What she felt was difficult to put into words. She seemed almost to be afraid of him. And yet that was impossible, for what was he to her? She wasn't even interested in him. Surely not. His eyes, his violet fragrance, the flexible elegance of his movements--these things merely aroused in her a faint curiosity. Strictly speaking, he wasn't even a sympathetic personality, and had her sister Lizzie, who had a gift for satire, been here, they would probably have made fun of him. The anxious unquiet which he inspired must have some other source. Here in the south everything was so different--richer, more colourful, more vivid than at home. The sun, the sea, houses, flowers, faces--upon them all lay more impassioned hues. Behind all that there must be a secret hitherto unrevealed to her. She felt this secret everywhere. It lay in the heavy fragrance of the trees, in the soft swinging of the palm leaves, in the multitudinous burgeoning and bloom about her. It lay in the long-drawn music of the men's voices, in the caressing laughter of the women. It lay in the flaming blushes that, even at table, mantled her face; in the delicious languor that pervaded her limbs and seemed to creep into the innermost marrow of her bones. But this secret which she felt, scented and absorbed with every organ of her being, but which was nowhere to be grasped, looked upon or recognised--this secret was in some subtle way connected with the man who stood there, irradiated, upon the edge of the cliff, and gazed upon the ancient tower which stood, unreal as a piece of stage scenery, upon the path. Now he observed her. For a moment it seemed as though he were about to approach to address her. In his character of a neighbour at table he might well have ventured to do so. But the hasty gesture with which she turned to her sick husband forbade it. "That would be the last inconvenience," Mary thought, "to make acquaintances." But as she was going home with her husband, she surprised herself in speculation as to how she might have answered his words. "My French will go far enough," she thought. "At need I might have risked it." The following day brought a sudden lapse in her husband's recovery. "That happens often," said the physician, a bony consumptive with the manners of a man of the world and an equipment in that inexpensive courtesy which doctors are wont to assume in hopeless and poorly paying cases. To listen to him one would think that pulmonary consumption ended in invariable improvement. "And if something happens during the night?" Mary asked anxiously. "Then just wait quietly until morning," the doctor said with the firm decision of a man who doesn't like to have his sleep disturbed. Nathaniel had to stay in bed and Mary was forced to request the waiters to bring meals up to their room.