Alec Aird hates the Casino, partly because they won't let him smoke his pipe there, partly because he doesn't like his life strung up to concert-pitch all the time. But Madge loves these vast vestibules of shining mahogany and cut and bevelled glass, these palms that brush the electric chandeliers, these broad terraces, all this bright restlessness of hotels and shops and plage. So they had split the difference in the villa they had rented. It stood high-perched among ilex and Spanish-chestnut, looking out over the rocks and islands that make of that bay a jaw full of cruel black splintered teeth. It had little broken lawns set with hydrangeas and beds and borders of blood-red begonias and montbretia and geraniums and marguerites, the whole tilted up as if it would have spilled over the rough cliff-top to the rocks below. The plage itself was hidden, but a little way out the translucent greens began, dappled with a fairy-like refraction that brought the purply shoals almost up to the surface. After that away northwards spread the wide sea--serene yet curiously wistful, tender yet never gay, dreamily lovely but unflashing, unglittering--the pensive aspect of a sea that has its back to the sun. "Here we are," said Alec as we pulled up in front of a chromo-lithograph from a toybox lid, the villa of dove-grey with shutters of a chalky greeny-white and slender ironwork everywhere--grilles of ironwork over the glazing of the double doors, scrolled balcony railings, and iron passementerie along the ridge of the mansard-roof. "Now look here, if you want to go to bed say so, and we'll all be Sleeping Beauties--confound those rotten late hours for that kid----" I assured him that I had no wish to go to bed. "Right. Then come along upstairs, and sing out if there's anything you want. You'll find me somewhere about when you come down. And you might give me that tobacco----" And, showing me up a staircase of waxed boards into my room, he left me to my toilet. The pergola in which I found him three quarters of an hour later was at the bottom of the garden. Its roof was latticed, so that over the floor, over the garden chairs and tables, over our shoulders and hands and white flannels, lay an intricate shepherd's-plaid of gay shadow that crept like a net over us whenever we moved. A _bonne_ followed me with coffee and rolls, and we sat down to talk and to watch the flat untwinkling sea.