A Spirit in Prison Series

by

ROBERT HICHENS

CONTENTS

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

A SPIRIT IN PRISON

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF

"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY

ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

MCMVI

Title page.

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

Published October, 1906.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

ILLUSTRATIONS

"HE STOOD STILL, GAZING AT THEM AS THEY PRAYED""

"'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"

"HE… LOOKED DOWN AT THE LIGHT SHINING IN THE HOUSE OF THE SIRENS"

"HER HEAD WAS THROWN BACK, AS IF SHE WERE DRINKING IN THE BREEZE"

"'I AM CONTENT WITHOUT ANYTHING, SIGNORINO,' SHE SAID"

"'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN—IN MY SICILIAN,' SHE SAID, TENDERLY"

"SHE COULD SEE VAGUELY THE SHORE BY THE CAVES WHERE THE FISHERMEN HAD SLEPT IN THE DAWN"

CHAPTER I

On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.

Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat, thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full, too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite these eyes and her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown hair, she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose attractive force issued from within, inviting inquiry and advance, as the flame of a fire does, playing on the blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.

Hermione was, in fact, found very attractive by a great many people of varying temperaments and abilities, who were captured by her spirit and by her intellect, the soul of the woman and the brains, and who, while seeing clearly and acknowledging frankly the plainness of her face and the almost masculine ruggedness of her form, said, with a good deal of truth, that "somehow they didn't seem to matter in Hermione." Whether Hermione herself was of this opinion not many knew. Her general popularity, perhaps, made the world incurious about the subject.

The room in which Hermione was reading the letters of Artois was small and crammed with books. There were books in cases uncovered by glass from floor to ceiling, some in beautiful bindings, but many in tattered paper covers, books that looked as if they had been very much read. On several tables, among photographs and vases of flowers, were more books and many magazines, both English and foreign. A large writing-table was littered with notes and letters. An upright grand-piano stood open, with a quantity of music upon it. On the thick Persian carpet before the fire was stretched a very large St. Bernard dog, with his muzzle resting on his paws and his eyes blinking drowsily in serene contentment.

As Hermione read the letters one by one her face showed a panorama of expressions, almost laughably indicative of her swiftly passing thoughts. Sometimes she smiled. Once or twice she laughed aloud, startling the dog, who lifted his massive head and gazed at her with profound inquiry. Then she shook her head, looked grave, even sad, or earnest and full of sympathy, which seemed longing to express itself in a torrent of comforting words. Presently she put the letters together, tied them up carelessly with a piece of twine, and put them back into the drawer from which she had taken them. Just as she had finished doing this the door of the room, which was ajar, was pushed softly open, and a dark-eyed, Eastern-looking boy dressed in livery appeared.

"What is it, Selim?" asked Hermione, in French.

"Monsieur Artois, madame."

"Emile!" cried Hermione, getting up out of her chair with a sort of eager slowness. "Where is he?"

"He is here!" said a loud voice, also speaking French.

Selim stood gracefully aside, and a big man stepped into the room and took the two hands which Hermione stretched out in his.

"Don't let any one else in, Selim," said Hermione to the boy.

"Especially the little Townly," said Artois, menacingly.

"Hush, Emile! Not even Miss Townly if she calls, Selim."

Selim smiled with grave intelligence at the big man, said, "I understand, madame," and glided out.

"Why, in Heaven's name, have you—you, pilgrim of the Orient—insulted the East by putting Selim into a coat with buttons and cloth trousers?" exclaimed Artois, still holding Hermione's hands.

"It's an outrage, I know. But I had to. He was stared at and followed, and he actually minded it. As soon as I found out that, I trampled on all my artistic prejudices, and behold him—horrible but happy! Thank you for coming—thank you."

She let his hands go, and they stood for a moment looking at each other in the firelight.

Artois was a tall man of about forty-three, with large, almost Herculean limbs, a handsome face, with regular but rather heavy features, and very big gray eyes, that always looked penetrating and often melancholy. His forehead was noble and markedly intellectual, and his well-shaped, massive head was covered with thick, short, mouse-colored hair. He wore a mustache and a magnificent beard. His barber, who was partly responsible for the latter, always said of it that it was the "most beautiful fan-shaped beard in Paris," and regarded it with a pride which was probably shared by its owner. His hands and feet were good, capable-looking, but not clumsy, and his whole appearance gave an impression of power, both physical and intellectual, and of indomitable will combined with subtlety. He was well dressed, fashionably not artistically, yet he suggested an artist, not necessarily a painter. As he looked at Hermione the smile which had played about his lips when he entered the little room died away.

