letter I found waiting for me.

“From Violet?” she said.

His eyebrows contracted as if with a twinge of pain.

“Yes. Oh, no bad news. Excellent news: she’s getting on wonderfully well without me. Hopes I am enjoying myself very much----”

“I join her in that wish,” said Pamela.

“I know you do, bless you, and it would be black and ungrateful of me if I didn’t recognize that. My dear, you’ve been such a godsend, coming here to sit on the perch with the moping owl.”

“You mustn’t mope,” she said. “You’re an owl for moping, Colin.”

“I don’t mope except with you,” said he. “It’s shocking bad manners, I know, and yet it’s one of those involuntary compliments. Ooh, the relief of getting somebody who understands.”

His eyes left her face, dwelt hovering over her breast, and came back again.

“Help me, Pamela,” he said.

She leaned forward over the table. She loved this weakness and this appeal.

“Violet has used you abominably,” she said.

“No, no: you mustn’t say that,” he interrupted.

“But I must say that. I want to help you, my dear, and ah, how lovely it is that you ask me to try--and you must lay hold on that. She gets on wonderfully well without you, you told me. Let that rouse your pride. Don’t let your happiness suffer shipwreck over that. Heavens, if I found that anyone I was fond of got on wonderfully well without me, that would make me determined to get on just as well without him. I saw how charming and gentle you were with her at Stanier, and she gives you a stone----”

“She gives me nothing,” said he, in a voice suddenly harsh and bitter.

She put her hand on his as it lay on the table, and he felt her pulses leap at the contact.

“I like to hear you say that,” she said. “Say it again and again till the truth of it stings you. Realize it, make it part of yourself instead of looking at it from outside and mourning over it. Oh, my dear, have some pride! You aren’t going to let all your power of love and of happiness pour itself away into the sand of a desert! You’ve got enough power of happiness to light up the midnight. Don’t waste it.”

(“She’s going it rather well,” thought Colin, “and I’m not doing it badly.”)

“I know you’re right,” he said.

He raised his eyes to hers.

“Of course I’m right,” said she. “Oh, youth passes so quickly, and with it all power of real happiness, though you may tell me that you will like to be old.... Ah, what nonsense!... Colin, you’re so different to what I thought you at first. When first we met and made friends, you were all laughter and enjoyment. Who could have guessed that you knew sorrow or unrequited love?”

She paused a moment: in that gaze of his there was a light she had never seen there yet. So suffocatingly sweet to her was it, that she panted for breath.

“Don’t fence yourself in,” she said, “and mourn over ruins. Build with them: use ... use the stones you spoke of, to make a pleasure-house. Laugh to see them serve your end.”

He looked at her in amazement. There was enchantment and force in her, and her beauty was enough to make a man’s senses reel. Was this the strength of which Violet had spoken which was more potent than all else in the world?

Pamela leaned back her head, pushing the heavy black hair from her forehead.

“Open the curtains, Colin,” she said. “Let’s have some air; I’m stifling.”

Was she going to faint, he thought, or adopt some mean feminine device of her weakness to escape from the situation that was closing round her, and which she had done her best to provoke? That would be tragic.... He pulled back the curtain with a rattle of rings, and the still tide of the night swept in.

“Ah, that’s delicious!” she said.

“Not faint?” he asked. “Not overtired?”

“Not a bit. It was just a breath of air I wanted: our lovely little tent was concentrated, overcharged....”

“Are you sure?” he said. “Hadn’t you better go quietly to bed? It would be wretched if in return for the help and strength you bring me--ah, such help, such strength....”

If all the kingdoms of the world had been his, he would have staked them against a penny-piece on her answer. It was her hour, she was winning, so she thought, all down the line. This was not the moment for the victor to ask for a truce.

She rose from her chair and stood by him. The flame burst out from her, enveloping her in fire.

“It’s all yours,” she whispered. “All ... all.”

She swayed towards him, and he caught her close; her face was against his, and she sought his lips. No word, no whisper even came from her: dumbly she clung to him, and, exultant, he betrayed her with a kiss. The best and the worst of her, love, trust, and all that was merely sensual as well, were his.

For one second he wavered, and reconsidered. Partly it was the mere beauty and physical intensity of her that gave him pause, partly also something akin to what he had felt when he saw Dennis staggering on the terrace at Stanier. Then back, stronger than ever from the gathered force of that check, came his hatred of love.

“We must go in,” he said.... “Pamela, you adorable thing. Your pity first, and then your love.”

They paused at the head of the stairs. Not a word had passed since they left the table.

“But your maid next door ...?” he queried, and her smile told him she understood.

Colin went softly into his room. There was Nino’s bed along the wall, and Nino there already, awake and silent, and eager for any adventure of Colin’s contriving. He tore off his clothes, and, as he undressed, once or twice his eyes caught Nino’s, and he had to check himself from laughing aloud. He slid into bed, and clicked off the light.

