ing breeze played over him, he felt a
shivery sensation not altogether agreeable.

"Going to be a bit of a blow--eh?" he asked, screwing up his eyes
against the sun to watch the iron-blue band that was widening every
second. "Think I'll just get my coat on in that case," he added.

Amaldi took the tiller while Chesney got into his coat. Now there came
white flashes from the band of blue.

"_Un Invernung, Scior Marchese_," grinned Peppin.

"What's he say?" asked Chesney.

"That we're going to have an '_Invernung_'--'a big Inverna'--'a stiff
breeze,'" translated Amaldi patiently.

And indeed the South Wind pounced on them in a few moments, blowing more
than a capful. As the full gust struck her, the little _Wind-Flower_
heeled till her shrouds were under water. The spray came from her
dipping bows in a silver sluice, drenching them even where they sat.
Against the wind they ran, and the sails bulged full and hard as though
carved from marble--only a slight flutter near the mast showed how close
to the wind Chesney was holding her. He shouted like a Viking with the
fierce fun of it, as the spume slapped his face now and then with the
topping of a bigger wave--exultant with that exultation in sheer health
known only to the lately redeemed morphinomaniac. Amaldi thought him
strangely effusive in his pleasure, for an Englishman. The more he saw
of him the more distasteful he found Chesney. He sat balanced on the
upper side of the cock-pit, gazing steadily forward. Peppin lay flat on
deck to windward. The whole lake was now one welter of white and indigo.

But though for a while his delight in this wild game with wind and water
shut out lesser things, by the time that the Inverna had romped with him
for half an hour, Chesney felt chilled to the bone. Pride kept him from
admitting it. He was vexed to think that Amaldi's warning had been
justified. Also, it annoyed him that he should not have sufficient vital
force to resist getting chilled by a whiff of wind on a day so mild as
this. Anne Harding had told him that he was not yet so "almighty strong
as he thought himself, by a long shot."

He reached Villa Bianca two hours later, feeling rather moody, and with
a nasty, teasing pain in his legs and the small of his back.

XXXVII

The pains in his back and legs persisted all that night, and in the
morning he confessed to Sophy that he thought he'd "caught a damned cold
somehow," that his legs felt like a pair of