"I've come to hear about it all," he said, in his resonant voice—a voice which matched his appearance. "Do you know"—and here his accent was grave, almost reproachful—"that in all your letters to me—I looked them over before I left Paris—there is no allusion, not one, to this Monsieur Delarey."

"Why should there be?" she answered.

She sat down, but Artois continued to stand.

"We seldom wrote of persons, I think. We wrote of events, ideas, of work, of conditions of life; of man, woman, child—yes—but not often of special men, women, children. I am almost sure—in fact, quite sure, for I've just been reading them—that in your letters to me there is very little discussion of our mutual friends, less of friends who weren't common to us both."

As she spoke she stretched out a long, thin arm, and pulled open the drawer into which she had put the bundle tied with twine.

"They're all in here."

"You don't lock that drawer?"

"Never."

He looked at her with a sort of severity.

"I lock the door of the room, or, rather, it locks itself. You haven't noticed it?"

"No."

"It's the same as the outer door of a flat. I have a latch-key to it."

He said nothing, but smiled. All the sudden grimness had gone out of his face.

Hermione withdrew her hand from the drawer holding the letters.

"Here they are!"

"My complaints, my egoism, my ambitions, my views—Mon Dieu! Hermione, what a good friend you've been!"

"And some people say you're not modest!"

"I—modest! What is modesty? I know my own value as compared with that of others, and that knowledge to others must often seem conceit."

She began to untie the packet, but he stretched out his hand and stopped her.

"No, I didn't come from Paris to read my letters, or even to hear you read them! I came to hear about this Monsieur Delarey."

Selim stole in with tea and stole out silently, shutting the door this time. As soon as he had gone, Artois drew a case from his pocket, took out of it a pipe, filled it, and lit it. Meanwhile, Hermione poured out tea, and, putting three lumps of sugar into one of the cups, handed it to Artois.

"I haven't come to protest. You know we both worship individual freedom. How often in those letters haven't we written it—our respect of the right of the individual to act for him or herself, without the interference of outsiders? No, I've come to hear about it all, to hear how you managed to get into the pleasant state of mania."

On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic, almost patronizing. Hermione fired up at once.

"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.

Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary, but did not begin to drink it.

"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she continued. "I won't have it. We're all on a level when we're doing certain things, when we're truly living, simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're dying. You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile, drop the professional point of view. I see right through it into your warm old heart. I never was afraid of you, although I place you high, higher than your critics, higher than your public, higher than you place yourself. Every woman ought to be able to love, and every man. There's nothing at all absurd in the fact, though there may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation of it. But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing in me, so you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now drink your tea."

He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his tea, puffed out a cloud of smoke, and said:

"Whom will you ever respect?"

"Every one who is sincere—myself included."

"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris to-morrow like a shorn lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur Delarey."

Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle of letters in her lap. At last she said:

"It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a feeling, isn't it?"

"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."

"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth of a feeling may be almost more complicated than the history of France."

Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the air of a man who knew all about that.

"Maurice—Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that way, for a long time. I was very much surprised when I first found it out."

"Why, in the name of Heaven?"

"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."

"No explanation of your astonishment."

"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the fact of a very handsome man loving me."

"Now, what's your theory?"

He bent down his head a little towards her, and fixed his great, gray eyes on her face.

"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult for a man like you, genius, insight, and all, thoroughly to understand how an ugly woman regards beauty, an ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation of beauty. When I look at beauty I feel rather like a dirty little beggar staring at an angel. My intellect doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity was meant originally to be beautiful, and that the ugly ones among us are—well, like sins among virtues. You remember that book of yours which was and deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you hadn't put yourself really into it?"

Artois made a wry face.

"Eventually you paid a lot of money to prevent it from being published any more. You withdrew it from circulation. I sometimes feel that we ugly ones ought to be withdrawn from circulation. It's silly, perhaps, and I hope I never show it, but there the feeling is. So when the handsomest man I had ever seen loved me, I was simply amazed. It seemed to me ridiculous and impossible. And then, when I was convinced it was possible, very wonderful, and, I confess it to you, very splendid. It seemed to help to reconcile me with myself in a way in which I had never been reconciled before."