There was no long waiting: there came a faint rattle from the door into Pamela’s room, but in the darkness nothing was visible there, and Colin heard the door close again, and the key turned. He could just hear her feet on the bare tiles of the floor, and then from close at hand a little bubbling laugh and his name softly called. The sheer happiness of love sounded in that whisper: it might have been Violet’s voice speaking to him on one of the nights of their honeymoon here, and he hated the inimitable thrill of it....

He reached his hand to the switches and turned them both on.

She was standing in the middle of the room just under the light from the ceiling. In that strong illumination the thin silk nightdress, which was all that covered her, was transparent as a veil of sun-pierced mist; her figure crowned by that bright flame of her face was clearly visible, and her apparelled magnificence was pale beside this luminous revealed perfection. Colin almost regretted that he had prepared this hellish surprise for her to-night. To-morrow would have done as well ... and yet, what thrill of physical love could rival this gorgeous humiliation? How superbly moral it was! The woman had tempted him, coming to him at solitary midnight in the blaze of her beauty, and for once the man, master of his soul, derided her seduction. But the infamy of the brothels of Sodom was nearer salvation than his chastity.

She heard a stir behind her and half-turned. There was Nino sitting upright in bed. Simultaneously Colin spoke.

“Hullo, here’s a pretty lady!” he said. “Has she come to visit you or me, Nino? I’ll pretend to be asleep, if you like.”

She turned back towards Colin as he spoke, and there came over her face just such a blanching, just such a stark terror as had struck the colour from Mr. Cecil’s. Colin’s laughing mouth, his dancing blue eyes, were close to her; in his hurry to be ready for her he had not put on his nightclothes, and over his slim suntanned body, as he sat up in bed, the skin-sheathed muscles rippled as he breathed, and at the sight, as if the horror of the Gorgon’s head had been shewn her, she turned to stone. Her arms made one stiff movement, as if drawing a cloak round her to hide her, and she went back to the door through which she had come. A violent trembling seized her; she could scarcely grasp the key in her fingers.

“The lock’s a little stiff,” said Colin. “Ah, that’s right. What a short visit! Good night, dear Pamela.”

Colin jumped out of bed the moment she had gone, and briskly turned the key.

“We’ll have no more visitors to-night, Nino,” he said. “The bold slut! There’s a lesson for her. What’s the matter, Nino?”

Nino’s face was buried in his pillow. He had given that one glance at her as she stood under the light, and then, for very pity, had hidden his eyes from her intolerable shame. Now at Colin’s voice he looked up.

“Ah, the poor lady!” he said. “You were terrible to her, signor.”

Some ecstasy of wickedness possessed Colin. Naked as a young Greek god, and as fair, he capered round the room in an abandonment of glee.

“Oh, the poor pretty lady!” he cried. “What a pleasant hour she had planned, and what a disappointment! But how naughty of her! She shocked me. What will she plan next, do you think? I would bet on a slight headache in the morning, and breakfast in her room. Or will she make an effort and catch the early boat? _Chi sa?_ Good night, Nino.”

He jumped into bed; Nino could hear it shaking under the gusts of his smothered laughter.

* * * * *

Colin, according to his wont, slept dreamlessly, and woke to find Nino’s hand on his shoulder, rousing him.

“Wake, signor,” he said.

Colin yawned and stretched himself.

“I’ll raise your wages, Nino, if you’ll go away,” he said.

“The signora----” began Nino.

Colin broke off his yawn and began to laugh.

“Good Lord, yes,” he said. “Well, what about the signora? I hope she had as good a night as I.”

“She did not sleep in her bed,” said Nino, “and she is not in the house.”

“Well, what then? She’s gone by the early boat; I thought she very likely would. So cool in the early morning. Probably she has left a note for her maid to say so. Look and find it. I’ll have breakfast out of doors.”

He got out of bed, and while he dressed basked in the wonderful memories of the night before. Just here had she stood for that short moment ... and then with that odd gesture of folding something round her had turned.... What a horrid humiliated night she must have passed, too badly stung to sleep, and only eager for the morning, and the boat that left at six o’clock, which would carry her away from the island. He wondered whether, if he had received a slap like that, he would have turned tail. Certainly it would have been an embarrassing breakfast next morning; they would have had to talk with great perseverance and animation. He rather thought that he would have stopped and brazened it out to show he didn’t care....

Nino entered again.

“I’ve found a note, signor,” he said, “but it is addressed to you not to her maid. It was on the breakfast table in the pergola.”

Colin held out his hand for it and opened it. It was quite short.

“I was terribly happy here,” it ran, “and I have been terribly unhappy. So it is good-bye, Colin.”

He knitted his brows. Surely he had heard something very like this only a few hours before.... Then he remembered.

