The Lighted Match

The following day was Tuesday. It found Benton nearer cheerfulness than

he had been since the Isis had in February pointed her bow eastward

for the run across the Atlantic, under sealed orders.

To Blanco the yachtsman announced that he would lunch at Parker's, and

evasively asked the Spaniard if he would mind being left alone for the

day.

As the coachman, hailed at random from the mob of brigands by the

Custom-house entrance, cracked his whip over the bony stallion in the

fiacre shafts, Benton began to notice that Naples was altogether

charming. He found no refusals for the tatterdemalion vagabonds who

pattered alongside to thrust their violets over the carriage door.

At last, as he paced one of the main parlors of the hotel, his eyes

riveted on the street entrance, he heard a laugh behind him; a laugh

tempered with a vibrant mellowness which was of a sort with no other

laugh, and which set him vibrating in turn, as promptly as a tuning-fork

answers to its note.

The sound brought him round in such electric haste as almost resulted in

collision with the girl behind him.

He was prepared, of course, to find in her incognita no suggestion of

Royalty, yet now when he met her standing alone, and could take the hand

she held out to him with her heart-breaking, heart-recompensating smile,

he felt a distinct sense of astonishment.

"I'm having a holiday," she declared. "It's to be the Queen's day off

and you are being allowed to play host with the Isis. Do you approve?"

With abandonment to the delight of mere propinquity, he laid away sorrow

against the returning time of her absence, as one lays away an umbrella

until the next shower.

"Approve?" he mocked. "It's like asking the drowning man if he approves

of being picked up."

For a moment her eyes clouded and a droop threatened her lips.

"But," she said in a softer tone, "what if you've got to be thrown back

into the sea again?" Then she added, "And, you see, I have. Probably I'm

very foolish to come. The prison will only be blacker, but I couldn't

stand it. I wanted--" She looked at him with the frankness which has

nothing to conceal--"I wanted to forget it all for a little time."

With a frigid salutation, Colonel Von Ritz arrived. As he addressed the

American, despite his flawless courtesy, his voice still carried the

undercurrent of antagonism which no word of his had ever failed to

convey to Benton, since their first meeting in America.