“I suppose you have begun to review your past life,” I said grimly, “and that’s why you are using so much American slang.”

Then, as Dicky was again holding my hands, I maintained a dignified silence.  You cannot possibly quarrel with a person who is holding your hand, no matter how you feel.

“There’s only one thing that consoles me in connection with those matches,” Dicky mentioned after a time.  “They were French ones.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with it,” I said.

“That’s because you don’t smoke,” Dicky replied.  And I had not the heart to pursue the inquiry.  Time went on, black and silent, as it had been doing down there for sixteen centuries.  We stopped arguing about why they didn’t come to look for us, each privately wondering if it was possible that we had strayed too ingeniously ever to be found.  We talked of many things to try to keep up our spirits, the conviction of the St. James’s Gazette that American young ladies live largely upon chewing-gum, and other topics far removed from our surroundings, but the effort was not altogether successful.  Dicky had just permitted himself to make a reference to his mother in Chicago when a sound behind us made us both start violently, and then cheered us immensely—­a snore from Mrs. Portheris within the tomb.  It was not, happily, a single accidental snore, but the forerunner of a regular series, and we hung upon them as they issued, comforted and supported.  We were vaguely aware that we could have no better defence against disembodied Early Christians, when, in the course of an hour, Mrs. Portheris sat up suddenly among the bones of the original occupant and asked what time it was.  We felt a pang of regret at losing it.

After the first moment or two that lady realized the situation completely.  “I suppose,” she said, “we have been down here about two days.  I am quite faint with hunger.  I have often read that candles, under these terrible circumstances, are sustaining.  What a good thing we have got the candles.”

Dicky squeezed my hand nervously, but our chaperone had slept off the eucalyptus and had no longer one cannibal thought.

“I don’t think it is time for candles yet,” he said reassuringly.  “You have been asleep, you know, Mrs. Portheris.”

“If you have eaten them already, I consider that you have taken an unfair advantage, a very unfair advantage.”

“Here is mine!” exclaimed Dicky nobly.  “I hope I can deny myself, Mrs. Portheris, to that extent.”

“And mine,” I echoed; “but really, Mrs. Portheris——­”

Another pressure of Dicky’s hand reminded me—­I am ashamed to confess it—­that if Mrs. Portheris was bent upon the unnecessary consumption of Roman tallow there was nothing in her past treatment of either of us to induce us to prevent her.  The dictates of humanity, I know, should have influenced us otherwise, in connection with tallow, but they seemed for the moment to have faded as completely out of our bosoms as they did out of the early Roman persecutors!  It seemed to me that all my country’s wrongs at the hands of Mrs. Portheris rose up and clamoured to be avenged, and Dicky told me afterward that he felt just the same way.