all supporting the terrace,
where, midway in its long length, it was broken by an arched grotto of
rough-hewn stonework, in which maiden-hair fern rooted,--the delicate
fronds of it caressing the shoulders of an undraped nymph, with
ever-dripping water-pitcher upon her rounded hip,--Helen turned sharp
to the left, and arrived at the bottom of the descending flight of
steps without once looking up. That Richard Calmady still leaned on the
balustrade some twelve to fourteen feet above that same cool, green
grotto she knew well enough. But she did not choose to anticipate
either sight or greeting of him. Both should come to her as a whole.
She would receive a single and unqualified impression.

So, silently, without apparent haste, she passed up the flight of
shallow steps on to the edge of the wide black-and-white chequer-board
platform. It was sun-bathed, suspended, as it seemed, between that
glorious prospect of city, mountain, sea, and the unsullied purity of
the southern heavens. It was vacant, save for the solitary figure and
the sharp-edged, yet amorphous, shadow cast by that same figure. For
the young man had moved as she came up from the garden below. He stood
clear of the balustrade, only the fingers of his left hand resting upon
the handrail of it. Seeing him thus the strangeness, the grotesque
incompleteness, of his person struck her as never before. But this,
though it did not move her to mirth as in her childhood, moved her to
pity no more now than it then had. That which it did was to deepen, to
stimulate, her excitement, to provoke and to satisfy the instinct of
cruelty latent in every pagan nature such as hers. Could Helen have
chosen the moment of her birth she would have been a great lady of
Imperial Rome, holding power of life and death over her slaves, and the
mutes and eunuchs with which the East should have furnished her palace
in the eternal city, and her dainty villa away there on the purple
flanks of Vesuvius at Herculaneum or Pompeii. The delight of her own
loveliness, of her own triumphant health and activity, would have been
increased tenfold by the sight of, by power over, such stultified and
hopelessly disfranchised human creatures. And the first sight of
Richard Calmady now, though she did not stop very certainly to analyse
the exact how and why of her increasing satisfaction, took its root in
this same craving for ascendency by means of the suffering and loss of
others. While, unconsciously