Often as he lingered in his garden, he would look up and imagine her standing in the doorway of the cottage in a frame of roses. She seemed to complete the picture so perfectly. What a pity she was not there. Well, one can’t have everything. True, he might ask her to marry him. But the idea of marriage dismayed him; it seemed so irrevocable. Romance ended there, he told himself. He was only twenty-three and a lifetime is long to spend with one woman. An early marriage is a mistake, so every one said. He missed her companionship awfully, but there! ... no doubt in time he would get used to the loss of her!
2.
It was curious how far away Monte Carlo seemed. Unfamiliar mountains heaved up behind him; another topaz hoop separated him from the gloomy rock and the glittering point. Sometimes he would sail his little boat far out, and from the shadow of his sail, watch the poisoned paradise. It seemed to him like a dream picture, rising in terraced beauty from the azure of the sea. The Casino glittered like a heap of jewels, and the mountains brooded in violet abstraction. All was loveliness,—creamy beach and cradled harbour, palms and olive groves, snowy villas gleaming in green gardens, and shining slopes of pine. He gazed at it with rapture,—then shuddered at the thought of all that lay behind.
For Monte Carlo may be all things to all men, the most adorable spot in the world or the most hateful. And to him, filled with the moral strength that is born of peace, the place was increasingly detestable. Its beauty was the fatal beauty of a glorious courtesan, its people parasites living on the folly and depravity of mankind. From prince to page-boy they were dependent on that great temple of chance into which poured streams of gold from all the world. Its white range of palaces were to him the symbol of all that was weak and wanton in human nature.
As he sat in the shadow of his sail he recalled them all so plainly, the spendthrift and the starveling, the derelict and the degenerate, swirling round in the eternal circle of that greater wheel which symbolizes the whole, unable to extricate themselves, being drawn nearer and nearer to that vortex which is ruin.
He detested it all now and saw it with other eyes. He had escaped its lures. Never again would he set foot in its polluted halls.
Then one day a shadow fell across his path and looking up he saw Bob Bender.
3.
Bob, rusty and creaky as ever, looked singularly out of place in his radiant garden.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, rubbing his hands together with a rasping sound, “for interruptin’ your horticulturous provocations.”