The Neapolitan steamer was greasy and smelled of garlic and bitumen. The red-shirted sailors were singing "Santa Lucia" from high and low, and a stalwart contadina was accompanying them with her tambourine down in the third-class place. Very few passengers were scattered about the deck, and the general speech was of the Blue Grotto. Evidently, of the first-class passengers only two were making more than an excursion from Naples, the excursionists intending to return with the steamer after a peep into the famous cave.
One of these two persons was rather a remarkable-looking lady. She wore a jaunty hat many years too young for the face: it did not shade. Her coquettish jacket and short skirt made her from a distance—a very long one—seem like a girl of eighteen. She wore her hair in a girlish braid—alas, woefully faded! She was airy of motion and coquettish of gesture, evidently one of those sad women who, burying their heads from the sight of the passing years, fancy that Time forgets to touch them.
The other person was a handsome gentleman of more than forty. The Hyperion curls had been thicker on his brow than now, and his shadow more slender, but it by no means follows that he was as bald as Cæsar or as bulky as the Belvidere Torso. He was dressed in elegant travelling costume, and, as well-dressed men must be, with coat evidently of London make and trousers Parisian.
As he dropped a handsome travelling-satchel on the coal-flecked seat beside the lady's color-box he chanced to meet her eye. It was a curious meeting of eyes that had last met so differently. He had only time to commune with his secret soul, "What a larky old girl!" when a look of half-startled recognition came into his face.
It was reflected in hers, and a humming-bird tremor passed over her.
"Was this not formerly Miss Deane?" he asked.
"It is Miss Deane, Mr. Shaw," twittered the lady, with head tiptilted like a frosted flower.
Alas! what a tyrant is that power which makes and moulds us like potter's clay to her own patterns, whether of glory or shame, and whom we call Nature!—a tyrant which forms us into that which we would cry and pray not to be were there any ear to be moved by our beseeching. Alas, poor Annie! It was not her fault that Nature took a canary-bird for her model. And it is the fault of none of us that the graces of our youth become grotesquenesses with our forties.
"Who would ever have dreamed of our meeting here? And to think you are still Miss Deane!" he exclaimed with obtuseness pre-eminently masculine. "But you are very pale: does the motion of the steamer make you ill?"