y know
their metal for what it was. Betty, still in the flames, could look
ahead: she saw with increasing clearness the result of that testing and
the gold that would remain--gold that could not, by any alchemy of newly
acquired knowledge, be proved base.

But if one lost that gold, then life--the essential interpretation of
it--would end there. It were better that the name of it--the poor
kernelless shell--should be swiftly crushed too. It would, no doubt,
find itself crushed somehow before long, because no continuance of it
was in the least degree imaginable. One cannot separate two lives so
tied together.

So, through the slow hours, life resolved itself into certainties, that
rose like sharp rocks out of the mists of doubt. With their increasing
clearness of outline, the emptiness of the other arm-chair became a
jarring outrage; it was as if, to one who has learnt to say, 'This one
thing matters, this one thing I must have,' the curt reply is flung,
'This one thing for the present you must go lacking.' The solitude
became an offence, insupportable, oppressive.

Betty horribly wanted Tommy; it seemed that she had never wanted
anything else, so the slow hours had stretched.

Between two and three the city shook with a stronger motion, more
violent and prolonged. In the streets buildings must surely be
falling.... Betty went out to see.

Others, too, had gone out, fleeing from the danger of roofs and walls,
or merely seeking companionship in blind fear. The streets were
thronged; the churches were full of praying and crying. The
_carabinieri_ and the _guardie municipali_ kept order as best they could
among a crowd on the verge of hysteria. Here and there trooped in file
homeless peasants from the ruined villages, their possessions bound on
their backs or the backs of their beasts. From the comments tossed about
one might infer this disaster to be probably the work of the good God or
of the Evil One, or merely the spontaneous freakish rage of the
eternally cursed mountain. Each view had its adherents.

Betty, at a street corner, ran into Luli. Like all the others, he was a
shadow to her, a shadow to whom she said:

'Have you seen Tommy?'

He had not seen Tommy; he walked with her, helping her to look for
Tommy; he was to her a shadow moving at her side, who spoke and was
answered nothing. His speaking was:

'How should we find him to-night? It's hopeless. He'll turn up all right
in the morning; there's nothi