The sun had gone, the gray water was ruffled by a little wind, the wind of evening, and as the guns boomed on the warships in the roadstead the ensigns came down. "You like me," she said again, bending over a little more, for his eyes were watching the ships and she could not bear it. Suddenly he put his arm across her shoulders and held her. And then he used a strange and terrible expression. "I'd go to hell for you," he said. She leaned back with a sigh of utter content. CHAPTER X He looked down from his window in the morning into a garden of tangled and neglected vegetation sparkling with dew. Over the trees beyond the road lay the Gulf, a sheet of azure and misty gray. He looked at it and endeavoured to bring his thoughts into some sort of practical order while he shaved and dressed. The adventure of the previous evening, however, was so fresh and disturbing that he could do nothing save return to it again and again. At intervals he would pause and stand looking out, thinking of Evanthia in a mood of extraordinary delight. She must be, he reflected, one of the most wonderful creatures in the world. He had not believed it possible that any woman could so transmute the hours for him into spheres of golden radiance. The evening had passed like a dream. Indeed, he was in the position of a man whose dreams not only come true but surpass themselves. His dreams had been only shabby travesties of the reality. He recalled the subtle fragrance of her hair, the flash of her amber eyes, the sensuous delicacy and softness of her limbs and bosom, the melodious timbre of her voice. And he paused longer than usual as he reflected with sudden amazement that she was his for the taking. The taking! How deliciously mysterious she had been as she made it clear he must take her away, far away, where nobody knew who she was, where they could be happy for ever together! How she had played upon the strong chords of his heart as she spoke of her despair, her loneliness, her conviction that she was destined for ill fortune! She injected a strange strain of tragic intensity into the voluptuous abandon of her voice. She evoked emotions tinged with a kind of savage and primitive religious mania as she lay in his arms in the scented darkness of that garden and whispered in her sweet twittering tones her romantic desires. And the thought that she was even now lying asleep in another room, the morning sun filtering through green shutters and filling the chamber with the lambent glittering beam-shot twilight of a submarine grotto, was like strong wine in his veins. She depended on him, and he was almost afraid of the violence of the emotion she stirred in him. She had touched, with the unerring instinct of a clever woman, his imagination, his masculine pride and the profound sentimentalism of his race towards her sex. She revealed to him a phase in her character so inexpressibly lovely and alluring that he was in a trance.