Thus, however much the Crevequers enjoyed the kind, gay and amusing world--and they enjoyed it, as a rule, tremendously--they were always aware that there was a better place waiting for them. Some day they meant to go back there for good, in the days of repose that age should bring them, and live together in the house beyond the long town (it belonged to them; they had little other heritage), and cross the bay in the canoe with the red stripe, that lay in the basement now and horribly needed caulking, and land on the beach below the little city, and go up to Mass in Sant' Ambrogio, and afterwards play games in the piazza and sit outside the _parrucchiere's_ in the sun. They had left Santa Caterina ten years ago; a sudden pricking of duty had come to the hermit of the red house; his obedience to it had, as Mrs. Venables said, cost him his life shortly afterwards. Three most forlorn things Betty had in her memory, following on each other: the leaving of Santa Caterina, Tommy's going away to school, and the death, a year later, of the careless, indulgent eccentric. At the first and last she and Tommy had wept together pitifully; at the middle tragedy of the three the iron had entered into her soul, too deep for tears. It had mattered infinitely most. But there had been, through those four years, the holidays--holidays mostly spent in an untrammelled and lawless liberty in London, with a light-hearted and irresponsible old Irish gentleman, their grandfather. It was in those days that they learnt to love the glamour of a great city. London they had known, as they now knew Naples, with a vagabond intimacy for the most part denied to the children of their class. The gamin strain that seemed innate in their blood was developed and strengthened thus. Part of these years had been spent with a family of cousins in a country vicarage. The memory of this portion of their career still lay like a heavy load on the Crevequers' consciousness. The atmosphere--an atmosphere, one would think, of fairly ordinary respectability--had not till then come their way. They stifled under it. No one in the household but themselves was in the least degree foolish, and they, being frankly babyish, and quite disreputable in their tastes, were more than ever driven to one another, facing the rest of the world hand-in-hand, hopelessly recognizing the impossibility of explanations, hopelessly failing to arrive at any perception of the civilized and usual code. It was to them merely an oppression, but from the oppression each had the other to fall back upon, and they were content. But, notwithstanding the smothering weight of civilization, they had always, even in those days, got on extremely amicably with the world in general. The failure to achieve friendship had not entered into their view of life as it was lived by them. That was a thing they had had to learn later, and at first with blank non-comprehension.