There was the soft hissing
of some whispered words outside and a muffled exclamation. Then Mrs.
Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Betty came into the room. Mrs. Wilder came
first, and Mrs. Morris with an alarmed face as if sheltering behind her.
"We want to tell you something," said Amanda.

"Amanda and I are going to marry each other," said Benham, standing in
front of her.

For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.

"BUT DOES HE KNOW?" Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.

Amanda turned her eyes to her lover. She was about to speak, she seemed
to gather herself for an effort, and then he knew that he did not want
to hear her explanation. He checked her by a gesture.

"I KNOW," he said, and then, "I do not see that it matters to us in the
least."

He went to her holding out both his hands to her.

She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful
gravity of her face broke into soft emotion. "Oh!" she cried and seized
his face between her hands in a passion of triumphant love and kissed
him.

And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.

She kissed him thrice, with solemnity, with thankfulness, with relief,
as if in the act of kissing she transferred to him precious and entirely
incalculable treasures.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON

1

It was a little after sunrise one bright morning in September that
Benham came up on to the deck of the sturdy Austrian steamboat that was
churning its way with a sedulous deliberation from Spalato to Cattaro,
and lit himself a cigarette and seated himself upon a deck chair. Save
for a yawning Greek sailor busy with a mop the first-class deck was
empty.

Benham surveyed the haggard beauty of the Illyrian coast. The mountains
rose gaunt and enormous and barren to a jagged fantastic silhouette
against the sun; their almost vertical slopes still plunged in blue
shadow, broke only into a little cold green and white edge of olive
terraces and vegetation and houses before they touched the clear blue
water. An occasional church or a house perched high upon some seemingly
inaccessible ledge did but accentuate the vast barrenness of the land.
It was a land desolated and destroyed. At Ragusa, at Salona, at Spalato
and Zara and Pola Benham had seen only variations upon one persistent
theme, a dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst the giant
ruins of preceding times, as worms live in the sockets of a sku