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By Root 10662 0

think we have many things to discover." "'We shall not cease from exploration'?" "You read that in the book on the beach?" "Didn't you leave it for me to read?" He looked down. "Well. Yes. It was left. And you read it." "I had a feeling someone was watching me. It was you?" His dark brown eyes burnt up into mine; he took a long moment to reply. The faintest ghost of a smile. "Do you feel that you are being watched now?" And once again his eyes flicked past my shoulders, as if he could see something some way inside the trees. I looked round. The pines were empty. I looked back at him; a joke? He was still smiling, a small dry smile. "Am I?" "I merely wondered, Mr. Urfe." He held out his hand. "If for some reason you cannot come, leave a message at Sarantopoulos's for Hermes. It will get here the next day." "I've enjoyed meeting you very much." "Good. I am delighted. Till Saturday." After fifty yards I turned and looked back. He was still standing there, master of his domaine. I waved and he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture, one foot slightly advanced, as if in some kind of primitive blessing. When I looked back again, just before the trees hid the house, he had disappeared. Whatever else he was he was not like anyone else I had ever met. Something more than mere loneliness, mere senile fantasies and quirks, burnt in his striking eyes, in that abrupt, probing then dropping conversation, in those sudden oblique looks at nothing. But I certainly didn't think, as I went into the trees, that I should have the apparent answer within another hundred yards.

14

Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-coloured glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman's glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label, with the words _Mireille, ganti�_ embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before--musky, old-fashioned like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he'd been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me. Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn't imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn't imagine; and who she was, I couldn't imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister--perhaps someone weakminded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me--that explained the old man's quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nervous strangeness. He knew she was "out"; it explained the second place at the tea table, and the mysterious bell. I turned around, half expecting to hear a giggle, a rather inane giggle; and then as I looked at the thick shadowy scrub near the gate, and remembered the grim reference to Prospero, a more sinister explanation came to me. Not weakmindedness, but some terrible disfigurement. _Not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe_. I felt, for the first time on the island, a small cold shiver of solitary-place fear. The sun was getting low and night comes with near tropical speed in Greece. I didn't want to have to negotiate the steep northside paths in darkness. So I hung the glove neatly over the centre of the top bar of the gate and went on quickly. Half an hour later the charming hypothesis occurred to me that Conchis was a transvestite. After a while I began, for the first time in months, to sing. I told no one, not even M�, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about