Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore,
continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others,
and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that
pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one,
after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed their
claim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the December
sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights
which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade
beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road
from the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of the
sea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue as
turquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath on
the left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, and in making its
climb of the spacious arc between, shed a heat as great as that of
summer, but not the heat of summer, on the pretty world of villas and
hotels, towered over by the olive-gray slopes of the pine-clad heights
behind and above them.
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