They went from dinner out into the garden. The night, like that other night in the bay of Oban, was rather a sort of fairy day, except that here the world was illumined by a great yellow moon beginning to emerge from the distant tree tops, while there the sun seemed merely to have gone behind a colored window.
The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the first terrace beside those exquisite pools rimmed with marble. The Duke and Caroline walked on, moved by that vague wanderlust with which this mysterious dead world seems to inspire every living creature when it moves naked and golden above the earth. They descended slowly from one terrace to another along the paths of the Italian garden to the green tile wall of the Egyptian garden. The soft white light, the broad stretches of delicate shadow, and these perfect gardens, lying one below the other, enveloped the world with an atmosphere of sorcery.
To the man this was no real land. This was some delicate, vague kingdom of illusion. It would presently vanish. There could be only an hour of it, and the value of that hour he could not measure.
It seemed to the man, walking slowly beside the girl, that he had purchased this hour at some staggering hideous cost. He must go when the hour struck, hack as he had come, through the door in the hill. There was no time, no time! The object, the sole moving object of every day that he had lived, of every day that he would yet live, seemed to converge into these moments that escaped with the sound of his feet moving in this garden. How they sped away, these moments, and how big with fate they were!
Suddenly the man spoke. "Do you know," he said, "why I have come?"
"Yes," replied the girl, "I know. You came to see if the shadow of Asia were lying on a British possession."
"No," he said, "I did not come for that. The thing that made me come was the thing that made my uncle go down to that dead pool on the coast of Brittany. I have done better than my uncle."