"And that was the beginning?"

"I dare say. There were other things, too. Maurice Delarey isn't at all stupid, but he's not nearly so intelligent as I am."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"The fact of this physical perfection being humble with me, looking up to me, seemed to mean a great deal. I think Maurice feels about intellect rather as I do about beauty. He made me understand that he must. And that seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary way. Can you understand?"

"Yes. Give me some more tea, please."

He held out his cup. She filled it, talking while she did so. She had become absorbed in what she was saying, and spoke without any self-consciousness.

"I knew my gift, such as it is, the gift of brains, could do something for him, though his gift of beauty could do nothing for me—in the way of development. And that, too, seemed to lead me a step towards him. Finally—well, one day I knew I wanted to marry him. And so, Emile, I'm going to marry him. Here!"

She held out to him his cup full of tea.

"There's no sugar," he said.

"Oh—the first time I've forgotten."

"Yes."

The tone of his voice made her look up at him quickly and exclaim:

"No, it won't make any difference!"

"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time. Cursed be the egotism of man."

He sat down in an arm-chair on the other side of the tea-table.

"It ought to make a difference. Maurice Delarey, if he is a man—and if you are going to marry him he must be—will not allow you to be the Egeria of a fellow who has shocked even Paris by telling it the naked truth."

"Yes, he will. I shall drop no friendship for him, and he knows it. There is not one that is not honest and innocent. Thank God I can say that. If you care for it, Emile, we can both add to the size of the letter bundles."

He looked at her meditatively, even rather sadly.

"You are capable of everything in the way of friendship, I believe," he said. "Even of making the bundle bigger with a husband's consent. A husband's—I suppose the little Townly's upset? But she always is."

"When you're there. You don't know Evelyn. You never will. She's at her worst with you because you terrify her. Your talent frightens her, but your appearance frightens her even more."

"I am as God made me."

"With the help of the barber. It's your beard as much as anything else."

"What does she say of this affair? What do all your innumerable adorers say?"

"What should they say? Why should anybody be surprised? It's surely the most natural thing in the world for a woman, even a very plain woman, to marry. I have always heard that marriage is woman's destiny, and though I don't altogether believe that, still I see no special reason why I should never marry if I wish to. And I do wish to."

"That's what will surprise the little Townly and the gaping crowd."

"I shall begin to think I've seemed unwomanly all these years."

"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes because she is going to do a very important thing that is very ordinary."

"It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me."

Emile Artois began to stroke his beard. He was determined not to feel jealous. He had never wished to marry Hermione, and did not wish to marry her now, but he had come over from Paris secretly a man of wrath.

"You needn't tell me that," he said. "Of course it is the great event to you. Otherwise you would never have thought of doing it."

"Exactly. Are you astonished?"

"I suppose I am. Yes, I am."

"I should have thought you were far too clever to be so."

"Exactly what I should have thought. But what living man is too clever to be an idiot? I never met the gentleman and never hope to."

"You looked upon me as the eternal spinster?"

"I looked upon you as Hermione Lester, a great creature, an extraordinary creature, free from the prejudices of your sex and from its pettinesses, unconventional, big brained, generous hearted, free as the wind in a world of monkey slaves, careless of all opinion save your own, but humbly obedient to the truth that is in you, human as very few human beings are, one who ought to have been an artist but who apparently preferred to be simply a woman."

Hermione laughed, winking away two tears.

"Well, Emile dear, I'm being very simply a woman now, I assure you."

"And why should I be surprised? You're right. What is it makes me surprised?"

He sat considering.

"Perhaps it is that you are so unusual, so individual, that my imagination refuses to project the man on whom your choice could fall. I project the snuffy professor—Impossible! I project the Greek god—again my mind cries, 'Impossible!' Yet, behold, it is in very truth the Greek god, the ideal of the ordinary woman."

"You know nothing about it. You're shooting arrows into the air."

"Tell me more then. Hold up a torch in the darkness."

"I can't. You pretend to know a woman, and you ask her coldly to explain to you the attraction of the man she loves, to dissect it. I won't try to."

