An expression of disappointment crossed the other woman's face as she patted the girl's shoulder.
"Wait a little," she said. "You can't tell yet."
"I would have given a thousand drachma to have got to the train," said the girl moodily. "And I would give a million to get to Constantinople. This place stifles me. I hate it ... hate it."
She stood up suddenly, raising her hands to her magnificent coil of dark hair, and revealing the poise and vigour of her body. "Ah!" she moaned, bending over her friend and caressing her. "I am a bad girl, forgetting how ill you are. Evanthia is a bad, bad girl, with her troubles—and you have a visitor——" She turned her head for a moment and Mr. Spokesly was caught unawares in the brilliance of a dazzling yet enigmatic glance from the amber eyes.
"A friend of my husband's," said Mrs. Dainopoulos. "He is English, you know, like me. From London. We have been talking of London."
"Ah, yes!" The lingering syllables were a caress, yet there was no more comprehension in them than in the inarticulate sounds of an animal. The girl bent her dark head over the blonde masses on the pillow. "Forgive your bad girl, Alice."
"Oh, all right," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, emerging with an embarrassed English smile. "Only you must be good now and go back to bed. There's Boris coming in."
"I am going!" said the girl and started. And then she remembered Mr. Spokesly sitting there in dumb stupefaction, his gaze following her, and she turned to make him a bow with a strange, charming gesture of an out-flung hand towards him. The next moment she dragged the door open and passed out.
He looked up to see Mrs. Dainopoulos regarding him thoughtfully, and he made a sudden step forward in life as he realized the ineffectiveness of any words in his vocabulary to express his emotions at that moment. He made no attempt to corrupt the moment, however, which was perhaps another step forward. He sat silent, looking at the glowing end of his cigarette, endeavouring to recapture the facile equilibrium of mind which had been his as he followed Mr. Dainopoulos through the gateway an hour or so before. But that was impossible, for it was gone, though he did not know it, for ever. He was trying to remember the name Mrs. Dainopoulos had called her. Evanthia! And once at the beginning, Miss Solaris. Something like that. Evanthia Solaris. He said to himself that it was a pretty name, and was conscious at the same time of the inadequacy of such a word. There was something beyond prettiness in it; something of a spring morning in the Cyclades, when the other islands come up out of the mist like hummocks of amethyst and the cicadas shrill in the long grass under the almond trees. There was in it an adumbration of youth beyond his experience, a hint of the pulsing and bizarre vitality of alien races, a vitality fretted into white wrath by her will and her desire, as the serene breath of the morning is suddenly lashed into a tempest by the howling fury of an Ægean white squall. She was gone, yet the room was still charged with her magnetic presence, so that Mr. Dainopoulos came in quietly, put down his tweed cap, and seated himself beside his wife, and Mr. Spokesly scarcely noticed his arrival.
As he became aware of outside phenomena once more—and he was rather frightened to discover how his thoughts had flown out into the unknown darkness in search of the girl—he saw that Mr. Dainopoulos was preoccupied and anxious. They were speaking in a low tone and in a foreign tongue, Mr. Spokesly noted. He recalled a story he had read in a magazine some little time before—a story of an Englishman who had a most miraculous command of foreign languages, who overheard a conversation which revealed a plot to destroy the British Army. The plot was revealed by the simple process of torturing a beautiful girl of neutral origin who was to be forced to marry a brutal enemy colonel. It did not occur to Mr. Spokesly to reflect that beautiful girls are usually eager to marry colonels of any denomination, or that colonels do not usually blend love and espionage. But he did notice the extreme improbability of an Englishman being a linguist. It made the tale seem unreal and artificial. Especially when the story added that he was a naval officer of good family who afterwards married the beautiful neutral and settled in a castle in Dalmatia. Fanciful! Mr. Spokesly knew enough of naval officers to doubt the dénouement. He himself, for that matter, would rather live in a bungalow in Twickenham than in Dalmatia. As for foreign girls—he rubbed his chin, puzzled over his own blurred sensations. Mr. Dainopoulos was speaking again. The woman lay back, looking up at the high ceiling, an expression of calm and careful consideration on her face, which was illuminated sharply, like an intaglio, by the lamp. And Mr. Spokesly experienced a shock to discover that they were not speaking of the girl at all. They seemed to have forgotten her existence. They looked at him and so brought him into the conversation.