A handsome woman, very well dressed, with beautifully tinted hair, scarlet lips and blackened eyelids, looked Joanna down and up, and Joanna took her envy for criticism. Mario had gone to find deck chairs. He stood at some distance speaking to a sailor, his shoulders moving. Very foreign and animated, yet very much at home he seemed to her in these unaccustomed surroundings. Afraid, but thrilled through and through, his bride watched him. That man in the grey suit was her husband. He was a stranger to her: at this moment he appeared a complete stranger. Yet she had left her mother, her home, all that was familiar, to come away with him.

This then was life at last! But it seemed less real, more dream-like than anything that had gone before. She was going to a strange land, was going among strangers, was going alone with that passionate stranger in the grey suit. The train of experience was alight. Greatly she feared it. But not for anything would she have escaped.

Soon Mario came, with the sailor carrying chairs. When he had made things comfortable in his deft, experienced way, he groped under the spread rug for Joanna’s hand. The middle-aged woman with the very red lips looked on for a moment; then she turned with a little smile, and leaning on the deck-rail, gazed toward the coast of France.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I

They were to spend their honeymoon at Vallombrosa.

For Mario the place had happy memories of childhood; for Joanna the lovely sounding name seemed to breathe the essence of a dream Italy. She imagined Vallombrosa as a wonderful, classic valley, shaded by great trees such as never grew at home, and it was grief to her that they could not go there by a through train from Calais. They would have to stay a night in Florence on the way.

Mario had not told his sister of their movements, so no one met them at the station. Joanna had not believed any journey could be so long and so tiring; but as they crossed the deserted piazza to their hotel, a porter running before them with their hand luggage, the midnight air refreshed her wonderfully. She was invigorated too, even in the darkness by the strangeness of everything. Among these unfamiliar buildings, breathing this new air, walking under this foreign sky, the man with whom she had passed the last forty-eight hours in the cramped room of a railway carriage became suddenly an old and tried friend. She clung to his arm and reassured herself by stealing glances at his dim profile. Though he did not once turn his face to hers she knew he was pre-occupied utterly by thoughts of her.