That was a great evening round the table at the Albergo del Sole.  How gloriously the air thickened with tobacco-smoke!  What removal of empty bottles and replacing them with full!  The Germans were making it a set Kneipe; the Englishmen, unable to drink quite so heroically, were scarce behind in vehemence of debate.  Mallard, grimly accepting the help of wine against his inner foes, at length earned Elgar’s approval; he had relaxed indeed, and was no longer under the oppression of English fog.  But with him such moods were of brief duration; he suddenly quitted the table, and went out into the night air.

The late moon was rising, amber-coloured on a sky of dusky azure.  He walked from the garden, across the road, and towards the ruins of the Amphitheatre, which lie some distance apart from the Pompeian streets that have been unearthed; he passed beneath an arch, and stood looking down into the dark hollow so often thronged with citizens of Latin speech.  Small wonder that Benvenuto’s necromancer could evoke his myriads of flitting ghosts in the midnight Colosseum; here too it needed but to stand for a few minutes in the dead stillness, and the air grew alive with mysterious presences, murmurous with awful whisperings.  Mallard enjoyed it for awhile, but at length turned away abruptly, feeling as if a cold hand had touched him.

As he re-entered the inn-precincts, he heard voices still uproarious in the dining-room; but he had no intention of going among them again.  His bedroom was one of a row which opened immediately upon the garden.  He locked himself in, went to bed, but did not sleep for a long time.  A wind was rising, and a branch of a tree constantly tapped against the pane.  It might have been some centuries-dead inhabitant of Pompeii trying to deliver a message from the silent world.

The breakfast-party next morning lacked vivacity.  Clifford Marsh was mute and dolorous of aspect; no doubt his personal embarrassments were occupying him.  Yesterday’s wine had become his foe, instead of an ally urging him to dare all in the cause of “art.”  He consumed his coffee and roll in the manner of ordinary mortals, not once flourishing his dainty hand or shaking his ambrosial hair.  Elgar was very stiff from his ascent of Vesuvius, and he too found that “the foam of life” had an unpleasant after-taste, suggestive of wrecked fortunes and a dubious future.  Mallard was only a little gruffer than his wonted self.

“I am going on at once to Sorrento,” he said, meeting Elgar afterwards in the garden.  “To-morrow I shall cross over the hills to Positano and Amalfi.  Suppose you come with me?”

The other hesitated.

“You mean you are going to walk?”

“No.  I have traps to carry on from the station.  We should have a carriage to Sorrento, and to-morrow a donkey for the baggage.”

They paced about, hands in pockets.  It was a keen morning; the tramontana blew blusterously, causing the smoke of Vesuvius to lie all down its long slope, a dense white cloud, or a vast turbid torrent, breaking at the foot into foam and spray.  The clearness of the air was marvellous.  Distance seemed to have no power to dim the details of the landscape.  The Apennines glistened with new-fallen snow.