When Savina had gone, in a long brightly-painted car summoned from the line backed at the plaza's edge, Lee Randon returned to their room. The heat of the day, approaching noon, the ceaseless noise of Havana rose diffused to the balcony where he sat until the circling sunlight forced him to move inside. What amazing comfort! A curiously impersonal admiration for Savina grew with the understanding of her exceptionally perceptive being. She was what, above all else, he would have chosen for a companion: her extraordinary feeling was sheathed, tempered, in the satin of a faultless aesthetic sense; the delicacy of her body was resembled by the fineness of her feminine mind; she was entirely, deliciously, decorative. The black brocade mules by her bed were characteristic of her--useless charming objects that had cost twenty, thirty, dollars. Their sliding tap on the glazed floor was an appreciable part of his happiness; Savina's bottles on a dressing-table were engraved crystal with gold stoppers: it was all as it should be. * * * * * When she returned she redressed her hair, drawing it back across her ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved shell comb, and twisted a shawl of flame-colored silk--it was a manton, she instructed him--about her shoulders. The guise of Andalusia was very becoming to her. For a dinner, Savina wore the filmy white and emeralds; they went to a restaurant like a pavilion on a roof, their table, by a low masonry wall, overlooking the harbor entrance. The heat of the day, cloaked in night, was cooled by the trade wind moving softly across the sea; the water of the harbor was black, like jet shining with the reflections of the lights strung along the shore; the lighthouse at Morro Castle marked the rocky thrust of the land. The restaurant was crowded: beyond Lee were four officers of the Spanish navy in snowy linen and corded gilt; in the subdued light the faces of women, under wide flowery hats, were illusive and fascinating; everywhere the deep crimson of Castilian wines was set against the amber radiance of champagne.