She roused herself presently and began to look out of the window with the remorseful feeling of one who has been neglecting an old friend for an acquaintance. After all, this was England, where she was born and where her mother had died, and she was leaving it perhaps for ever. She tried to fix the varying aspects of the spring in her mind for future reference; the tender green of the young larches in the plantation, the pale gold of the primroses, and the flowering gorse close to the line, the square grey towers of the village churches, even the cold, pinched faces of the people waiting on the platforms of the little stations. Italy would be otherwise, and she might never see these familiar things again.
When the train rushed out on to the pier at Dover she dared not look back at the white cliffs, but kept her eyes resolutely seaward. The wind was high, and she heard that the crossing would be rough. Cæsar was close behind her, and she caught a glimpse of him going aft as she made her way to the ladies’ cabin.
She lay down on one of the red velvet divans in the stuffy saloon, and closed her eyes as she had been advised to do, and in ten minutes her misery was complete.
“If you are going to be ill nothing will stop you,” observed the sympathetic stewardess. “It is like Monte Carlo. Most people have a system, and sometimes they win, but they are bound to lose in the end. Champagne, munching biscuits, patent medicines, lying down as you are now. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit, my dear.”
Olive joined feebly in her laugh. “I feel better now. Are we nearly there?”
“Just coming into harbour.”
“Thank heaven!”
When Olive crawled up on deck her one idea, after her luggage, was to avoid anyone who had seemed to admire her. She could not bear that the man should see her green face, and she was grateful to him for keeping his distance in the crush to get off the boat, and for disappearing altogether in the station. A porter in a blue linen blouse piloted her to the waiting train, and she climbed into the compartment labelled “Turin,” and settled herself in a window seat.
The country between Calais and Paris can only be described as flat, stale and unprofitable by a beauty lover panting for the light and glow and colour of the South, and Olive soon got a book out of her bag and began to read. Her only fellow-passenger, a middle-aged English lady with an indefinite face, spoke to her presently. “You are reading a French novel?”
“No, it is in Italian. La Città Morta, by Gabriele D’Annunzio. I want to rub up my few words of the language.”