“Oh, we’ll get used to it.  Let’s sit down, Mr. Heard.”

Still distrustful of his companion, the bishop made himself comfortable and glanced around.  They were high up; the view embraced half the island.  The distant volcano confronting him was wreathed in sullen grey smoke that rose up from its lava torrent, and crowned with a menacing vapour-plume.  Then an immensity of sea.  At his feet, separated from where he sat by wide stony tracts tremulous with heat, lay the Old Town, its houses nestling in a bower of orchards and vineyards.  It looked like a shred of rose-tinted lace thrown upon he landscape.  He unraveled those now familiar thoroughfares and traced out, as a map, the more prominent buildings—­the Church, the Municipality, the old Benedictine Monastery where Duke Alfred, they say, condescendingly invited himself to dine with the monks every second month in such state and splendour that, the rich convent revenues being exhausted, His Highness was pleased to transfer his favours to the neighboring Carthusians who went bankrupt in their turn; he recognized Count Caloveglia’s place and, at the furthest outskirts, the little villa Mon Repos.

Where was she now, his cousin?

Reposing, no doubt, like all sensible folks.

And his eye wandered to the narrow pathway along the precipice where he had walked with her in the evening light—­that pathway which he had suggested railing in, by reason of its dangers.  A section of the horrible face of the cliff was exposed, showing that ominous coloration, as though splotched with blood, which he had noticed from the boat.  The devil’s rock!  An appropriate name.  “Where the young English lord jump over. . . .”

It was the stillest hour of the day.  Not a soul in sight.  Not a particle of shade.  Not a breath of air.  A cloudless sky of inky blueness.

To Mr. Heard’s intense relief Denis had settled down, apparently for ever.  He lay on his stomach like a lizard, immovable.  His head, sheltered by a big hat, rested upon his jacket which he had rolled up into a sort of cushion; one bare sunburnt arm was stretched to its full length on the seared ground.  What a child he was, to drag one up to a place like this in the expectation of seeing something unearthly!  Mr. Heard was not quite satisfied about him.  Perhaps he was only feigning.

Time passed.  Do what he would to keep awake, the bishop felt his eyelids drooping—­closing under the deluge of light.  Once more there approached him that spirit of malevolence brooding in the tense sunny calm, that baleful emanation which seemed to drain away his powers of will.  It laid a weight upon him.  He felt into an unquiet slumber.

Presently he woke up and turned sharply to look at his companion.  Denis had not stirred an inch from his voluptuous pose.  A queer boy.  Was he up to some mystification?

The landscape all around was scarred and deserted.  How silent a place can be, he thought.  An unhealthy hush.  And what a heat!  The lava blocks—­they seemed to smoulder and reel in the fiery glare.  It was a deathly world.  It reminded him of those illustrations to Dante’s inferno.  He thought to see the figures of the damned writhing amid tongues of flame.