link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its
advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. "I met you
years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed to
disappointment--she had been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he
did he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as
he called for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service now,
worked the miracle--the impression operating like the torch of a
lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-jets.
Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was
really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his
haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong. It
hadn't been at Rome--it had been at Naples; and it hadn't been eight
years before--it had been more nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with
her uncle and 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