The following day was Tuesday. It found Benton nearer cheerfulness than he had been since the Isis had in February pointed her bow eastward for the run across the Atlantic, under sealed orders.
To Blanco the yachtsman announced that he would lunch at Parker's, and evasively asked the Spaniard if he would mind being left alone for the day.
As the coachman, hailed at random from the mob of brigands by the Custom-house entrance, cracked his whip over the bony stallion in the fiacre shafts, Benton began to notice that Naples was altogether charming. He found no refusals for the tatterdemalion vagabonds who pattered alongside to thrust their violets over the carriage door.
At last, as he paced one of the main parlors of the hotel, his eyes riveted on the street entrance, he heard a laugh behind him; a laugh tempered with a vibrant mellowness which was of a sort with no other laugh, and which set him vibrating in turn, as promptly as a tuning-fork answers to its note.
The sound brought him round in such electric haste as almost resulted in collision with the girl behind him.
He was prepared, of course, to find in her incognita no suggestion of Royalty, yet now when he met her standing alone, and could take the hand she held out to him with her heart-breaking, heart-recompensating smile, he felt a distinct sense of astonishment.
"I'm having a holiday," she declared. "It's to be the Queen's day off and you are being allowed to play host with the Isis. Do you approve?"
With abandonment to the delight of mere propinquity, he laid away sorrow against the returning time of her absence, as one lays away an umbrella until the next shower.
"Approve?" he mocked. "It's like asking the drowning man if he approves of being picked up."
For a moment her eyes clouded and a droop threatened her lips.