Helena calmly, “for I can only half translate. I have thrown overboard all my scrap-books of such stuff.”
“Why,” said Siegmund, rather abashed, “only ‘the row and the smoke of Rome.’ But it is remarkable, Helena”—here the peculiar look of interest came on his face again—“it is really remarkable that I should have said that.”
“Yes, you look surprised,” smiled she.
“But it must be twenty”—he counted—“twenty-two or three years since I learned that, and I forgot it—goodness knows how long ago. Like a drowning man, I have these memories before…” He broke off, smiling mockingly, to tease her.
“Before you go back to London,” said she, in a matter-of-fact, almost ironical tone. She was inscrutable. This morning she could not bear to let any deep emotion come uppermost. She wanted rest. “No,” she said, with calm distinctness, a few moments after, when they were climbing the rise to the cliff’s edge. “I can’t say that I smell the smoke of London. The mist-curtain is thick yet. There it is”—she pointed to the heavy, purple-grey haze that hung like arras on a wall, between the sloping sky and the sea. She thought of yesterday morning’s mist-curtain, thick and blazing gold, so heavy that no wind could sway its fringe.
They lay down in the dry grass, upon the gold bits of bird’s-foot trefoil of the cliff’s edge, and looked out to sea. A warm, drowsy calm drooped over everything.
“Six hours,” thought Helena, “and we shall have passed the mist-curtain. Already it is thinning.
