Without saying a word she put out her hand, and her slender fingers fell like bars of ice across his burning palm. Then she said—
“Will you come with me up the hill a little? If there is peace anywhere, it will be among the olives.”
His heart beat violently, giving him a sense of suffocation.
They left the dusty road, and mounted the banks silently, twisting in and out up the narrow path over slopes covered with yellow broom and magenta gladiolus, with snowy garlic flower, purple vetch, and masses of mauve wild thyme. The scent from the pine needles and the sage-plant rose from the cooling earth as the heat of the vivid, glaring day gave way under the clouds driven up by the rising wind.
At first, as they climbed the steep ascent, a rush of relief, a joyous flowing of his blood at being near her again, carried him away past all power of reason and doubt. It was happiness, just to see her slender figure swaying, as she mounted two paces in front of him, to hear her lightly-drawn breath, to catch the perfume of her hair, the half glimpse of her profile as the path twisted. But long before they stopped there had come a returning agony of doubt. What would she say when she at last spoke? What were they to be to each other in the future? Had he sinned beyond forgiveness? With one step he felt a mad spasm of hope, with the next the dull throb of a blank despair; and always with him, like the cloud left by a bad dream, was the grim shadow of his wife’s awakening beside the little table, in that darkened room.
They were high up now among the olives, and neither had spoken. A gloomy, purple hue had spread like a pall over the broken ridges of the mountains, which ran inland to the west. It shaded up from the surf-girt, murky sea, and deepened on the sides of the hills till it crowned the summit with a hard, blue line against the veiled sky. Upon the remote greyness of the westward sea the hidden sun threw a narrow streak of yellow light. Where the sun had travelled, far as the gloomy horizon, the violet waters brooded in long, broken ridges, and inshore little white waves hissed at the borders of shallow, turquoise pools.
The wind was sighing a mournful tune in gentle crescendo through the patient olives, whose knotted stems creaked a sad accompaniment. In the sinister colouring the vivid green of a tiny fig-tree made a single bright spot whereon the eye rested gratefully.
At the foot of a little tower, grey, ruined, and flanked by two towering cypresses, Jocelyn stopped, and, leaning against the broken stair, looked long and steadily over the sea. One small singing-bird was lifting the feeble requiem of the day’s departed glory, and from the valley came an occasional crowing of cocks; these, and the sigh of the wind, were the only sounds. Presently she spoke—
“I like that angry white blaze on the sea,” she said. Giles heard the even tones of her voice with wonder, but they served to steady him.
“Yes, it’s beautiful.” He was standing beside her, a tall figure, holding his hat in his hand, and taking deep breaths like a man that has come to the surface of water, after a long dive. He found it difficult to believe that he was actually at her side talking commonplaces, and he made a great effort to brace himself to meet what was coming. His impulse was to fling himself at her feet, but he stood straight and stiff, gnawing his moustache, and clenching his hands. Presently Jocelyn said, without looking at him—