Welcome reverie!  If only he could continue to busy himself with idle speculation concerning the strange young Puritan, and so find relief from the anguish that beset him.  Suppose now, he set himself to imagine Miriam in unlikely situations.  What if she somehow fell into poverty, was made absolutely dependent on her own efforts?  Suppose she suffered cruelly what so many women have to suffer—­toil, oppression, solitude; what would she become?  Not, he suspected, a meek martyr; anything but that, Miriam Baske.  And how magnificent to see her flash out into revolt against circumstances!  Then indeed she would be interesting.

Nay, suppose she fell in love—­desperately, with grim fate against her?  For somehow this came more easilyto the fancy than the thought of her loving obstacle.  Presumably she had never loved; her husband was out of the question.  Would she pass her life without that experience?  One thing could be affirmed with certainty; if she lost her heart to a man, it would not be to a Puritan.  He could conceive her being attracted by a strong and somewhat rude fellow, a despiser of conventionalities, without religion, a man of brains and blood; one whose look could overwhelm her with tumultuous scorn, and whose hand, if need be, could crush her life out at a blow.  Why not, however, a highly polished gentleman, critical, keen of speech, deeply read, brilliant in conversation, at once man of the world and scholar?  Might not that type have power over her?  In a degree, but not so decidedly as the intellectual brute.

Pshaw! what brain-sickness was this!  What was he fallen to!  Yet it did what nothing else would, amused him for a few minutes in his pain.  He recurred to it several times, and always successfully.

Sunday came.  This evening would see Elgar back again.

No doubt of his return had yet entered his mind.  Whether Reuben would in reality settle to some kind of work was a different question; but of course he would come back, if it were only to say that he had kept his promise, but found he must set off again to some place or other.  Mallard dreaded his coming.  News of some kind he would bring, and Mallard’s need was of silence.  If he indeed remained here, the old irritation would revive and go on from day to day.  Impossible that they should live together long.

It was pretty certain by what train he would journey from Naples to Salerno; easy, therefore, to calculate the probable hour of his arrival at Amalfi.  When that hour drew near, Mallard set out to walk a short distance along the road, to meet him.  Unlike the Sorrento side of the promontory, the mountains here rise suddenly and boldly out of the sea, towering to craggy eminences, moulded and cleft into infinite variety of slope and precipice, bastion and gorge.  Cut upon the declivity, often at vast sheer height above the beach, the road follows the curving of the hills.  Now and then it makes a deep loop inland, on the sides of an impassable chasm; and set in each of these recesses is a little town, white-gleaming amid its orchard verdure, with quaint and many-coloured campanile, with the semblance of a remote time.  Far up on the heights are other gleaming specks, villages which seem utterly beyond the traffic of man, solitary for ever in sun or mountain mist.