Rabelais, an original Surtees, a large paper Decameron, and a few other
classics. Down another couple of steps was a perfectly white bathroom,
with shower and plunge. Francis wandered from room to room, and finally
threw himself into a chair on the veranda to smoke a cigarette. From the
river below him came now and then the sound of voices. Through the trees
on his right he could catch a glimpse, here and there, of the strange
pillars and green domed roof of the Borghese villa.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was one of those faultless June evenings when the only mission of
the faintly stirring breeze seems to be to carry perfumes from garden
to garden and to make the lightest of music amongst the rustling leaves.
The dinner-table had been set out of doors, underneath the odorous
cedar-tree. Above, the sky was an arc of the deepest blue through which
the web of stars had scarcely yet found its way. Every now and then came
the sound of the splash of oars from the river; more rarely still, the
murmur of light voices as a punt passed up the stream. The little party
at The Sanctuary sat over their coffee and liqueurs long after the fall
of the first twilight, till the points of their cigarettes glowed like
little specks of fire through the enveloping darkness. Conversation had
been from the first curiously desultory, edited, in a way, Francis
felt, for his benefit. There was an atmosphere about his host and Lady
Cynthia, shared in a negative way by Margaret Hilditch, which baffled
Francis. It seemed to establish more than a lack of sympathy--to
suggest, even, a life lived upon a different plane. Yet every now and
then their references to everyday happenings were trite enough. Sir
Timothy had assailed the recent craze for drugs, a diatribe to which
Lady Cynthia had listened in silence for reasons which Francis could
surmise.

"If one must soothe the senses," Sir Timothy declared, "for the purpose
of forgetting a distasteful or painful present, I cannot see why the
average mind does not turn to the contemplation of beauty in some shape
or other. A night like to-night is surely sedative enough. Watch these
lights, drink in these perfumes, listen to the fall and flow of the
water long enough, and you would arrive at precisely the same mental
inertia as though you had taken a dose of cocaine, with far less harmful
an aftermath."

Lady Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.

"Cocaine is in one's dressing-room," she objected, "and beaut