'This,' he replied, tearing it into pieces.
'You are angry. Oh, Julian, I love you for being reckless.'
'I see red. He threatens me with disinheriting me. He takes good care to remain in Stavridis' good books himself. Do you want to go back?'
'No, Julian.'
'Of course, father is quite right: I am insane, and so are you. But, after all, you will run no danger, and as far compromising you, that is absurd: we have often been alone together before now. Besides,' he added brutally, 'you said yourself you belonged to the Islands no less than I; you can suffer for them a little if necessary.'
'I make no complaint,' she said with an enigmatic smile.
They dined together near the fountain in the courtyard, and overhead the sky grew dark, and the servant brought lighted candles for the table. Julian spoke very little; he allowed himself the supreme luxury of being spoilt by a woman who made it her business to please him; observing her critically, appreciatively; acknowledging her art; noting with admiration how the instinct of the born courtesan filled in the gaps in the experience of the child. He was, as yet, more mystified by her than he cared to admit.
But he yielded himself to her charm. The intimacy of this meal, their first alone together, enveloped him more and more with the gradual sinking of night, and his observant silence, which had originated with the deliberate desire to test her skill and also to indulge his own masculine enjoyment, insensibly altered into a shield against the emotion which was gaining him. The servant had left them. The water still plashed into the marble basin. The candles on the table burned steadily in the unruffled evening, and under their light gleamed the wine—rough, native wine, red and golden—in the long-necked, transparent bottles, and the bowl of fruit: grapes, a cut melon, and bursting figs, heaped with the lavishness of plenty. The table was a pool of light, but around it the court and cloisters were full of dim, mysterious shadows.