"A letter from my wife reached me just before we left Rome," he explained. "She is very nervous, and fears Vesuvius is working up for another eruption. She often thinks that--pure fancy, of course! Anyway she has gone on to Taormina, in Sicily. She will return to Naples when she can muster courage." "How much she travels about," remarked the unsuspecting Evarne. "Doesn't she!" agreed Morris with a grim little smile, thinking of the invalid to whom the daily journey from bedroom to boudoir was an arduous undertaking. Then, noting a troubled expression on Evarne's face as she gazed out of the window at the fast-flying landscape, he asked, with a tiny hint of sadness in his voice-- "Am I such dull company for a bright little girl that you look thus solemn at the prospect of a few more _tête-à-tête_ meals?" He took her hand as he spoke. Evarne had long ago got to the point of finding it pleasant to feel her slender fingers enclosed in his strong magnetic clasp. She smiled a little and shook her head slightly in response to his question, but the fingers he held moved restlessly, as if they half-sought to free themselves. Evarne's mental upbringing and education had been as unusual and unconventional--to say the least of it--as had been her physical training. She learnt the Greek and English alphabets almost simultaneously, and while other damsels of her years were skimming through novelettes, she had been poring over the eternal and inspiring works of the writers of antiquity. Which form of exclusive mental diet created, on the whole, the most impracticable, the most false, the most mischievous ideas when considered in reference to the stern realities of modern life, it is difficult to say. Infinitely more than the average girl of her age did Evarne know of the possible sins of humanity, of the grim tragedies of history; infinitely less of that perhaps more useful field of knowledge--the restrictions, petty malignity, wickedness, and cruelly quick suspicions of modern society. Nevertheless, an instinct told her that there was a vast difference between travelling under the escort of her guardian to join his wife, and in staying with him at his villa without that lady. "Do you not think Mrs. Kenyon expects us to go on to her at Sicily?" she suggested in a hesitating voice, divided between her fear of appearing to presume and dictate, and her instinctive shrinking from this new programme. Morris read the trouble in the girl's mind, and promptly answered in the one and only manner that was calculated to set her thoroughly at ease again. "When you are comfortably fixed up at Naples I will go on to Taormina and bring back the truant. As to you, my dear, forgive my plain speaking, but it is time you seriously started to study for your future profession. There are excellent Art masters at Naples, and you can draw in the museum there, but in Sicily there is nothing of all this."