The girl's answering laugh, like the inward look of her eyes, showed
only a preoccupied attention. She had the concentrated absent aspect of
a person who has just heard vital tidings and can attend to nothing
else. She said, "Oh, Neale, how ridiculous of you. He couldn't possibly
have the least idea what he's done to deserve getting paid for."

At the sound of her voice, the tone in which these words were
pronounced, the ticket-seller looked at her hard, with a bold,
intrusive, diagnosing stare: "Lovers!" he told himself conclusively. He
accepted with a vast incuriosity as to reason the coin which the young
foreigner put into his hand, and, ringing it suspiciously on his table,
divided his appraising attention between its clear answer to his
challenge, and the sound of the young man's voice as he answered his
sweetheart, "Of course he hasn't any idea what he's done to deserve it.
Who ever has? You don't suppose for a moment I've any idea what I've
done to deserve mine?"

The ticket-seller smiled secretly into his dark mustache. "I wonder if
_my_ voice quivered and deepened like that, when I was courting
Annunziata?" he asked himself. He glanced up from pocketing the coin,
and caught the look which passed between the two. He felt as though
someone had laid hands on him and shaken him. "_Dio mio_" he thought.
"They are in the hottest of it."

The young foreigners went across the tracks and established themselves
on the rocks, partly out of sight, just at the brink of the great drop
to the Campagna. The setting sun was full in their faces. But they did
not see it, seeing only each other.

Below them spread the divinely colored plain, crossed by the ancient