ches--it was more than tragic. It was--it was--but I pause
for a word! All the time I was murmuring sadly to myself '_Sic transit
gloria mundi_.'"

"I'm quite glad I didn't go if it was so bad as that," she said.

"I had been at great, very great, trouble to trace the path of the
fugitives in Lytton's immortal work. But I have an idea that at certain
points Lytton was rather nebulous. I met your young friend and asked him
what he thought. He only laughed, however. He is fond of laughing."

Marcella's dullness disappeared; the clouds from her mind packed like
wolves and vanished. Her heart suddenly stood still.

"He was at Pompeii?" she whispered.

"Only for a little time this morning. Then he and his party went away
again in their car."

"He was with the doctor," said Marcella, hating to talk about him, but
unable not to.

"Not when I saw him. He was with those exceedingly noisy fellows--the
man who is severely pitted with small-pox and the man with the missing
fingers."

"Oh--"

She turned away and answered him at random after that. Even then she did
not see that Louis had deliberately lied to her. She was hurt that he
could have gone to Pompeii without her: she was indignant that he had
gone with her abomination, the pock-marked man. But perhaps it was only
an accident! She wondered, with sudden misgiving, if he could have been
back on the boat for her and missed her. But that his desertion was
intentional she could not imagine.

Lights began to twinkle from the houses, to flare from the streets, to
dance from the boats. The sky of ultramarine became indigo with a green
and mauve lightening to the west. Over Vesuvius was a column of white
smoke that now turned rosy, now coppery from the fires beneath. Little
boat loads of chattering people who seemed ghosts kept tumbling up the
accommodation ladder out of the grey water; they seemed to come
soundlessly as though they were produced by a conjuror's hand, for no
one could hear what they said: only their gestures, their laughing,
excited faces were visible. A little cold hand squeezed Marcella's, and
she answered Jimmy's eager questions about his father thoughtlessly,
while a steamer coming into port hooted shrilly and desolately beyond
the bar. The little boats glided up and down, in and out of the shadows
of big ships with double lights--lights on board that were determinate
and steady, reflections of lights that cracked and shivered and went in
long, shimm