At Pompeii Lorna returned to Fossato feeling as if she had passed through a great crisis.

The short week-end and its revelation seemed to have added years to her life.

She had never been a typical specimen of "sparkling girlhood," but her new knowledge made her more sedate than ever.

It brought her both gain and loss: gain in the fact that she now shared her father's confidence, and could help him to bear his heavy burden, and loss in the sense of a yet wider division between herself and her schoolmates.

She realized now, only too bitterly, why her father so persistently shunned all English people.