He stood in the window, absently looking out into the garden across the veranda, where the dinner table was laid for six. Pots of oleander and agapanthus stood along the edge of the veranda, between the fat white columns, with gaps between them through which one might pass out into the garden, and beyond them in the garden proper the fruit gleamed on the lemon-trees, and, somewhere, the sea whispered in the dusk. The night was calm and hot with the serenity of established summer weather, the stars big and steady like sequins in the summer sky. The spirit of such serenity does not brood over England, where to-day's pretence of summer will be broken by the fresh laughter of to-morrow's shower. The rose must fall to pieces in the height of its beauty beneath the fingers of sudden and capricious storm. But here the lemons hung, swollen and heavily pendulous, among the metallic green of their leaves, awaiting the accomplished end of their existence, the deepening of their gold, the fuller curve of their ripened luxuriance, with the complacency of certainty; fruit, not for the whim of the elements, but progressing throughout the year steadfastly towards the hand and the basket of the picker. Here and there the overburdened stem would snap, and the oblong ball of greenish-gold would fall with a soft and melancholy thud, like a sigh of regret, upon the ground beneath the tree; would roll a little way, and then be still. The little grove stretched in ordered lines and spaces, from the veranda, where the windows of the house threw rectangles of yellow light on to the ground in the blackness, to the bottom of the garden, where the sea washed indolently against the rocks. Presently he would see Eve, his eyes would meet her mocking eyes, and they would smile at one another out of the depths of their immemorial friendship. She was familiar to him, so familiar that he could not remember the time when, difficult, intractable, exasperating, subtle, incomprehensible, she had not formed part of his life. She was as familiar to him as the house in the _platia_, with its big, empty drawing-room, the walls frescoed with swinging monkeys, broken columns, and a romantic land and seascape; as the talk about the vintage; as the preposterous politics, always changing, yet always, monotonously, nauseatingly, pettishly, the same. She was not part of his life in England, the prosaic life; she was part of his life on the Greek seaboard, unreal and fantastic, where the most improbable happenings came along with an air of ingenuousness, romance walking in the garments of every day. After a week in Herakleion he could not disentangle the real from the unreal.