--the
last more silent weeks had slipped from memory; Tommy, who was so often
late in returning, who might be occupied in so many ways during this
strange night, yet whose absence, nevertheless, grew with the hours to
have a sinister meaning, as well as an infinite solitary sadness.

The storm rolled over Naples.

CHAPTER X

BETTY AND TOMMY

'So flesh
Conjures tempest-flails to thresh
Good from worthless. Some clear lamps
Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.'

GEORGE MEREDITH.

Through the black, slow hours Betty stared with wide unswerving eyes at
the other arm-chair. On one of its arms lay a pipe, on the other a
half-finished drawing. Between them, it was strange how Tommy sat,
drawing, with face bent down, saying nothing. His presence grew, till
the loneliness of the room was conquered. How should it be lonely? It
held, as always, a companionship of two. As always, one had only to look
up to see the other. So had all the past been; so would all the future
be. No other state was within the bounds of imagination. As Betty once,
at Baja by the sea, had looked up swiftly and seen, for life and all it
meant, all it contained, herself and Tommy on warm sand, and a
sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding, and had then
been lit by a flash of vivid insight, of great certainty; so now she
came, by slower steps, through the black night to the same realization.
For it was after all a thing always known, if unexpressed, this
companionship of two which should endure, stronger than death, surer
than the thing called love, failing nowhere. It had been from the dawn
of the days.

To the further north there lay, in sunshine, a little warm bay of blue
sea, and a Ligurian fishing-city, pink and yellow and white and green,
was set curving round it--Santa Caterina, of deep stone-paved streets,
where odours dwelt of roasting coffee, and drying fish, and cheese, and
drains, and tar, and the breath of the brown seaweed, and of the nets
that had drawn in shoals of _bianchetti_ at daybreak, and lay through
the day drying on the hot sands.

A town of people most companionable, who played a kind of croquet (it is
more amusing than ordinary croquet; you kneel in the road, and use
boards for mallets) in the piazzas, and along the dusty roads where the
white walls shaded them; who sat and talked outside the church on Sunday
mornings, while their women tied their handkerchie