"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying as Maurice came up to her and Artois. "Do you wonder that we love it?"
"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.
He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue piled up with cushions, facing the great and radiant view. After he had spoken he sighed.
"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really know that this is Eden. That knowledge has been reserved for the interloper, for me."
Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing by the wall, listening furtively to the noises from the out-house, where Gaspare was unsaddling the donkeys. Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply conscious of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long journey, which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed an enchanted place of peace, a veritable Elysian Field in which the saddest, the most driven man must surely forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful in repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had been living in paradise, who ought surely to have been learning its blessed lessons through sunlit days and starry nights, was restless like a man in a city, was anxious, was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this man, Artois had thought of the messenger, poised on winged feet, radiantly ready for movement that would be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different! As Artois was thinking this Maurice moved.
"Excuse me just for an instant!" he said. "I want to speak to Gaspare."
He saw now that Gaspare was taking into the cottage the provisions that had been carried up by the donkey from Marechiaro.
"I—I told him to do something for me in the village," he added, "and I want just to know—"
He looked at them, almost defiantly, as if he challenged them not to believe what he had said. Then, without finishing his sentence, he went quickly into the cottage.
"You have chosen your garden well," Artois said to Hermione directly they were alone. "No other sea has ever given to me such an impression of tenderness and magical space as this; no other sea has surely ever had a horizon-line so distant from those who look as this."