"Dan?"
"What is it?"
"Look at this!"
"Good Lord!" Dan gasped, his feet coming down to the deck.
For Hillard was holding up for his inspection a crumpled black silk mask.
CHAPTER VIII
WHAT MERRIHEW FOUND
The great ship had passed the Isle of Ischia, and now the Bay of Naples unfolded all its variant beauties. Hillard had seen them many times before, yet they are a joy eternal, a changing joy of which neither the eye nor the mind ever grows weary. Both he and Merrihew were foremost in the press against the forward rail. To the latter's impressionable mind it was like a dream. In fancy he could see the Roman galleys, the fighting triremes, the canopied pleasure-craft, just as they were two thousand years ago. Yonder, the temples and baths of Nero of the Golden House; thither, the palaces of the grim Tiberius; beyond, Pompeii, with Glaucus, lone, and Nydia, the blind girl. The dream-picture faded and the reality was no less fascinating: the white sails of the fishermen winging across the sapphire waters, leaving ribboned pathways behind that crossed and recrossed like a chart of the stars; proud white pleasure-yachts, great vessels from all ports in the world; and an occasional battle-ship, drab and stealthy. And the hundred pink and white villages, the jade and amethyst of the near and far islands, the smiling terraces above the city, the ruined temples, the grim giant ash-heap of Vesuvius!
"That is it," said Merrihew, whose flights of rhetoric were most simplified.