"But," he said, with now a sort of joking persistence, which was only a mask for an almost irritable curiosity, "I want to know."

"And you shall. Maurice and I are dining to-night at Caminiti's in Peathill Street, just off Regent Street. Come and meet us there, and we'll all three spend the evening together. Half-past eight, of course no evening dress, and the most delicious Turkish coffee in London."

"Does Monsieur Delarey like Turkish coffee?"

"Loves it."

"Intelligently?"

"How do you mean?"

"Does he love it inherently, or because you do?"

"You can find that out to-night."

"I shall come."

He got up, put his pipe into a case, and the case into his pocket, and said:

"Hermione, if the analyst may have a word—"

"Yes—now."

"Don't let Monsieur Delarey, whatever his character, see now, or in the future, the dirty little beggar staring at the angel. I use your own preposterously inflated phrase. Men can't stand certain things and remain true to the good in their characters. Humble adoration from a woman like you would be destructive of blessed virtues in Antinous. Think well of yourself, my friend, think well of your sphinxlike eyes. Haven't they beauty? Doesn't intellect shoot its fires from them? Mon Dieu! Don't let me see any prostration to-night, or I shall put three grains of something I know—I always call it Turkish delight—into the Turkish coffee of Monsieur Delarey, and send him to sleep with his fathers."

Hermione got up and held out her hands to him impulsively.

"Bless you, Emile!" she said. "You're a—"

There was a gentle tap on the door. Hermione went to it and opened it. Selim stood outside with a pencil note on a salver.

"Ha! The little Townly has been!" said Artois.

"Yes, it's from her. You told her, Selim, that I was with Monsieur Artois?"

"Yes, madame."

"Did she say anything?"

"She said, 'Very well,' madame, and then she wrote this. Then she said again, 'Very well,' and then she went away."

"All right, Selim."

Selim departed.

"Delicious!" said Artois. "I can hear her speaking and see her drifting away consumed by jealousy, in the fog."

"Hush, Emile, don't be so malicious."

"P'f! I must be to-day, for I too am—"

"Nonsense. Be good this evening, be very good."

"I will try."

He kissed her hand, bending his great form down with a slightly burlesque air, and strode out without another word. Hermione sat down to read Miss Townly's note:

"Dearest, never mind. I know that I must now accustom myself to be nothing in your life. It is difficult at first, but what is existence but a struggle? I feel that I am going to have another of my neuralgic seizures. I wonder what it all means?—Your, Evelyn."

Hermione laid the note down, with a sigh and a little laugh.

"I wonder what it all means? Poor, dear Evelyn! Thank God, it sometimes means—" She did not finish the sentence, but knelt down on the carpet and took the St. Bernard's great head in her hands.

"You don't bother, do you, old boy, as long as you have your bone. Ah, I'm a selfish wretch. But I am going to have my bone, and I can't help feeling happy—gloriously, supremely happy!"

And she kissed the dog's cold nose and repeated:

"Supremely—supremely happy!"

CHAPTER II

Miss Townly, gracefully turned away from Hermione's door by Selim, did, as Artois had surmised, drift away in the fog to the house of her friend Mrs. Creswick, who lived in Sloane Street. She felt she must unburden herself to somebody, and Mrs. Creswick's tea, a blend of China tea with another whose origin was a closely guarded secret, was the most delicious in London. There are merciful dispensations of Providence even for Miss Townlys, and Mrs. Creswick was at home with a blazing fire. When she saw Miss Townly coming sideways into the room with a slightly drooping head, she said, briskly:

"Comfort me with crumpets, for I am sick with love! Cheer up, my dear Evelyn. Fogs will pass and even neuralgia has its limits. I don't ask you what is the matter, because I know perfectly well."

Miss Townly went into a very large arm-chair and waveringly selected a crumpet.

"What does it all mean?" she murmured, looking obliquely at her friend's parquet.

"Ask the baker, No. 5 Allitch Street. I always get them from there. And he's a remarkably well-informed man."

"No, I mean life with its extraordinary changes, things you never expected, never dreamed of—and all coming so abruptly. I don't think I'm a stupid person, but I certainly never looked for this."

"For what?"

"This most extraordinary engagement of Hermione's."

