Thenceforward her stay on the Riviera was one uninterrupted delight. It was a dream in which the mind lay subject to the sense. She was in a blue mist, which hid impenetrably past and future, and informed the visible area about her feet with unutterable sweetness. “Don't expect me to write letters,” she said in a hastily scribbled note to Caroline. “This is a land in which words have no part. You might as well expect me to talk the 'Moonlight Sonata' to you.” And Caroline, being a wise woman, smiled. Yet, after all, her wisdom had nothing to do with it--for anything feminine would have divined. The days flew on wings of fire. She never read, never worked; her sketch-book remained empty. Often they sat at their sitting-room window, looking out on to the Strada Romana, hand in hand, without speaking, save for a murmured caress, for an hour together. Or they walked up between the olives, past the famous high wall with its gorgeous coat of mesembryanthemum, through the narrow, crooked town, down the rugged descent to the surf-beaten shore, where the great white solitary _casa_ stands, and there sat down in the shade of the big rocks and watched the glowing “countless laughter” of the sea. Often they rambled through the cool, sunless olive gardens, rising terrace after terrace apparently into the deep violet sky. The scent of the rosemary and wild thyme beneath their feet rose penetrating and filled the blood, and Thornton would pick a handful, and laughingly hold it between them above their lips as he kissed her. And when they reached the top of the hill they sat under a tree, and Clytie rested her head on his shoulder, and let her eye wander over the low-lying ridges of the Maritime Alps rising in endless soft-rounded undulations, like the many-breasted mother of men, in each bosom nestling a compact white townlet gathered around the slated cupola of its church; and the soft sunlight lay over all, transfused through the blue atmosphere. Then she would say: “Don't let us talk, Thornton,” but there was a different meaning to the words from that which they had when she uttered them in the train as it left Croydon.