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with their mems, and Mr Fernando, of course, and … ‘But ducky ,’ said Mr Cecil, ‘ not that ill-tempered devil with only one arm?’
    â€˜It’s a pity about the one arm,’ acknowledged Louli. ‘But he does pretty well with it – don’t you fret!’ She said, a trifle anxiously. ‘You won’t tell? I just have to talk about it to someone or I’ll burst out at the seams.’
    â€˜There’s nobody to tell,’ said Mr Cecil. He said it a little reluctantly; to receive sacred confidences was, of course, delicious – but to be able to pass them on and so find oneself at the storm centre of a scandal was to Mr Cecil the breath of life. ‘Of course there’s the wife,’ he added, ‘but she’s one of these self-contained people, I don’t suppose she’ll care a fig …’
    Leo Rodd stood at the entrance of the dreary little albergo . ‘Well – I think I’ll – er – just go for a bit of a walk.’
    Helen was jaded and weary after two sleepless nights on the albergo beds. She missed her cue. ‘A walk? – we’ve just come back from one.’
    His hand dug into the pocket of his light jacket, the nails driven into the palm by the excess of his irritation, goaded on by the sense that he was deceiving and ill-using her. ‘Well – I’m just going off for another one. Any objection?’
    No – she had no objection. She had pulled herself together by now and could smile and look into his face and say that the hotel beds certainly weren’t very inviting; but that she thought that for her part she would go in: and to try not to wake her if he was – was late. And she had no objection: not really. These flirtations kept him happier, he pretended to be annoyed by outpourings of ‘womanly sympathy’ but he fell for them every time, there would be sentimental gaiety for a week or two, another week or two of increasing boredom and disillusion, a week or two of sulks and self-pity: and then he would come back to her. She smiled and lightly said good night and watched him walk away with his swinging, wrenching, exaggeratedly wrenching, shoulder-forward step, down the close little street, away into the lovely heart of Siena: and would not even let herself pray that this time it would be the same as all the other times – this time, despite the sudden sick stab of doubt in her own weary heart – he would still come back.
    A figure detached itself from the shadows in the little square and dodged back into other shadows, lining the high street walls: creeping down, softly and swiftly, after him, an alley cat padding through city gutters to the mating call of the sleek, black tom, caterwauling on the tiles.… An alley cat! Her heart lifted within her, she could have laughed aloud at the folly of that stab of sudden dread. An alley cat – not the soft, shining marmalade creature with its proud head and the gleaming big blue eyes; but a secret cat, slinking along by its wild lone, avid and anxious, making for the rendezvous …
    But men were curious creatures. Fancy, when that gay, that radiant creature, Louli Barker, was offering him her charming heart on a plate – fancy Leo going off to an assignation with a girl like Vanda Lane!

Chapter Four
    T HE island of San Juan el Pirata lies, as any regular traveller with Odyssey Tours must know, some twenty kilometres off the coast of Tuscany about level with the topmost tip of Corsica, in the Ligurian sea. It is perhaps seven or eight miles across and largely composed of volcanic upheavals of rock: a republic, self-contained, self-controlled, self-supporting, with a tiny parliament and a tiny police force and a quite remarkably tiny conscience in regard to its obligations to the rest of society; but with a traditionally enormous Hereditary Grand Duke. Juan the Pirate appropriated his foothold there two hundred years