A little after midnight the city shook with great definiteness. The room quivered and rattled from floor to ceiling. Betty, after that, went out into the streets, to see how things were, to meet other people, to find Tommy, to escape her own society. The Crevequers were gregarious; they on all occasions sought other people's society in preference to their own. Betty was in the fashion; every one seemed, upon that upheaval, to have sought the open, more or less regardless of whether or not they were clad suitably to face it. Some of them were not at all clad suitably; they gave an impression of extreme haste. Close to Betty a stout lady in a nightdress shivered, and clasped a whimpering pug in her arms. There was an influx into the churches; there was crying and moaning and telling of beads. An impromptu procession passed, bearing lighted candles, and a wax San Gennaro lent from his altar by his _parocco_. Meanwhile the mountain across the bay flung into the black night its glowing masses. Above it hung an immense fiery pillar, blazing across the dark, restless sea. Vesuvius had not done yet. Betty looked for Tommy. She did not find him; she found instead Mrs. Venables, and thought, with a vague, detached part of her mind, what an orgie this must be. Mrs. Venables was not pleased with Betty, but the strikingness of the present occasion seemed to unite them. 'Deeply impressive.... I suppose few of us have ever experienced such a night.... I am going into the church.' 'I'm l-looking for Tommy,' Betty said mechanically, staring down the street. Mrs. Venables did not hear; she was borne away by the crowd, murmuring, 'The city of dreadful night,' the light of exaltation kindling her fine plain face. 'But probably he's home by now,' Betty suddenly thought, and pressed a way through the people to her own street, and climbed the black stairs to the small room, where the lamp flickered dimly and nothing else moved. Betty huddled again into her own arm-chair, and rested her chin on her drawn-up knees, and stared across at the empty chair opposite her. She wanted Tommy; Tommy who would so have talked if he had been there--the last more silent weeks had slipped from memory; Tommy, who was so often late in returning, who might be occupied in so many ways during this strange night, yet whose absence, nevertheless, grew with the hours to have a sinister meaning, as well as an infinite solitary sadness. The storm rolled over Naples. CHAPTER X BETTY AND TOMMY 'So flesh Conjures tempest-flails to thresh Good from worthless. Some clear lamps Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.' GEORGE MEREDITH.