Livio's eyebrows rose; he shrugged his shoulders, but continued his
singing. He, anyhow, had not yet had enough of such a good-natured
audience.

Peter slipped out of the garden into the white road than ran down between
the grey mystery of the olive groves to the little dirty fishing-town and
the dark, quiet sea. In the eastern sky there was a faint shimmer, a
disturbance of the deep, star-lit blue, a pallor that heralded the rising
of the moon. But as yet the world lay in its mysterious dusk.

Peter, his feet stirring on the white dust of the road, drew in the
breath of the lemon-grown, pine-grown, myrtle-sweet hills, and the keen
saltness of the sea, and the fishiness of the little, lit, clamorous town
on its edge. In the town there was singing, raucous and merry. Behind in
the garden there was singing, melodious and absurd. It echoes fleeted
down the road.

"Ah, Signor!"
"Scusi, Signora?"
"È forse il mio marrito..."

Peter sat on the low white wall to watch the moon rise. And for a moment
the bitter smell of the soft dust on the road was in his nostrils, and he
was taken back into a past bitterness, when the world had been dust to
his feet, dust to his touch, dust in his throat, so that he had lain
dust-buried, and choked for breath, and found none. This time a year ago
he had lain so, and for many months after that. Those months had graved
lines on his face--lines perhaps on his soul--that all the quiet, gay
years could not smooth out. For the peace of the lee shore is not a thing
easily won; to let go and drift before the storms wheresoever they drive