over and over again.  Somewhere at the end of a ventilator shaft a man was polishing boots; he was swearing monotonously, between each rub of his brush, using a list of twelve words beginning with “blast” uttered very softly and increasing in volume of sound and violence of meaning at the twelfth word, when he would start pianissimo again.  Marcella’s eyes closed; she was not asleep, she was thinking very vividly of Louis, but all the murmur of sounds about her intruded on her consciousness, making clear thought impossible.  The peculiar languor of shipboard life seized upon her mind and her body:  when she went below both were partly anaesthetized; her feet scarcely felt the boards of the deck; her fingers were scarcely conscious of the letters and books she held.  Her eyes and her mind took in the returning passengers dully.

“You look half asleep, kid,” said Diddy with sparkling eyes.  “We didn’t half have a day of it!  Young Bill and Mr. Winkle both got shore leaf, and Mr. Winkle knew a man who keeps a little cafe.  He was once chef where Mr. Winkle was assistant chef in an hotel.  My, we didn’t half have a tuck in!  Oysters and funny things in French, and chicken done up with jam, and ices.  We went to Pompey in the afternoon, but I couldn’t move, I was that stuffed up!  My, it was a day and a half!  Where did you get to?”

“Oh, just about with Jimmy.”

“Where’s your young chap?” asked Diddy in surprise.

Marcella stared at her and flushed.  The schoolmaster came up to her and stood silent beside her.  He was very full of Naples.  His shoes were dustless, though everyone else was covered in the fine, impalpable powdery dust of Naples.  His high collar was spotless, his coat incredibly black.  He looked irresistibly as if he had been lay-reading.

“I was hoping that I might have had the pleasure of your company during my journeyings to-day, Miss Lashcairn,” he began after a little cough.  “But I was—­er—­afraid to intrude.”

“I stayed on board with Jimmy,” she explained.  “Did you have a good time?”

“One cannot have a good time in the tomb of past splendours,” he said slowly.  “Imperial Cesar dead and turned to clay stopping a hole to keep the wind away is indeed a tragedy to a sensitive mind.  But to see Imperial Pompeii desecrated by ginger-beer bottles, cigarette packets and spent matches—­it was more than tragic.  It was—­it was—­but I pause for a word!  All the time I was murmuring sadly to myself ’Sic transit gloria mundi.’”

“I’m quite glad I didn’t go if it was so bad as that,” she said.

“I had been at great, very great, trouble to trace the path of the fugitives in Lytton’s immortal work.  But I have an idea that at certain points Lytton was rather nebulous.  I met your young friend and asked him what he thought.  He only laughed, however.  He is fond of laughing.”

Marcella’s dullness disappeared; the clouds from her mind packed like wolves and vanished.  Her heart suddenly stood still.