“Well, I walked along after them, not knowing what might turn up, but determined to keep them in sight.  Those beggars with chairs were not to be trusted, and the ladies had gold enough about them to tempt violence.  What a reckless old devil of a chaperon she was, to let those young girls go!  So I walked on, cursing all the time the conventionalities of civilization that prevented me from giving them warning.  They were rushing straight on into danger, and I had to keep silent.

“On reaching the foot of the cone a lot of fellows came up to them, with chairs and straps, and that sort of thing.  They employed some of them, and, mounting the chairs, they were carried up, while I walked up by myself at a distance from which I could observe all that was going on.  The girls were quite merry, appeared to be enchanted with their ride up the cone, enjoyed the novelty of the sensation, and I heard their lively chatter and their loud peals of ringing laughter, and longed more than ever to be able to speak to them.

“Now the little girl that I had first seen—­the child-angel, you know—­seemed, to my amazement, to be more adventurous than the other.  By her face you would suppose her to be as timid as a dove, and yet on this occasion she was the one who proposed the ascent, urged on her companion, and answered all her objections.  Of course she could not have really been so plucky as she seemed.  For my part, I believe the other one had more real pluck of the two, but it was the child-angel’s ignorance that made her so bold.  She went up the cone as she would have gone up stairs, and looked at the smoke as she would have looked at a rolling cloud.

“At length the bearers stopped, and signified to the girls that they could not go any further.  The girls could not speak Italian, or any other language apparently than English, and therefore could not very well make out what the bearers were trying to say, but by their gestures they might have known that they were warning them against going any further.  One might have supposed that no warning would have been needed, and that one look upward would have been enough.  The top of the cone rose for upward of a hundred feet above them, its soil composed of lava blocks and ashes intermingled with sulphur.  In this soil there were a million cracks and crevices, from which sulphurous smoke was issuing; and the smoke, which was but faint and thin near where they stood, grew denser farther up, till it intermingled with the larger volumes that rolled up from the crater.

“Now, as I stood there, I suddenly heard a wild proposal from the child-angel.

“‘Oh, Ethel,’ she said, ‘I’ve a great mind to go up—­’”

Here Hawbury interrupted his friend: 

“What’s that?  Was that her friend’s name?” he asked, with some animation.  “Ethel?—­odd, too.  Ethel?  H’m.  Ethel?  Brunette, was she?”

“Yes.”

“Odd, too; infernally odd.  But, pooh! what rot!  Just as though there weren’t a thousand Ethels!”