3.1.

It was at Naples, some two years later, that the circumstances of his
flight were recalled to Odo Valsecca by the sound of a voice which at
once mysteriously connected itself with the incidents of that wild
night.

He was seated with a party of gentlemen in the saloon of Sir William
Hamilton's famous villa of Posilipo, where they were sipping the
ambassador's iced sherbet and examining certain engraved gems and
burial-urns recently taken from the excavations. The scene was such as
always appealed to Odo's fancy: the spacious room, luxuriously fitted
with carpets and curtains in the English style, and opening on a
prospect of classical beauty and antique renown; in his hands the rarest
specimens of that buried art which, like some belated golden harvest,
was now everywhere thrusting itself through the Neapolitan soil; and
about him men of taste and understanding, discussing the historic or
mythological meaning of the objects before them, and quoting Homer or
Horace in corroboration of their guesses.

Several visitors had joined the party since Odo's entrance; and it was
from a group of these later arrivals that the voice had reached him. He
looked round and saw a man of refined and scholarly appearance, dressed
en abbe, as was the general habit in Rome and Naples, and holding in one
hand the celebrated blue vase cut in cameo which Sir William had
recently purchased from the Barberini family.

"These reliefs," the stranger was saying, "whether cut in the substance
itself, or afterward affixed to the glass, certainly belong to the
Grecian period of cameo-work, and recall by the purity of their design