Mrs. Creswick, who was a short woman who looked tall, with a briskly conceited but not unkind manner, and a decisive and very English nose, rejoined:

"I don't know why we should call it extraordinary. Everybody gets engaged at some time or other, and Hermione's a woman like the rest of us and subject to aberration. But I confess I never thought she would marry Maurice Delarey. He never seemed to mean more to her than any one else, so far as I could see."

"Everybody seems to mean so much to Hermione that it makes things difficult to outsiders," replied Miss Townly, plaintively. "She is so wide-minded and has so many interests that she dwarfs everybody else. I always feel quite squeezed when I compare my poor little life with hers. But then she has such physical endurance. She breaks the ice, you know, in her bath in the winter—of course I mean when there is ice."

"It isn't only in her bath that she breaks the ice," said Mrs. Creswick.

"I perfectly understand," Miss Townly said, vaguely. "You mean—yes, you're right. Well, I prefer my bath warmed for me, but my circulation was never of the best."

"Hermione is extraordinary," said Mrs. Creswick, trying to look at her profile in the glass and making her face as Roman as she could, "I know all London, but I never met another Hermione. She can do things that other women can't dream of even, and nobody minds."

"Well, now she is going to do a thing we all dream of and a great many of us do. Will it answer? He's ten years younger than she is. Can it answer?"

"One can never tell whether a union of two human mysteries will answer," said Mrs. Creswick, judicially. "Maurice Delarey is wonderfully good-looking."

"Yes, and Hermione isn't."

"That has never mattered in the least."

"I know. I didn't say it had. But will it now?"

"Why should it?"

"Men care so much for looks. Do you think Hermione loves Mr. Delarey for his?"

"She dives deep."

"Yes, as a rule."

"Why not now? She ought to have dived deeper than ever this time."

"She ought, of course. I perfectly understand that. But it's very odd, I think we often marry the man we understand less than any one else in the world. Mystery is so very attractive."

Miss Townly sighed. She was emaciated, dark, and always dressed to look mysterious.

"Maurice Delarey is scarcely my idea of a mystery," said Mrs. Creswick, taking joyously a marron glacé. "In my opinion he's an ordinarily intelligent but an extraordinarily handsome man. Hermione is exactly the reverse, extraordinarily intelligent and almost ugly."

"Oh no, not ugly!" said Miss Townly, with unexpected warmth.

Though of a tepid personality, she was a worshipper at Hermione's shrine.

"Her eyes are beautiful," she added.

"Good eyes don't make a beauty," said Mrs. Creswick again, looking at her three-quarters face in the glass. "Hermione is too large, and her face is too square, and—but as I said before, it doesn't matter the least. Hermione's got a temperament that carries all before it."

"I do wish I had a temperament," said Miss Townly. "I try to cultivate one."

"You might as well try to cultivate a mustache," Mrs. Creswick rather brutally rejoined. "If it's there, it's there, but if it isn't one prays in vain."

"I used to think Hermione would do something," continued Miss Townly, finishing her second cup of tea with thirsty languor.

"Do something?"

"Something important, great, something that would make her famous, but of course now"—she paused—"now it's too late," she concluded. "Marriage destroys, not creates talent. Some celebrated man—I forget which—has said something like that."

"Perhaps he'd destroyed his wife's. I think Hermione might be a great mother."

Miss Townly blushed faintly. She did nearly everything faintly. That was partly why she admired Hermione.

"And a great mother is rare," continued Mrs. Creswick. "Good mothers are, thank God, quite common even in London, whatever those foolish people who rail at the society they can't get into may say. But great mothers are seldom met with. I don't know one."

"What do you mean by a great mother?" inquired Miss Townly.

"A mother who makes seeds grow. Hermione has a genius for friendship and a special gift for inspiring others. If she ever has a child, I can imagine that she will make of that child something wonderful."

"Do you mean an infant prodigy?" asked Miss Townly, innocently.

"No, dear, I don't!" said Mrs. Creswick; "I mean nothing of the sort. Never mind!"

When Mrs. Creswick said "Never mind!" Miss Townly usually got up to go. She got up to go now, and went forth into Sloane Street meditating, as she would have expressed it, "profoundly."

