"I never could touch it," Katrine said, with an emphatic shake of her head. "I should think a baby brought up on goat's milk would run round and bleat. Why, I think the idea of it is horrid!"

Her eyes sparkled and her whole air was full of a delicious animation, so that it was no wonder Jack threw back his head and laughed, as much in sheer admiration as from amusement. He was in high spirits this morning, the excitement of a mighty resolve stirring in his blood.

"How do you know that you haven't been having goat's milk at the hotel?" he demanded. "Aren't you afraid you'll begin to break out in a baa yourself all of a sudden?"

"Why, how rude you are!" she cried, her dimples deepening and shoaling. "Of course they wouldn't dare to give it to us, and we should know it if they did!"

The young people were being driven in a Neapolitan vettura to the tomb of Vergil. Jack had mentioned the spot that morning at breakfast as being well worth a visit, if only for the view, and said that the ladies ought to see it. Mrs. Fairhew had, for reasons perhaps not wholly unconnected with remembrances of her own youth and the late Mr. Fairhew, declined to make the jaunt, on the score that it was too hot and that she had a thousand trifles to attend to. She had refused her niece's prompt offer of assistance, and so left that young woman free to accept Jack's invitation that she take the drive with him.

Their talk was light enough, the lighter because Jack at least hardly dared to venture to be serious lest he betray how terribly in earnest he was. The sight of a little flock of goats, which had scattered at the pistol-like crack of their driver's whip, had given them a theme for a moment. The agile brown animals skipped along the gutters, assailed by the effervescent profanity of their conductor, a half-naked, slim-limbed lad browner than the beasts themselves; and with more detonations of the whiplash the carriage whirled up the hill with hardly diminished speed as the grade grew steeper. Through picturesque, squalid streets, braver in their poverty than many a splendid thoroughfare, through nooks that seemed to be private courtyards with entire families disposed about them, the carriage took its way noisily; it turned now to the left, now to the right, continually ascending; it brought them to the top of narrow ways down which they looked as through a kaleidoscope gleaming with a confusion of gay colors; it seemed about to land them on the roof of some building which lay directly before them, and then at the last moment whisked around some unseen corner and carried them still higher.

"Isn't it wonderful," Katrine said. "I never saw such a city. I feel almost as if we were in a flying-machine,—we keep going up so and see such wonderful sights all the time. Oh, do look down that street! Did you ever see such colors?"

"It is stunning," Castleport answered, his eyes on her face.

"You didn't look at it at all," she said half pouting, as the carriage whirled them past.

"Oh, I could see it all in your eyes," he returned. "You don't know what excellent mirrors they are."

"What nonsense! How silly you are this morning!"

Her color deepened, however, and Jack did not feel that his remark had missed fire. He smiled to himself, and just then the carriage brought up with a jerk on the left side of the way, in front of a small green door in a gray retaining-wall. Over the door was printed in black letters: Tomba di Virgilio.

"Here we are," Jack said.

He got out with the field-glasses he had brought, and extended his hand to assist Katrine. She hardly touched his arm with her finger-tips, but the air was electric, and he felt the thrill like a pulse of warm blood from head to foot. He did not speak to the driver, but with a manner that made that piratical Neapolitan regard him with a new respect simply ordered him in the sign-language of the town to remain in waiting. A soldier came slouching out of a shop near by wherein he was evidently lounging, took the prescribed gate-fees, and then opened the narrow door. This disclosed a staircase, strait and steep, cut from the living rock, which led upward and to the right.

They climbed the stone stairs without speaking, but at the top the wonderful beauty of the view which burst upon them called from Katrine an involuntary exclamation of surprise and delight. Below them, red-roofed and multi-colored, Naples lay bathed in the strong white light of the southern sun; beyond, marvelously blue and ruffled by a gentle breeze, the waters of the bay flashed and sparkled; and beyond again, farther yet, stood purple Capri and the piled-up southern shore, luminous and mistily azure. To the eastward, brooding and tragic, yet with a thrilling beauty of its own in softly flowing curves and wavering outline, showed Vesuvius, and stupendous as it was, seemed crouching sinister and awful, the incarnation of pitiless power.

Jack focused the glasses, and handed them to Katrine. Then he began to point here and there, showing her the different things of interest visible from the spur of the hill on which they were standing. As she was looking toward the Mole and the New Harbor, suddenly she uttered a little cry of surprise.

"There's the Merle," she said. "I'm sure it is. At least she's flying the American flag."

"Yes," Jack responded. "That's she, fast enough."

"Doesn't it seem like a bit of home to see her down there?" Katrine went on. "I think it was perfectly wonderful that Mr. Drake let you take her this summer."

Jack gave a quick movement of the shoulders, and then set his lips together more firmly.

"I shall have to tell her the whole thing," he thought to himself. Aloud he said, "I shouldn't have been here when you were if it hadn't been for having the Merle."

"I suppose not," she answered, and the change in her tone showed most clearly that she understood in the words more than met the ear.

After they had stood for a time in admiration of the magnificent view before them, they turned to go to the tomb, twenty yards away. The uneven path, bordered by beautiful wild poppies and violets, was shaded by gnarled fig and plum trees. A splendid stone-pine rose superb on the left, crowned by its dome-shaped cluster of branches.

"Oh," Katrine cried, "it's perfectly beautiful, isn't it? It makes you feel solemn, it's so lovely."

"Yes," he assented, and unwonted emotion left him with no word to add.

"Just look at those flowers," she went on. "What a pity it is that we don't have them like that at home."

