sudden and go
into other lodgings. I never knew what it was, though--"

"The deluge," muttered Heyst absently.

He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first
moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come
together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of
audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane
chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a
capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the
concert platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her
hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey,
unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable
reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force--or
simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of
complete surrender.

During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if
the word "deluge" had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at the
cloudless sky:

"Does it ever rain here?"

"There is a season when it rains almost every day," said Heyst,
surprised. "There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-shower.'"

"Mud-shower?"

"Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his
red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the
same time. It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well
behaved--just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed
you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-natured,
lazy fellow of a volcano."

"I saw a mountain smoking like that before," she said, staring at the
slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her. "It wasn't
very long after we left England--some few days, though. I was so ill at
first that I lost count of days. A smoking mountain--I can't think how
they called it."

"Vesuvius, perhaps," suggested Heyst.

"That's the name."

"I saw it, too, years, ages ago," said Heyst.

"On your way here?"

"No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the world. I
was yet a boy."

She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover some
trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair
thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank
examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these
veiled grey eyes produced--whether on his heart or on his nerves