He had automobiles, as he had resolved, of matchless black and cream-coloured coachwork, with scarlet wheels and orange silk upholstery. He imported a yacht that floated in the harbour like a great moth with folded wings. Far out on the breakwater he had an enormous bungalow built of hard woods upon a square lighter, with chambers for music and slumber in the cool Mediterranean breeze, while the thud and wash of the waves against the outer wall lulled the sleeper to antique dreams. He did all this, and sat each day in the portico of the great marble Bourse, planning fresh acquisitions of money. His wife lay in her chair in her rose-tinted chamber at San Stefano, looking out upon the blue sea beyond the orange trees and palms, smiling and sometimes immobile, as though stunned by this overwhelming onslaught of wealth pressed from the blood and bones of the youth of the world. She smiled and lay thinking of her imaginary people, who lived exemplary and unimportant lives in an England which no longer existed. And near her, hovering, shining like a creature from another world, clad miraculously in robes of extraordinary brilliance, could be seen Evanthia Solaris, the companion of her hours. Often it was she who shot away along the great corniche road in those cars of speed and beauty, their silver fittings and glossy panels humming past like some vast and costly insect. She it was who lay in a silken hammock in the great houseboat by the breakwater, and listened to the sweet strains from the disc concealed in a cabinet shaped like a huge bronze shell. "_Je déteste les hommes_," she murmured to herself as she wandered through the orange groves to the curved marble seats on the shore. Hearing these words as she passed, the young Jew, working among the roses, would tremble and recall with an expression of horror their experiences in Europe. Often, when in their destitution she had taken him by the hair and hissed them in his affrighted ear, and he would utter an almost inaudible moan of "Oh, Madama!" For he loved her. He was the victim of a passion like a thin, pure, agitated flame burning amid conflagrations. He would have expired in ecstasy beneath her hand, for it would have needed more courage to speak than to die. And now he was in paradise tending the roses and suffering exquisite agonies as she passed, her beautiful lips muttering, "_Je déteste les hommes!_" As perhaps she did; yet she would sometimes look suddenly out across the waves with smouldering amber eyes and parted lips, as though she expected to behold once more the figure of a man coming up out of the sea, to offer again the unregarded sacrifices of fidelity and love. THE END