"'You aren't clever enough to be as bad as you try to make out,' I said, and she looked down at her hands. "'All the same,' she remarked almost to herself, 'you are taking an awful risk in talking to me like this. How do you know I shouldn't go--go to pot altogether, later on? I'm thinking of you, you know,' she added. "'There you go again!' I exclaimed. She put up her hand as a token of surrender, and there came into her voice that unforgettably alluring timbre which, as I told you before, evoked mysterious memories and invested her with an extraordinary quality which one might almost describe as spiritual iridescence, a glamour of sybillant charm and delicious abandon." * * * * * "And there, you know," said Mr. Spenlove in a low tone, "the story ought to finish. That's where, when I recall the whole history of Captain Macedoine's daughter, I should like it to finish--on a final note of a supreme memory of that day. I would have had it forever wrapped in the gracious radiance of romance. Which, I suppose, is more than is granted to any of us. So, though it would not do for me to break the silence in which one buries the fragrant bodies of dead moments, there is something more to tell. Of M. Nikitos, for example, and the reproaches, courteously worded, of M. Kinaitsky.... "We went for what in England we would call a picnic. Pollyni came back about ten, in a fresh carriage whose driver had celebrated a day's contract by coloured ribbons on the horses' head-stalls and a dark red rose thrust over one of his own ears, in bizarre contrast to the almost incredible dilapidation of his clothes. An old woman, whose features were shrivelled to the colour and consistency of a peeled walnut, placed between our feet a basket out of which stuck the necks of wine bottles. I didn't ask where we were going, for I didn't care. I remember, however, demanding an explanation of the heavy explosions which had begun somewhere in the neighbourhood, and their telling me it was a blasting party in a quarry just behind the houses and outside the city wall. And I recall another incident, when we reached the barrier at the Great Tower, where a squad of fezzed and moustached guards debated among themselves the wisdom of permitting us to pass out. Very serious, not to say uneasy, they seemed, the heavy explosions causing them to look over their shoulders apprehensively even while they held their bayonets, long, sharp, unpleasant affairs, across the breasts of the horses. But finally they let us go, and after a half hour or so of the boulevards we came to a road leading across the plain to a town a few miles away. That is a memory, too--the wide plain of pale saffron earth, the dancing blue sea, the turquoise sky piled here and there with immense snowy billowings of autumn clouds, the girdle of grim and inaccessible peaks, and the compact little town of white houses buried in a circular plaque of foliage in the middle distance.