, asserted themselves now with a fatal vehemence. He was not a man who could love without passion. Passion would play its full part in his love, neither more nor less; and he knew it.
In the changes that his mind rang on the situation, and the bewildered jangling of his thoughts, the idea of recoil was the only one that did not come to him. He would go forward, at what cost he did not know, he did not stop to count. He hugged to himself, undiscerning of what it meant, the defeat of the eternal compromise.
Again he moved homewards, now idling slowly along, and her words, “The evening is coming over everything, like a cool blessing, gentle—gentle,” sounded in his ears, and he could see again her arms outstretched as though to take it to herself.
He came presently through the scented night to the villa, and let himself in with a sudden, chill feeling of utter languor. He flung himself into a long chair in the unlighted drawing-room, and, worn out, fell fast asleep.
To Irma, as she raised the curtains that divided the room from her own boudoir, there was the look of a wrecked man about him as he lay there. The long figure was thrown carelessly down in its dusty, white clothes, the neck bent slightly back, and the head rested on an arm twisted behind him. A bar of yellow light from the half-shaded lamp she held in her hand fell across his lean, sun-tanned face and neck, sharpening the features, and throwing into relief the lines which seam a man’s face when sleep follows on the fiercer emotions. She set the lamp upon a table, and stood, leaning painfully against the wall, thinking.
Her husband! those two words were the epitome of her thoughts. She bent forward, and gazed at him long and closely, as if she had never seen him before. How tired he looked! After all, it was the face of a stranger!—ten years of married life, and the face of a stranger! She smiled, a very weary smile. A fine face, with a good brow and chin, now that it was rid of the mask it had worn to her these ten years! She read in its lines things she had never known were there, and another woman had brought them into the face! That was the mischief of it! and the pain! She passed her thin hand across her eyes with a sudden, swift gesture. In her own mind, too, she was finding things she had not suspected. She had thought it impossible she should ever feel that pain, that sudden jealous spasm.