Chapter 35

I could not hear everything he said, but I knew he was telling her of lands where it was always summer, lands where snow and ice were unknown and birds sang and flowers were for ever in bloom. And as I sat in the mist-filtered northern moonlight I thought of Thera on a copra-schooner, beating about palm-fringed islands lashed by the Trades, creeping into beryl-watered harbors with rusty wharf-sheds, with the swart bare-chested Knutsson at the wheel and her own regal body, browned by wind and sun, scantily clad in f…