to treat
more kindly with him. It was, rather, that all his natural being
wanted and reached out for this woman who had first taught him the
meaning and purpose of life. . . . His mind went back, suddenly, to
one afternoon, months before, at Abbazia, when they had come up from
sea-bathing in the Adriatic. He had leaned down over her, to help her
up the Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-water. The
mingled gold and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden with
brine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched and
colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as she
leaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dim
future, an adumbration of her own body grown frail and old, looking up
to him for help, calling forlornly to him for solace. And in that
impressionable moment his heart had gone out to her, in a burst of pity
that seemed deeper and stronger than love itself.

CHAPTER V

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Durkin waited until, muffled and far away, the throb and drone of an
orchestra floated up to him. This was followed, scatteringly, by the
bells of the different _tables d'hote_. They, too, sounded thin and
remote, drifting up through the soft, warm air that had always seemed
so exotic to him, so redolent of foreign-odored flowers, so burdened
with alien-smelling tobacco smoke, of unfamiliar sea scents
incongruously shot through with even the fumes of an unknown and
indescribable cookery.

While that genial shrill and tinkle of many bells meant refreshment and
most gregarious frivolity for the chattering, loitering, laughing and
ever-spectacular groups so far below him--and how he hated their
outlandish gibberish and their arrogant European aloofness!--it meant
for him hard work, and hard work of a somewhat perilous and stimulating
nature.

For, as the last of the demurely noisy groups made their way through
the deepening twilight to the different hotels and cafes that already
spangled the hillsides with scattering clusters of light, Durkin coolly
removed his shoes, twisted and knotted his two bath towels into a stout
rope, securely tied back his heavy French window-shutter of wood with
one of his sheets, and having attached his improvised rope to the base
of the shutters, swung himself deftly out. On the return swing he
caught the cast-iron water-pipe that scaled the wall from window tier
to window tier. Down this jointed pipe he went, gorilla-li