“No-one knows of this but you, Nino?” he asked.

“No, signor, I found it and brought it to you.”

Colin stood crumpling the note in his hand. A contingency had presented itself with the reading of that note, which he wished to be prepared for. If the implication there hinted at was true, he did not want to stew in that ebullition of scandal and gossip which would boil up if last night’s adventure were known. Three people knew of it, possibly only two now, himself and Nino.... For a few seconds he thought intently, then his face cleared.

“Now, listen to me, Nino,” he said. “You have found no note for me, you have brought me no note. The last you saw of the signora was when you brought us coffee last night after dinner in the garden. That’s all you know.... Ah, wait a moment: your bed. Move it back to your room, where of course you slept last night as usual. I’ll help you. Now----”

Colin laid his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looked him in the face.

“When did you see the signora last?” he said.

Nino’s eyes were wide with some unspoken terror.

“Last night,” he said, “when I brought your coffee after dinner.”

“And you found nothing on the table when you went to lay my breakfast this morning?”

“No, signor.”

“Good boy. Now be quick with my coffee. I long to be in the sea this morning.”

Colin swam and basked and swam again, spending the whole morning on the beach. He was convinced that when Pamela wrote that note to him she had intended, at any rate, to take her own life, for the wording of it reproduced too closely for any explanation of fortuitous resemblance what she had said to him the evening before as they came home. Very likely she had not done so, for there was a big gulf between such an intention and its execution. It was one thing to feel that you were terribly unhappy, and quite another to put an end to your unhappiness. Most people preferred any amount of unhappiness to forcing an entry through the door that led no man knew whither. Even if it led into nothingness, anything that could happen to you was better than nothingness.

Colin came up out of the water, and, after brushing the wetness off him, sat down on the hot shingle. Supposing Pamela had done what her melodramatic little note implied, what would he think of her, or what (which concerned him more) would he think of himself?

Of course he had never dreamed of such a possibility, but if she had done it what a swift and surprising drama? Yet how abominably stupid, and how, if you looked at it clearly how self-conscious! There was revenge in it, too: she meant, at fatal cost to herself, to overwhelm him with remorse at this great final gesture. Was it a sign of love, to do that which might be calculated however mistakenly to bring misery on the adored? Yet, after all, it was not love of him that might have driven her to the desperate act, it was no more than self-love and self-pity for that unexpected exposure. He remembered just how she had looked when he turned up the light, and she heard Nino stir. If he had supplied a determining motive at all, it was fear.

Misery ... remorse.... What had he done to be miserable or remorseful for? The woman was a slut and she had come to stay with a respectable married man, who had assured her that his heart’s devotion was consecrated to his wife, and, knowing that, she had deliberately tried to seduce him, coming into his room at midnight and offering herself. There was a fine story to tell the world, if so he chose, and Nino, with a wink from him, would testify to the veracity of the crucial episode. And the stern morality of his own attitude, his scorn of her intrusion! That was the cream of it! The missal of wonderful blasphemies itself contained no mockery so distilled.

And then supposing she had done nothing desperate at all, but simply gone for a nice walk to think things over and console her wounded vanity? It was easy to realize what he would feel then. Mockery, sheer mockery and contempt at the fiasco. She had written that note to indicate what she meant to do, and when it came to the doing of it she had squealed and shied off at the idea of going out alone into the dark of nothingness or whatever she imagined was the next scene. Probably she thought that nothingness came next: that was the usual conclusion of such shallow folk. He knew better than that....

The dense stupidity, the blindness of those who did not believe in the hereafter of heaven and hell! He knew his hereafter well enough, the eternal hate, or, if love was too strong, the eternal spectacle of love, and to have no share in it, to sit in a cave of ice, and in an everlasting numbness of cold to behold the sun.... But the very thought of that, the certainty that in the end God would somehow beat him, gave the spice to defiance. Safe in the protection of evil, as long as life lasted he would enjoy and deride without remorse or fear. He chose evil because he loved it, and because he hated love, even when it was such love as Pamela had tried to enchain him with, for it partook in its narrow greedy sphere of the true essence, in that she wanted somebody not herself, and if she longed to get, she also longed to give.

Through the windless calm there came the sound of some rhythmical movement, and sitting up he saw a boat approaching with swiftly-dipping oars. The sun was bright on the water, and it was only a vague black speck, but soon he saw who was rowing in such a hurry.... He had said he would come back for lunch, so why had Nino come down to the bathing-place? News of some kind, perhaps.

Nino beached the boat, and jumped out.

“The signora,” he said.

“So she’s come back,” said Colin. “I knew she would.”

Nino looked at him with wide eyes of horror.

“They brought her back,” he said. “Two fishermen found her in the water below the high cliff where Tiberio’s palace is, the palace you call the Sunday palace....”