Explore "The Gamblers" by William Le Queux on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The men drank Marsala -- always offered in the afternoon in an Italian house -- and smoked in the garden, while we women wandered wherever we liked. Those of my companions who had not before seen the interior of an Italian villa were interested in everything, even to the culinary arrangements, so different from those in England. The Italian cook makes his dishes over some half-a-dozen small charcoal fires about the size of one's hand, which he keeps burning by a kind of rush fire-screen, the English grate being unknown.
We had been there a couple of hours, and to all of us the change had been pleasant after so long a spell at sea. Velia was sitting apart in the garden, and we were chatting, she telling me of the perfect tranquillity of her married life. Rino was, she declared, a model husband, and she was perfectly happy; indeed, her life was a realisation of those dreams that we both used to have long ago in the old neglected garden of the convent, when we walked together hand-in-hand at sundown.