"You look half asleep, kid," said Diddy with sparkling eyes. "We didn't half have a day of it! Young Bill and Mr. Winkle both got shore leaf, and Mr. Winkle knew a man who keeps a little café. He was once chef where Mr. Winkle was assistant chef in an hotel. My, we didn't half have a tuck in! Oysters and funny things in French, and chicken done up with jam, and ices. We went to Pompey in the afternoon, but I couldn't move, I was that stuffed up! My, it was a day and a half! Where did you get to?"
"Where's your young chap?" asked Diddy in surprise.
Marcella stared at her and flushed. The schoolmaster came up to her and stood silent beside her. He was very full of Naples. His shoes were dustless, though everyone else was covered in the fine, impalpable powdery dust of Naples. His high collar was spotless, his coat incredibly black. He looked irresistibly as if he had been lay-reading.
"I was hoping that I might have had the pleasure of your company during my journeyings to-day, Miss Lashcairn," he began after a little cough. "But I was--er--afraid to intrude."
"I stayed on board with Jimmy," she explained. "Did you have a good time?"
"One cannot have a good time in the tomb of past splendours," he said slowly. "Imperial Cesar dead and turned to clay stopping a hole to keep the wind away is indeed a tragedy to a sensitive mind. But to see Imperial Pompeii desecrated by ginger-beer bottles, cigarette packets and spent matches--it was more than tragic. It was--it was--but I pause for a word! All the time I was murmuring sadly to myself '_Sic transit gloria mundi_.'"
"I'm quite glad I didn't go if it was so bad as that," she said.
"I had been at great, very great, trouble to trace the path of the fugitives in Lytton's immortal work. But I have an idea that at certain points Lytton was rather nebulous. I met your young friend and asked him what he thought. He only laughed, however. He is fond of laughing."
Marcella's dullness disappeared; the clouds from her mind packed like wolves and vanished. Her heart suddenly stood still.
"Only for a little time this morning. Then he and his party went away again in their car."
"He was with the doctor," said Marcella, hating to talk about him, but unable not to.