“Does it ever do things now?” she asked rather breathlessly.

“Oh yes.  Listen!” She heard faint reports like distant small guns being fired.  “With any luck it’ll give us a bit of a Crystal Palace Bank Holiday exploit to-night—­we sail at midnight, you know.  It will be rather gorgeous if the old bonfire will oblige.  Red fires, white and silver moonlight—­why Naples is making me get poetical,” he added, stopping short.

People began to come on deck:  the schoolmaster walked along, his finger in between two pages of a Baedeker in which he was going to count off the items of interest he encountered.

“Good morning, Miss Lashcairn!” he said with a smile.  “See Naples and die!”

“Oh no—­it’s too beautiful!” she said quickly.  Louis edged her along the deck as a little clatter of church bells pealed from the many spires rising above the tall brown houses of the town.  A motor-launch chuff-chuffed out from the quay, flying the yellow flag.

“Port doctor,” he informed her.  “If he gives us a clean bill we’ll be ashore the minute breakfast’s over.  And I say, Marcella, let me implore you not to have Jimmy or schoolmasters in attendance.  This is my show.”

She smiled at him and turned to watch three boys scrambling up the ladder after the port doctor, carrying great baskets of grapes and flowers and oranges.

“I’m going to buy you some grapes—­those whopping big black ones.  It seems the obvious thing to do in Naples, doesn’t it?  Oh, by the way, I must pay a visit to the Bank of Scotland.  You’d better give me five pounds.”

“You’re very extravagant,” she laughed.

“Never mind.  Any other trip I’ve been broke by this time, and in a devil of a mess as well.  Lord knows what these bally dagoes will charge us for a car out to Pompeii.  They’re all on the make.  But I don’t care if they charge thirteen pounds—­”

“Eight and fivepence,” she added, laughing at him and running below to unlock her trunk and bring him the money without a glimmer of apprehension.

She put the five pounds into his hand in the alley-way.  A minute later he was back with an enormous bunch of grapes lying amongst their green leaves.

“Lock your door when you come on deck, and shut your porthole,” he told her.  “We’re coaling, and coal dust gets everywhere—­in your eyes, your finger-nails, your food and your bed if you don’t hermetically seal them all.  It’s a good place to be away from, a coaling ship.”

He darted away before she could mention the grapes.  She helped Jimmy dress, and then, turning him out, examined her three white frocks with minute care to see in which she should do honour to Pompeii.  Often, in the past, she had dressed a part, but always her personality had been lost in the part she was playing.  Now she consciously dressed as Marcella; it was probably the first time in her life she had looked interestedly in a mirror; comparing herself with Mrs. Hetherington, she felt vaguely dissatisfied:  she wished she were much nicer.  Noticing the vine leaves where she had twined them round the rail of her bunk, she broke off two or three and tucked them in her dress at the waist.  Stepping back, she surveyed the effect, decided that it was as good as could be managed, and tapped at the partition.  She had heard Louis moving about some time before.