Through the black, slow hours Betty stared with wide unswerving eyes at the other arm-chair. On one of its arms lay a pipe, on the other a half-finished drawing. Between them, it was strange how Tommy sat, drawing, with face bent down, saying nothing. His presence grew, till the loneliness of the room was conquered. How should it be lonely? It held, as always, a companionship of two. As always, one had only to look up to see the other. So had all the past been; so would all the future be. No other state was within the bounds of imagination. As Betty once, at Baja by the sea, had looked up swiftly and seen, for life and all it meant, all it contained, herself and Tommy on warm sand, and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding, and had then been lit by a flash of vivid insight, of great certainty; so now she came, by slower steps, through the black night to the same realization. For it was after all a thing always known, if unexpressed, this companionship of two which should endure, stronger than death, surer than the thing called love, failing nowhere. It had been from the dawn of the days. To the further north there lay, in sunshine, a little warm bay of blue sea, and a Ligurian fishing-city, pink and yellow and white and green, was set curving round it--Santa Caterina, of deep stone-paved streets, where odours dwelt of roasting coffee, and drying fish, and cheese, and drains, and tar, and the breath of the brown seaweed, and of the nets that had drawn in shoals of _bianchetti_ at daybreak, and lay through the day drying on the hot sands. A town of people most companionable, who played a kind of croquet (it is more amusing than ordinary croquet; you kneel in the road, and use boards for mallets) in the piazzas, and along the dusty roads where the white walls shaded them; who sat and talked outside the church on Sunday mornings, while their women tied their handkerchiefs over their heads and went in to Mass. During Mass the sweetness of the church smothered the saltness of the sea, but when the church-goers came out again into the hot piazza the sea's breath caught theirs, stealing up to meet them, calling most insistently, through deep little arches, that framed blue glimpses like pictures in a row. Going down on to the shore--it lay just outside the stone streets--one saw how, from the point of Savona in the west, across to the white gleaming of Genoa, the city of ships, all the blue bay stretched. Down by the tideless still edge of it a white canoe with a red stripe waited--a canoe for two (but it held five quite nicely, if some one sat astride on each end, so that its owners, being sociably inclined, sometimes took parties of friends).