She looked at him with unseeing eyes. He paused a moment, then turned and left her, slipping away into the shadows, one of a world of shadows, leaving those two alone together, as, for her, they had been alone together through all the long night.
She looked down into her lap, and made a shield of her two hands, and muttered:
'Tommy—Tommy.'
CHAPTER XI
THE ETERNAL ROADS
'We are the creatures of birth, of ancestry, of circumstance; we are surrounded by law, physical and psychical.... The ways are dark, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we cannot see.'—J. H. Shorthouse.
'The law of the past cannot be eluded,
The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,
The law of the living cannot be eluded—it is eternal.'—Walt Whitman.
There was peace in Naples, and sunshine breaking at last through clouds—rest and brightness following days of fear. It remained to put things together—all the broken things, human and otherwise. The city was full of those who reached hopeless hands for prop and support, having lost everything; full of those who gathered closely to them the fragments that remained, fragments they had snatched from ruin and clutched in their arms as they fled.