The night before they touched at Naples Marcella and Louis arranged what she called a “ploy.”  They would go ashore together and spend the day at Pompeii.  He had been there before, but he remembered little of it because he had been with a party who had hired a car, taken a luncheon basket and several bottles of whisky and left him asleep in the car while they explored the dead towns.

“It seems an insult to the past—­going there and getting drunk on their tombs,” he said musingly.  “But you and I will have a great day.  In a Roman town, Marcella—­there’s something very Roman about you—­you’re like the mother of the Gracchi.  I happen to know all about the mother of the Gracchi because it came in my Latin translation at Matric, and I had such a devil of a job with it that I never forgot it.  That’s the only bit of Roman history that’s stuck to me, just as ‘Julius Caesar’ is the only bit of Shakespeare I know because we did scenes from it for a school concert once.”

During the afternoon the young schoolmaster came along with “The Last Days of Pompeii” in his hands.

“He’s going to suggest coming with us to-morrow,” said Louis, who laughed at him every time he saw him.  “And he’s going to read us bits of local colour.  I can see it glinting in his eye.  Let’s look very busy.”

“What can we do?” asked Marcella with a giggle.  He initiated her into the mysteries of “Noughts and Crosses” and they sat with heads bent low over the paper as the schoolmaster came along.

“I have been tracing the course of the fugitives in Lytton’s immortal work,” he began with a cough.  “It would greatly add to the interest of visitors to Pompeii if they could follow it to-morrow, so I am giving a little lecture on it in the saloon to anyone who cares—­”

“Thanks,” said Louis shortly.  With a sigh the schoolmaster passed on, and, sitting down with his back against the capstan, read studiously.

“Don’t let’s go with him if he asks us,” whispered Marcella.  “Let’s be alone.”

“Of course—­he’s a bore,” whispered Louis.  “I wouldn’t lose this day at Pompeii for a shipload of footling schoolmasters.”

Very early next morning he wakened her by tapping on her cabin door.  She had heard him tossing about in the night and was not surprised that he looked tired and rather haggard.  But she forgot to ask him what was the matter as Naples burst upon her the moment she put her head above the companion-way where he was waiting for her.

“Oh—­look at it,” she gasped.

“Yes, isn’t it?” he said, waving his arm as if he were responsible for Naples.  “Look at the jolly old bonfire.”

All round, in the brilliant blue waters of the Bay, ships lay as if asleep; a few little tugs fussed nervously, a few little boats laden brilliantly with fruit and vegetables glided along as though they were content to reach somewhere quite near by to-morrow or the day after.  There was a cloud over the grey town at the foot of Vesuvius; it looked like winding sheets about the dead; it reminded Marcella insensibly of Lashnagar as she saw the mist and smoke wraiths mingle grey and white, rising from fissures, creeping along gullies until they formed a wreath at the crest of the volcano through which a thin needle of yellower smoke was rising straight as a pinnacle through the windless air.