"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.
"He was at Pompeii?" she whispered.
"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.
"Not when I saw him. He was with those exceedingly noisy fellows—the man who is severely pitted with small-pox and the man with the missing fingers."
"Oh—"
She turned away and answered him at random after that. Even then she did not see that Louis had deliberately lied to her. She was hurt that he could have gone to Pompeii without her: she was indignant that he had gone with her abomination, the pock-marked man. But perhaps it was only an accident! She wondered, with sudden misgiving, if he could have been back on the boat for her and missed her. But that his desertion was intentional she could not imagine.
Lights began to twinkle from the houses, to flare from the streets, to dance from the boats. The sky of ultramarine became indigo with a green and mauve lightening to the west. Over Vesuvius was a column of white smoke that now turned rosy, now coppery from the fires beneath. Little boat loads of chattering people who seemed ghosts kept tumbling up the accommodation ladder out of the grey water; they seemed to come soundlessly as though they were produced by a conjuror's hand, for no one could hear what they said: only their gestures, their laughing, excited faces were visible. A little cold hand squeezed Marcella's, and she answered Jimmy's eager questions about his father thoughtlessly, while a steamer coming into port hooted shrilly and desolately beyond the bar. The little boats glided up and down, in and out of the shadows of big ships with double lights—lights on board that were determinate and steady, reflections of lights that cracked and shivered and went in long, shimmering ribbons through the water.