“An absurd question.”

“You mean that I cannot suppose you would tell me the truth.”

“And just as little the untruth.  I do not know your sister.”

“We had a horrible scene that day I turned up.  I behaved brutally to her, poor girl.”

“I’m afraid you have often done so.”

“Often.  I rave at her superstition; how can she help it?  But she’s a good girl, and has wit enough if she might use it.  Oh, if some generous, large-brained man would drag her out of that slough of despond!—­What a marriage that was!  Powers of darkness, what a marriage!”

Mallard was led to no question.

“I shall never understand it, never,” went on Elgar, in excitement.  “If you had seen that oily beast!  I don’t know what criterion girls have.  Several of my acquaintance have made marriages that set my hair on end.  Lives thrown away in accursed ignorance—­that’s my belief.”

Mallard waited for the next words, expecting that they would torture him.  There was a long pause, however, and what he awaited did not come.

“Do you hate the name Miriam, as I do?”

“Hate it, no.”

“I wonder they didn’t call her Keziah, and me Mephibosheth.  It isn’t a nice thing to detest the memory of one’s parents, Mallard.  It doesn’t help to make one a well-balanced man.  How on earth did I get my individuality?  And you mustn’t think that Miriam is just what she seems—­I mean, there are possibilities in her; I am convinced of it.”

“Did it ever occur to you that your own proceedings may have acted as a check upon those possibilities?”

“I don’t know that I ever thought of it,” said Elgar, ingenuously.

“You never reflected that her notion of the liberated man is yourself?”

“You are right, Mallard.  I see it.  What other example had she?”

They walked as far as Massa Lubrense, a little town on the steep shore; over against it the giant cliffs of Capri, every cleft and scar and jutting rock discernible through the pellucid air, every minutest ruggedness casting its clear-cut shadow.  But the surpassing glory was the prospect at the Cape of Sorrento when they reached it on their walk back.  Before them the entire sweep of the gulf, from Ischia to Capri; Naples in its utmost extent, an unbroken line of delicate pink, from Posillipo to Torre Annunziata.  Far below their feet the little marina of Sorrento, with its row of boats drawn up on the strand; behind them noble limestone heights.  The sea was foaming under the tramontana, and its foam took colour from the declining sun.

Next morning they set forth again as Mallard had proposed, their baggage packed on a donkey, a guide with them to lead the way over the mountains to the other shore.  A long climb, and at the culminating point of the ridge they rested to look the last on Naples; thenceforward their faces were set to the far blue hills of Calabria.