"It's a fitting place for Vergil to be buried in, isn't it?" Jack said. "I thought you would like it."

"It is a place I shall remember all my life," she replied. Her eyes met his as she spoke, and her glance fell with quick consciousness. Before he could speak, she added hurriedly, "Is this the tomb?"

"Yes," he answered, entirely undisturbed by any chilling scholastic doubts on the subject, "this is the tomb."

Before them was a lowly structure of old rubble, four square, and a narrow door, at which the path, with a sudden dip, came to an end.

"Will you go in?" he said, standing aside.

Katrine entered, and he followed. The place was as simple within as without. The floor seemed to be of beaten earth; the single room, or cella, was lighted by a small window, and it contained only two or three cinerary urns of dark red clay, which leaned against the wall opposite the door. Above these, in brown letters on a tablet of white marble, was an inscription set there by the Academy of France.

The pair stood silent for a minute, Katrine reading the tablet, and Jack, his head bared, standing beside her. As she turned her head she caught for a second time his glance. She colored, and moved quickly to the small window.

"Isn't the view wonderful!" she said, as if she had caught at the first words that came into her mind.

"Yes," he returned absently. "Fine, isn't it?"

She looked a moment out of the window, and then, avoiding his eyes, she turned back to the Latin distich cut in the tablet, and by tradition assigned to Vergil himself:—

"You'll think I am unspeakably stupid," she said, "but I confess I cannot make it out. 'Mantua gave me birth,' I can read that."

"'The Calabrian winds carried me away,'" Jack went on.

"Oh, yes; but I don't understand the Parthenope."

"That's Naples," he answered. "'Naples holds me.'"

"Oh, is that it? I know the rest. 'I sang pastures, fields, leaders.'"

"Good! You shall have an A in the examination in spite of Parthenope," he assured her. "Perhaps 'heroes' is a better word for duces, though."

"I'm afraid I don't deserve an A," she laughed, "but I am satisfied if I pass at all."

As they came out of the tomb Jack picked a spray from the beautiful laurel growing beside the entrance, and held it out to her. She took it with a murmured word of thanks, and put it in her gown. Not far away on the right of the path was a rude seat or bench, shaded by fig and olive trees, and partially screened from the path by dwarf plums. It was slightly higher than the way by which they had come.

"Here," Jack said, "let's go up and rest a bit. The view is worth seeing."

They turned to the seat and took their places in silence. The view was not perceptibly different from that which they had on the path, but as Jack looked at Katrine and Katrine cast down her eyes, this was not a matter which they were likely to notice.

"Katrine," the captain began,—for they had come, almost by insensible degrees, to call each other by their Christian names,—"I've got to tell you something. It isn't altogether pleasant for me, but it's only fair that you should know."

She looked up at him in evident surprise and with some disquiet.

"Why, what is it?" she asked. "I hope it isn't anything really terrible."

He hesitated, and began to scrape the ground with his foot nervously.

"I—er—Well, to be honest, I don't know exactly how to tell you so you won't be too hard on me," he answered frankly.

"Is it so bad?" she queried in a tone which showed some concern under its assumed lightness.

"What in the world have you been doing? You haven't been murdering anybody, I hope."

"What would you say," asked Jack, "what would you think of a man that acted like this? Suppose a case. Suppose the chap was, in the first place, in America. Suppose he had a friend, a friend he cared a lot about, one he thought more of than anybody else in the world, and that friend was on this side. Suppose the man's property was all tied up,—in trust, you know,—and he'd promised not to borrow, so he couldn't honorably raise the money to come over unless his trustee would let him. The trustee, we'll say, is a nice old fellow,—really nice, you know, only rather crotchety,—who wouldn't hear a word of the chap's going."

He stopped as if for encouragement, and Katrine, with evident appreciation of this, murmured, "Yes, I understand."

"And suppose," Castleport went on, a new hesitancy coming into his voice, "that this trustee—of course the chap is his nearest relative, you know—has an able schooner yacht. Now if the chap simply couldn't stand it, but captured that yacht—not violently, of course, but by stratagem,—and came over to see his friend, and to ask her"—

"Why, Jack Castleport!" cried Katrine, with eyes open to their widest. "You don't mean that you ran away with the Merle! I never can believe it!"

"It's true, though," he responded. "Do you blame me so very much?"

Her glance dropped before his, and her manner instantly lost its boldness.

"I—Why, of course that depends," she murmured.

"Depends on what?"

"On—how—how necessary it was for him to see his friend."

"Oh," Jack cried. "I had to see her! You know I had to come, Katrine! I had to tell you I love you, and I stole Uncle Randolph's yacht because he wouldn't let me come any other way. I had to come."

He sprang up in his excitement, and stood before her, his hands twisting each other in a way odd enough for one of so much self-control.

"You must have known how I cared for you, Katrine. I couldn't tell you without making a clean breast of this, but don't be too hard on me. I had to come."

She flashed up at him the merest hair's-breadth of a glance, and with her hands pressed to her bosom, said softly, "I never could have forgiven you if you hadn't come."

He simply stooped over and took her unceremoniously in his arms, and it was several moments before she had breath and presence of mind to protest.

"Heavens!" she cried with mock terror. "Am I in the arms of a pirate? Jack, I never knew anything so shocking in my life! How could you do it?"

"I had to get across the Atlantic to you," he answered, as if that were an excuse all-sufficient.

And the sun shone down on the sea and on Vesuvius and on Vergil's tomb, and on that which is more enduring than all these,—the sweetness of young love.