It seemed to Rose made up of all the laughing colors of the sea. They were surrounded by the sea, clear and limpid as a shallow pool, the great deep bay gleamed and shone about them. Out of it the Islands rose like flowers. Capri uneven, wild and blue, Ischia tulip-shaped and tall--Posilippo and its attendant isles like a fallen spray of blossoms; and in Capri itself the whole spring lay bare to the sun. The South was like Léon--it was beautiful, but it was strange. On their first evening they had driven swiftly up the hillside; the air was cold and keen; the small mountain ponies galloped through the quick-falling darkness and just for a moment a breath of fear touched the triumphant bride. She longed for something familiar, something that wasn’t even beautiful, but to which she had grown accustomed. She didn’t put it to herself quite like that--she only wished she hadn’t had to leave her fox terrier at home. The moment passed and other richer moments took its place. Love was just--what without expecting it Rose had most desired. No one could have expected any one to be as wonderful as Léon. He spilt his soul into his passion, his ardor filled their hours, there was no way in which he did not color her life. She felt herself like some poor common pebble transformed into purple and rose color by the touch of the sea. It never occurred to her that when the tide recedes the color goes. She did not know that Léon’s passion was a tide, and she did not believe that it would ever recede. They explored everything in Capri, the ruins of Tiberius’ villas, the many colored grottos, the little stray paths that led between high walls to the heights of Capri--and everything they saw Rose loved. But best of all she loved their own familiar garden of the Hotel Paradiso, surrounded by violets, where Léon taught her to smoke cigarettes and where the stars swooped down on them in the velvet dark evenings, leaning just over the tops of the little stunted trees. She had everything she wanted then, but most of all she had Léon, rarer and sweeter than the voilets, more astonishing and limitless than the southern stars. Of course he had his faults. Rose accepted these limits of natural frailty with eager tenderness. He was jealous, fierce and a little hard on anything that interfered with his crowning absorption. Rose had heard him speak with cold, incisive sharpness to a waiter who interrupted one of their soft, interminable garden intimacies; and Léon was indifferent, intensely indifferent--to anything or any one but her. She couldn’t be said to mind it, but she noticed it; it made her hope that nothing would ever happen to her--it would be so awful if it did--for Léon. Then one day he ran up the outside staircase which led to their rooms with a peculiar, excited expression in his eyes. Rose came out to meet him, and together they leaned over the balcony.