?

Looking down the garden, he saw them, sitting under a pergola,
half-veiled by the purple drifts of the wistaria that hung in trails
between them and him. Through its twilight screen he saw Denis in a
dinner-jacket, leaning back in a cane chair, his elbow on its arm, a
cigarette in his raised hand, speaking. The light from a big yellow
lantern swinging above them lit his clear profile, gleamed on his fair
hair. Opposite him was Lucy, in a white frock, her elbows on a little
table, her chin in her two hands, her eyes wide and grey and full of the
wonder of the twilight. And beyond her sat Lord Evelyn, leaning back with
closed eyes, a cigar in his delicate white hand.

Peter stood and looked, and a little faint, doubtful smile twitched at
his lips, as at a dear, familiar sight long unseen. Should he approach?
Should he speak? For a moment he hung in doubt.

Then he turned away. He had no part with them, nor they with him. His
part--Rodney had said it once--was to clear out.

Livio, close to him, was twanging his mandolin and singing some absurd
melody:

"Ah, Signor!"
"Scusi, Signora?"
"E forae il mio marito,
Da molti anni smarrito?..."

Peter broke in softly, "Livio, I go. I have had enough."

Livio's eyebrows rose; he shrugged his shoulders, but continued his
singing. He, anyhow, had not yet had enough of such a good-natured
audience.

Peter slipped out of the garden into the white road than ran down between
the grey mystery of the olive groves to the little dirty fishing-town and
the dark, quiet sea. In the eastern sky there was a faint shimmer, a
disturbance of the deep, star-lit blue, a pallor that heralded the rising
of the moon. But as yet the world lay in its mysterious dusk.

Peter, his feet stirring on the white dust of the road, drew in the
breath of the lemon-grown, pine-grown, myrtle-sweet hills, and the keen
saltness of the sea, and the fishiness of the little, lit, clamorous town
on its edge. In the town there was singing, raucous and merry. Behind in
the garden there was singing, melodious and absurd. It echoes fleeted
down the road.

"Ah, Signor!"
"Scusi, Signora?"
"E forse il mio marrito..."

Peter sat on the low white wall to watch the moon rise. And for a moment
the bitter smell of the soft dust on the road was in his nostrils, and he
was taken back into a past bitterness, when the world had been dust to
his feet, dust to his touch, dust in his throat, so that he had lai