The two looked uneasily at this man appearing so unexpectedly among the ruins.  They had the preoccupied and timorous air of those going to a forbidden place or meditating a bad action.  Their first movement was an impulse to go back, but the guide continued on his way so imperturbably that they followed on.

Ferragut smiled.  He knew where they were going.  The little cross street of the Lupanares was near.  The guard would open a door, remaining on watch with dramatic anxiety as though he were endangering his job by this favor in exchange for a tip.  And the two ladies were about to see some tarnished, clumsy paintings showing nothing new or original in the world,—­nude, yellowish figures, just alike at first glance with no other novelty than an exaggerated emphasis on sex distinction.

Half an hour afterwards Ulysses abandoned his bench, for his eyes had tired of the severe monotony of the ruins.  In the street of the Hot Baths (Thermae), he again visited the house of the tragic poet.  Then he admired that of Pansa, the largest and most luxurious in the city.  This Pansa had undoubtedly been the most pretentious citizen of Pompeii.  His dwelling occupied an entire block.  The xystus, or garden, adjoining the house had been laid out like a Grecian landscape with cypresses and laurels between squares of roses and violets.

Following along the exterior wall of the garden, Ferragut again met the two ladies.  They were looking at the flowers across the bars of the door.  The younger one was expressing in English her admiration for some roses that were flinging their royal color around the pedestal of an old faun.

Ulysses felt an irresistible desire to show off in a gallant and intrepid fashion.  He wished to pay the two foreign ladies some theatrical homage.  He felt that necessity of attracting attention in some gay and dashing way that characterizes Spaniards far from home.

With the agility of a mast-climber, he leaped the garden wall in one bound.  The two ladies gave a cry of surprise, as though they had witnessed some impossible maneuver.  This audacity appeared to upset the ideas of the older one, accustomed to life in disciplined towns that rigidly respect every established prohibition.  Her first movement was of flight, so as not to be mixed up in the escapade of this stranger.  But after a few steps she paused.  The younger one was smiling, looking at the wall, and as the captain reappeared upon it she almost clapped with enthusiasm as though applauding a dangerous acrobatic feat.

Believing them to be English, the sailor spoke in that language when presenting to them the two roses that he carried in his hand.  They were merely flowers, like all others, grown in a land like other lands, but the frame of the thousand-year-old wall, the propinquity of the alcoves and drinking shops of a house built by Pansa in the time of the first Caesars, gave them the interest of roses two thousand years old, miraculously preserved.