I remember all about it.”  She confessed to disappointment—­she had been so sure he didn’t; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called for them.  Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked the miracle—­the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-jets.  Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong.  It hadn’t been at Rome—­it had been at Naples; and it hadn’t been eight years before—­it had been more nearly ten.  She hadn’t been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but with her mother and brother; in addition to which it was not with the Pembles he had been, but with the Boyers, coming down in their company from Rome—­a point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand.  The Boyers she had known, but didn’t know the Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people he was with who had made them acquainted.  The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an excavation—­this incident had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had been present there at an important find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really didn’t remember the least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that when all was made strictly historic there didn’t appear much of anything left.  They lingered together still, she neglecting her office—­for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper right to him—­and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn’t again breathe on them.  It hadn’t taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands; only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect—­that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more than it had.  It had made them anciently meet—­her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn’t done a little more for them.  They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn’t been so stupidly meagre.  There weren’t, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried—­too deeply (didn’t it seem?) to sprout after so many years.  Marcher