It was long after midnight when they came rippling back to the huge bulk of the troopship, with silver raining from the blades of their oars into the sparkling bosom of that wondrous bay. A joyous little flotilla of Neapolitan water craft was theirs, for they had chartered several of the clumsy, unwieldly looking, yet most serviceable barklings, each with its dusky, brown-throated oarsman. They had spent some merry hours after the long, hot voyage through Indian seas and under torrid skies. They had heard much catchy music that all could appreciate and few words, fortunately, that any could understand. They were chatting and singing and recalling the brilliant scene, the dazzling lights, the lustrous corridor and stairway of pure white marble, the coaxing, wheedling swarm of beggar children, the sharp and ever-recurrent contrast between splendid opulence and squalid misery, and as they circled under the massive overhang of their stanch and trusty ship, and one after another each merry boatload came again in full view of the frowning cone of old Vesuvius, belching lurid flame and billowing ruddy streams of molten lava from its crest, some sweet-voiced woman in the foremost boat uplifted her heart in the barcarole from "Masaniello": "Behold how brightly breaks the morning," and, though morning was yet some hours away, here but a league or two across the star-reflecting deep and under the shoulder of the mountain furnace lay the vine-covered walls of Portici, where first was trilled that exquisite welcome to Aurora. And so with music and merriment and laughter, homeward bound from distant service in defense of a beloved flag, they came trooping up the side, the opulence of their gladness all the sharper contrast to the dull apathy of one lone watcher who shrank from their approach and sought seclusion across the deck and in the shadow of the long boat.
Ray was not in his stateroom when Foster bustled thither to inquire. Ray had returned some hours before, said the ship's official on duty. Ray was not found, however, until nearly four bells, when Foster, who had smoked too much to feel sleepy and wished to "stay up and see Vesuvius, anyhow," made an extended inspection of the silent deck. Foster had taken it amiss that Ray should seem so downhearted and be so uncompanionable. Foster felt that the time had come when, in the absence of Sandy's own, he (Foster) should assume paternal rights, or at least those of elder brother, and take the youngster to task. Here and there about the big ship he found, in knots of two or three, silent or conversing in low tone, comrades of the commissioned list or of the ranks, unwilling to seek their berths so long as so gorgeous a panorama lasted. These were ranged along the starboard side, where best they could study that superb sweep of shore line, of light and shadow, of slope and mountain, of curving strand--white, flashing in the moonbeams, of twinkling villages low-lying, of distant, rock-ribbed isles, but among these worshipers there was no Ray.