Meanwhile Artois went back to the Hans Crescent Hotel on foot. He walked slowly along the greasy pavement through the yellow November fog, trying to combat a sensation of dreariness which had floated round his spirit, as the fog floated round his body, directly he stepped into the street. He often felt depressed without a special cause, but this afternoon there was a special cause for his melancholy. Hermione was going to be married.

She often came to Paris, where she had many friends, and some years ago they had met at a dinner given by a brilliant Jewess, who delighted in clever people, not because she was stupid, but for the opposite reason. Artois was already famous, though not loved, as a novelist. He had published two books; works of art, cruel, piercing, brutal, true. Hermione had read them. Her intellect had revelled in them, but they had set ice about her heart, and when Madame Enthoven told her who was going to take her in to dinner, she very nearly begged to be given another partner. She felt that her nature must be in opposition to this man's.

Artois was not eager for the honor of her company. He was a careful dissecter of women, and, therefore, understood how mysterious women are; but in his intimate life they counted for little. He regarded them there rather as the European traveller regards the Mousmés of Japan, as playthings, and insisted on one thing only—that they must be pretty. A Frenchman, despite his unusual intellectual power, he was not wholly emancipated from the la petite femme tradition, which will never be outmoded in Paris while Paris hums with life, and, therefore, when he was informed that he was to take in to dinner the tall, solidly built, big-waisted, rugged-faced woman, whom he had been observing from a distance ever since he came into the drawing-room, he felt that he was being badly treated by his hostess.

Yet he had been observing this woman closely.

Something unusual, something vital in her had drawn his attention, fixed it, held it. He knew that, but said to himself that it was the attention of the novelist that had been grasped by an uncommon human specimen, and that the man of the world, the diner-out, did not want to eat in company with a specimen, but to throw off professional cares with a gay little chatterbox of the Mousmé type. Therefore he came over to be presented to Hermione with rather a bad grace.

And that introduction was the beginning of the great friendship which was now troubling him in the fog.

By the end of that evening Hermione and he had entirely rid themselves of their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated by the heart without the brains, but the two in combination took possession of him with an ease which, when the evening was over, but only then, caused him some astonishment.

Hermione had a divining-rod to discover the heart in another, and she found out at once that Artois had a big heart as well as a fine intellect. He was deceptive because he was always ready to show the latter, and almost always determined to conceal the former. Even to himself he was not quite frank about his heart, but often strove to minimize its influence upon him, if not to ignore totally its promptings and its utterances. Why this was so he could not perhaps have explained even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of his temperament. From the first moment of their intercourse Hermione showed to him her conviction that he had a warm heart, and that it could be relied upon without hesitation. This piqued but presently delighted, and also soothed Artois, who was accustomed to be misunderstood, and had often thought he liked to be misunderstood, but who now found out how pleasant a brilliant woman's intuition may be, even at a Parisian dinner. Before the evening was over they knew that they were friends; and friends they had remained ever since.

Artois was a reserved man, but, like many reserved people, if once he showed himself as he really was, he could continue to be singularly frank. He was singularly frank with Hermione. She became his confidante, often at a distance. He scarcely ever came to London, which he disliked exceedingly, but from Paris or from the many lands in which he wandered—he was no pavement lounger, although he loved Paris rather as a man may love a very chic cocotte—he wrote to Hermione long letters, into which he put his mind and heart, his aspirations, struggles, failures, triumphs. They were human documents, and contained much of his secret history.

It was of this history that he was now thinking, and of Hermione's comments upon it, tied up with a ribbon in Paris. The news of her approaching marriage with a man whom he had never seen had given him a rude shock, had awakened in him a strange feeling of jealousy. He had grown accustomed to the thought that Hermione was in a certain sense his property. He realized thoroughly the egotism, the dog-in-the-manger spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause for his melancholy—his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.

When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him. Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.

Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual spirit.

He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick, low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small, straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that denoted health and an out-door life—an out-door life in the south, Artois thought.

As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity, he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate, leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous, unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.

Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body—sympathy, enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a Delarey for her. As Hermione looked round at him, turning her tall figure rather slowly in the chair, Artois made up his mind that she had been captured by the physique of this man. He could not be surprised, but he still felt angry.

