nd aunt, but with her mother and brother; in addition to which
it was not with the Pembles _he_ had been, but with the Boyers, coming
down in their company from Rome--a point on which she insisted, a little
to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand. The
Boyers she had known, but didn't know the Pembles, though she had heard
of them, and it was the people he was with who had made them acquainted.
The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round them with such
violence as to drive them for refuge into an excavation--this incident
had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an
occasion when they had been present there at an important find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the moral
of them was, she pointed out, that he _really_ didn't remember the least
thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that when all was made
strictly historic there didn't appear much of anything left. They
lingered together still, she neglecting her office--for from the moment
he was so clever she had no proper right to him--and both neglecting the
house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn't again
breathe on them. It hadn't taken them many minutes, after all, to put
down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their
respective hands; only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately
not perfect--that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give
them, naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently
meet--her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they
seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a
little more for them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of
an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the
other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly
meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little
old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them;
trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of
ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried--too deeply
(didn't it seem?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher could only feel
he ought to have rendered her some service--saved her from a capsized
boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her
cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it