Late that night, as he sat
alone in front of the Caffe Turco smoking innumerable cigarettes, he
resolved to show these foreigners the stuff a Neapolitan was made of.
They did not know. Poor, ignorant beings from cold England, drowned
forever in perpetual yellow fogs, and from France, country of
volatility but not of passion, they did not know what the men of the
South, of a volcanic soil, were capable of, once they were roused,
once their blood spoke and their whole nature responded! It was time
they learned. And he would undertake to teach them. As he drove
towards dawn up the dusty hill to Capodimonte he was in a fever of
excitement.
There was excitement, too, in the house on the island, but it did not
centre round the Marchesino.
That night, for the first time in her young life, Vere did not sleep.
She heard the fisherman call, but the enchantment of sea doings did
not stir her. She was aware for the first time of the teeming horrors
of life. There, in the darkness beneath the cliff, Peppina had sobbed
out her story, and Vere, while she listened, had stepped from girlhood
into womanhood.
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