"Why land?" she said. "Why climb the steps to the chatter in the villa?"
"Why indeed?"
"They are not singing! They are talking. There is deep, sweet shadow around that point."
The boat turned glidingly. Now it was under tall rock, parapeted with trees.
"Let Giovanni have the boat. Come and sit beside me! You are too far away for singing together."
Old Giovanni at the helm, boatman upon this lake since youth, used long since to murmuring words, to touching hands, stayed brown and wrinkled and silent and unspeculative as a walnut. Perhaps his mind was sunk in his own stone hut behind vine leaves. The two under the rose-and-white-fringed canopy leaned toward each other.
"Tell me of your strange, foreign land! Have you roses there—roses—roses? And nightingales that sing out your heart under the moon?"
"I will tell you of the heather, the lark, and the mavis."
She listened. "Oh, it does not taste as tastes this lake! Give me pain! Tell me of women you have loved.... Oh, hear! The nightingales stop singing."
"Do you ever listen to the silence?"