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“Maybe. Maybe he’s just pleased.”

“Let’s not think about him.”

“I haven’t thought about him.”

“The car will protect us. He’s our good friend already. Did you see how friendly he was coming back from the widow woman’s?”

“I saw the difference.”

“Let’s not even put the light on.”

“Good,” Roger said. “I’ll take a shower or do you want one first?”

“No. You.”

Then waiting in the bed he heard her in the bath splashing and then drying herself and then she came into the bed very fast and long and cool and wonderful feeling.

“My lovely,” he said. “My true lovely.”

“Are you glad to have me?”

“Yes, my darling.”

“And it’s really all right?”

“It’s wonderful.”

“We can do it all over the country and all over the world.”

“We’re here now.”

“All right. We’re here. Here. Where we are. Here. Oh the good, fine, lovely here in the dark. What a fine lovely wonderful here. So lovely in the dark. In the lovely dark. Please hear me here. Oh very gently here very gently please carefully Please Please very carefully Thank you carefully oh in the lovely dark.”

It was a strange country again but at the end he was not lonely and later, waking, it was still strange and no one spoke at all but it was their country now, not his nor hers, but theirs, truly, and they both knew it.

In the dark with the wind blowing cool through the cabin she said, “Now you’re happy and you love me.”

“Now I’m happy and I love you.”

“You don’t have to repeat it. It’s true now.”

“I know it. I was awfully slow wasn’t I.”

“You were a little slow.”

“I’m awfully glad that I love you.”

“See?” she said. “It isn’t hard.”

“I really love you.”

“I thought maybe you would. I mean I hoped you would.”

“I do.” He held her very close and tight. “I really love you. Do you hear me?”

It was true, too, a thing which surprised him greatly, especially when he found that it was still true in the morning.

They didn’t leave the next morning. Helena was still sleeping when Roger woke and he watched her sleeping, her hair spread over the pillow, swept up from her neck and swung to one side, her lovely brown face, the eyes and the lips closed looking even more beautiful than when she was awake. He noticed her eyelids were pale in the tanned face and how the long lashes lay, the sweetness of her lips, quiet now like a child’s asleep, and how her breasts showed under the sheet she had pulled up over her in the night. He thought he shouldn’t wake her and he was afraid if he kissed her it might, so he dressed and walked down into the village, feeling hollow and hungry and happy, smelling the early morning smells and hearing and seeing the birds and feeling and smelling the breeze that still blew in from the Gulf of Mexico, down to the other restaurant a block beyond the Green Lantern. It was really a lunch counter and he sat on a stool and ordered coffee with milk and a fried ham and egg sandwich on rye bread. There was a midnight edition of the Miami Herald on the counter that some trucker had left and he read about the military rebellion in Spain while he ate the sandwich and drank the coffee. He felt the egg spurt in the rye bread as his teeth went through the bread, the slice of dill pickle, the egg and the ham, and he smelled them all and the good early morning coffee smell as he lifted the cup.

“They’re having plenty of trouble over there aren’t they,” the man behind the counter said to him. He was an elderly man with his face tanned to the line of the sweatband of his hat and freckled dead white above that. Roger saw he had a thin, mean cracker mouth and he wore steel-rimmed glasses.

“Plenty,” Roger agreed.

“All those European countries are the same,” the man said. “Trouble after trouble.”

“I’ll take another cup of coffee,” Roger said. He would let this one cool while he read the paper.

“When they get to the bottom of it they’ll find the Pope there.” The man drew the coffee and put the pot of milk by it.

Roger looked up interestedly as he poured the milk into the cup.

“Three men at the bottom of everything,” the man told him. “The Pope, Herben Hoover,