Dicky and Isabel occupied chairs at a distance nicely calculated to necessitate a troublesome raising of the voice to communicate with them.

Mrs.Portheris was still confined to her room with what was understood to be the constitutional shock of her experiences in the Catacombs.

Dicky, in joyful privacy, assured me that nobody could recover from a combination of Roman tallow and French kid in less than a week, but I told him he did not know the British constitution.
[Illustration: We were sitting in a narrow balcony.] The moon sailed high over Naples, and lighted the lapping curve of her perfect bay in the deepest, softest blue, and showed us some of the nearer houses of the city, sloping and shouldering and creeping down, that they were pink and yellow and parti-coloured, while the rest curved and glimmered round the water in all tender tones of white holding up a thousand lamps.

And behind, curving too, the hills stood clear, with the grey phantom of Vesuvius in sharp familiar lines, sending up its stream of steady red, and now and then a leaping flame.

It was a scene to wake the latent sentiment of even a British bosom.