The note was produced. There it was, down in black and white! The young Signor Antonio drew a similar weapon—more black and white promises! The Padrone raised eyes and hands in a gesture almost consoling in its histrionic effectiveness. 144Could he make guests depart at the time they said they would depart? Could he cast them out neck and crop when they found Syracuse so attractive that they changed their minds about going away and vacating rooms promised to others? He left it to Jane. He left it to Peripatetica. He left it to Signor Antonio. He left it to Signor Antonio’s beautiful bride, his “bellissima sposa.” Could he? He asked that!... The two seekers were sternly sarcastic. Signor Antonio imitated the histrionic attitude. The Bellissima Sposa simply smiled fatuously. Beloved Antonio now held her destinies in his strong hand. Was it a royal suite? Well and good. Was it a corner of a stone wall under an umbrella? It was still well and good, for would she not still be with her Antonio? The honeyed submissiveness of this was too much for even the wicked obduracy of the Padrone. There was a billiard room—for the night. To-morrow some one must keep his promise and go. They could choose among themselves. The bride was led away to the billiard room, still gazing upon her Antonio with intoxicated content, and two cross females, shaking the dust of the Villa Politi’s glowing garden and vine-wreathed terraces from their feet, jolted back again indignantly along the bare, windy heights fretted by the clamour of a sirocco-tortured sea. Past the gritty precincts of the ugly building villas, to the gaunt precincts of an hotel within the shrunken town. There to climb early into beds of the sloping pitch and rugged surface of a couple of tiled roofs; to lay their heads upon pillows undoubtedly 145stuffed with the obdurate skulls of all Syracuse’s myriad dead, and to listen in the wakefulness thereby induced to the dull sickening thuds about the floor which they knew, for good and sufficient reasons, to be the nocturnal hopping of the mighty Syracusan flea.... “Fancy anyone being tempted to remain over here!” sneered Peripatetica. This was in the morning. They had compared the bleatings of the goats; the raucous early cries of the population; the effects of sirocco; the devices by which, clinging with teeth and nails, they had succeeded in maintaining their perch on the tile roofs; had boasted of their shikarry among the hopping, devouring monsters of the dark. “Talk of history!” mourned Jane. “Who could be the adequate Herodotus of last night?”