"I'll explain," Taberman responded. "I know a jolly little place just round the corner. Come on."
Jack suffered himself to be led to a small café which bore the rather incongruously ambitious name Albergo del Sole, and which displayed on the yellowish wall above its entrance a rising sun, blood-red and most magnificent as to its rays. At one of the little tables which covered the sidewalk before this establishment, the pair took their places. Tab produced his cigarette-case and ordered a glass of vermouth as he offered his friend a smoke. Jack, with a hardly perceptible compression of the lips which showed that he was controlling his impatience and waiting for Tab to speak, rolled his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger to loosen it, tapped it on the table-top, and lighted it with great deliberation. Jerry did the same, but with evident nervousness.
"Jack," said he, "I have been, and gone, and done it, for fair!"
"What?" inquired Jack in a tone mildly incisive.
"Well, you see—it's this way," Tab answered. "Of course I haven't really done anything yet, but I think I'm bound to, and if you don't think so—Well, you can see it'll be devilish hard on me as well as him."
Jack blew a smoke-ring, and looked at Jerry with a queer smile.
"It must be something pretty bad, Jerry," he said, "if you don't dare tell me what it is."
Jerry looked at him a minute, and then broke into a grin.
"Why," he said, more at his ease, "it's that damned archæologist, that bedlamite Wrenmarsh I was talking about at the hotel. Well, not having anything else to do, I went down to Pæstum to see the temples and kill time, and I fell into his clutches. I had a lot of talk with him, or he did with me. He knows a pile about the temples, and he did the showman in great shape. Incidentally he told me all about his own affairs. I didn't ask him, mind you. He just did it off his own bat. I couldn't help that, now could I?"
"I don't see how you could," Jack assented; "and no more do I see why you should want to."