for the first time looked round.
These people! They belonged to a world that he had left. They gave him
the same feeling that her uncle and aunt had given him just now, when
they said good-night, following her into their hotel. That good Colonel,
that good Mrs. Ercott! The very concretion of the world he had been
brought up in, of the English point of view; symbolic figures of health,
reason, and the straight path, on which at that moment, seemingly, he
had turned his back. The Colonel's profile, ruddy through its tan,
with grey moustache guiltless of any wax, his cheery, high-pitched:
"Good-night, young Lennan!" His wife's curly smile, her flat, cosy,
confidential voice--how strange and remote they had suddenly become! And
all these people here, chattering, drinking--how queer and far away! Or
was it just that he was queer and remote to them?

And getting up from his table, he passed the fiddlers with the
dark-white skins, out into the Place.

II

He went up the side streets to the back of her hotel, and stood by the
railings of the garden--one of those hotel gardens which exist but to
figure in advertisements, with its few arid palms, its paths staring
white between them, and a fringe of dusty lilacs and mimosas.

And there came to him the oddest feeling--that he had been there before,
peering through blossoms at those staring paths and shuttered windows.
A scent of wood-smoke was abroad, and some dry plant rustled ever so
faintly in what little wind was stirring. What was there of memory in
this night, this garden? Some dark sweet thing, invisible, to feel whose
presence was at once ecstasy, and the irritation of a thirst that will
not be quenched.

And he walked on. Houses, houses! At last he was away from them, alone
on the high road, beyond the limits of Monaco. And walking thus through
the night he had thoughts that he imagined no one had ever had before
him. The knowledge that she loved him had made everything seem very
sacred and responsible. Whatever he did, he must not harm her. Women
were so helpless!

For in spite of six years of art in Rome and Paris, he still had a
fastidious reverence for women. If she had loved her husband she would
have been safe enough from him; but to be bound to a companionship that
she gave unwillingly--this had seemed to him atrocious, even before
he loved her. How could any husband ask that? Have so little pride--so
little pity? The unpardonable thing! What was there