'Look out, Dick,' cried Norah, wise in the ways of cattle. 'He's coming for you.'
But Dick would not have been quick enough to escape the fate of the goat, had not Norah presented a stick to the oncoming muzzle. Faced with the alternative of bumping his nose, or abandoning his objective, scared and nervy, rather than ugly-tempered, he shambled off, lowing, to the after end of the ship.
'Brute,' said Dick, but Norah followed and had her late opponent slobbering his wet muzzle into her sleeve.
His owner, the Arab, in a hurry to start his hundred-mile walk home, had rowed back to shore to collect his herd boys, who lay on the beach, at the edge of the lapping water. His white-robed figure was visible for a moment on the path leading into the hills behind the village, before it disappeared among the trees. The voices of his ragged followers were audible a little longer, then silence fell as the village settled for the night. Blue smoke rose through every roof and hovered in a mist over the village; the smell of wood fires and cooking was added to the faintly saline breath of the Lake. Presently the moon came up and touched with silver the crest of every ripple. Across the glittering pathway slid the silhouette of a canoe and, lying in her bows, an adolescent began to twang a native guitar."
CHAPTER II
Telling the story a fortnight later, Norah said that this evening offered her the last peace and contentment she was to know. I fancy one must have youth as well as a good digestion on one's side to feel peaceful and content a few weeks after deserting a devoted husband. But scruples, if women ever have them, lapse in love, and more fully I imagine when the game is played with so splendid a partner in so romantic a scene.
All her life, Norah had taken to romance, as other folk take to drink, or politics. The cure, you shall see, was drastic.
As a child, she had run wild. Her mother had died at her birth, and her father was interminably engaged in a series of unsuccessful operations on the markets, the turf, or the tables. A succession of governesses threw in their hands after a brief attempt, unbacked by any parental authority, to control her. From them, however, she learned to read and write, and from the coachman, to swear. Otherwise, she had little regular education.
She made up for it in the great dilapidated library where she browsed, uncontrolled, among the great debris of the past. Poetry, drama, novels, history, it did not matter, so long as it had a story and a swing. Not a very high criterion, perhaps, but it led her to Shakespeare, and the Arabian Nights, Marlowe and Webster, Froissart and Hakluyt, Chaucer, Drayton, Otway, Defoe, Byron. There seemed to be a wonderful world waiting for her, wonderful lands to visit, wonderful deeds to dare, wonderful men to meet.