Mary could see no reason
why these people who promenaded and listened to the music should be
different both individually and in mass from a crowd to be seen at Monte
Carlo, yet the fact remained that they were different; and among the
faces there were none she knew, save those of the bird-like girl and her
mother, half forgotten since the meeting in the train.
Hannaford took her by the Port, and past the old town whose heights
towered picturesquely up and up, roof after roof, above the queer shops
and pink and yellow houses of the sea level. Then came the East Bay,
with its new villas and hotels, and background of hills silvered with
olives; and at last, by a turn to the right which avoided the high road
to Italy, they dipped into a rough path past a pebble floored stream,
where pretty kneeling girls sang and scrubbed clothing on the stones.
Two douaniers, one French, the other Italian, lounging on opposite sides
of the little stream flowing down from the Gorge of St. Louis, told that
this was the frontier. It was not the road to Italy that Mary knew, when
once or twice she had motored over the high bridge flung across the dark
Gorge of St. Louis on excursions to Bordighera and San Remo.
Nevertheless they were in Italy, and a mysterious change had come over
the landscape, the indefinable change that belongs to frontiers. The
buildings were shabbier; yet, as if in generous pity for their poorness,
roses and pink geraniums draped them in cataracts of bloom.
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