Hermione introduced Delarey to him eagerly, not attempting to hide her anxiety for the two men to make friends at once. Her desire was so transparent and so warm that for a moment Artois felt touched, and inclined to trample upon his evil mood and leave no trace of it. He was also secretly too human to remain wholly unmoved by Delarey's reception of him. Delarey had a rare charm of manner whose source was a happy, but not foolishly shy, modesty, which made him eager to please, and convinced that in order to do so he must bestir himself and make an effort. But in this effort there was no labor. It was like the spurt of a willing horse, a fine racing pace of the nature that woke pleasure and admiration in those who watched it.

Artois felt at once that Delarey had no hostility towards him, but was ready to admire and rejoice in him as Hermione's greatest friend. He was met more than half-way. Yet when he was beside Delarey, almost touching him, the stubborn sensation of furtive dislike within Artois increased, and he consciously determined not to yield to the charm of this younger man who was going to interfere in his life. Artois did not speak much English, but fortunately Delarey talked French fairly well, not with great fluency like Hermione, but enough to take a modest share in conversation, which was apparently all the share that he desired. Artois believed that he was no great talker. His eyes were more eager than was his tongue, and seemed to betoken a vivacity of spirit which he could not, perhaps, show forth in words. The conversation at first was mainly between Hermione and Artois, with an occasional word from Delarey—generally interrogative—and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics—the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them—were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two people in Paris, common friends of his and of Hermione's, who had been very intimate, but who had now quarrelled, and every one said, irrevocably. The question arose whose fault was it. Artois, who knew the facts of the case, and whose judgment was usually cool and well-balanced, said it was the woman's.

"Madame Lagrande," he said, "has a fine nature, but in this instance it has failed her, it has been warped by jealousy; not the jealousy that often accompanies passion, for she and Robert Meunier were only great friends, linked together by similar sympathies, but by a much more subtle form of that mental disease. You know, Hermione, that both of them are brilliant critics of literature?"

"Yes, yes."

"They carried on a sort of happy, but keen rivalry in this walk of letters, each striving to be more unerring than the other in dividing the sheep from the goats. I am the guilty person who made discord where there had been harmony."

"You, Emile! How was that?"

"One day I said, in a bitter mood, 'It is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a creator. You two, now would you even dare to try to create?' They were nettled by my tone, and showed it. I said, 'I have a magnificent subject for a conte, no work de longue haleine, a conte. If you like I will give it you, and leave you to create—separately, not together—what you have so often written about, the perfect conte.' They accepted my challenge. I gave them my subject and a month to work it out. At the end of that time the two contes were to be submitted to a jury of competent literary men, friends of ours. It was all a sort of joke, but created great interest in our circle—you know it, Hermione, that dines at Réneau's on Thursday nights?"

"Yes. Well, what happened?"

"Madame Lagrande made a failure of hers, but Robert Meunier astonished us all. He produced certainly one of the best contes that was ever written in the French language."

"And Madame Lagrande?"

"It is not too much to say that from that moment she has almost hated Robert."

"And you dare to say she has a noble nature?"

"Yes, a noble nature from which, under some apparently irresistible impulse, she has lapsed."

"Maurice," said Hermione, leaning her long arms on the table and leaning forward to her fiancé, "you're not in literature any more than I am, you're an outsider—bless you! What d'you say to that?"

Delarey hesitated and looked modestly at Artois.

"No, no," cried Hermione, "none of that, Maurice! You may be a better judge in this than Emile is with all his knowledge of the human heart. You're the man in the street, and sometimes I'd give a hundred pounds for his opinion and not twopence for the big man's who's in the profession. Would—could a noble nature yield to such an impulse?"

"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.

"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach between them."

"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its various forms?"

"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."

"Yet you must be capable of it."

"You think every one is?"

"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am certain, are."

Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the narrow room.

"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared for some one and was cared for—"

"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain, limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection elsewhere—what then?"

"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection would die. My love subsists on sympathy—take that food from it and it would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."

He smiled.

"What is?"

"The point is—can a noble nature lapse like that from its nobility?"

"Yes, it can."

"Then it changes, it ceases to be noble. You would not say that a brave man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."

"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain circumstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the point from which it started. The inherently noble nature will, because it must, return eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really tragic moment with the passion of remorse."

He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked at him with shining eyes. She had quite forgotten Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had lost the sense of the special in her love of the general.

"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must come back to the good that is in us in the end, that we must be true to that somehow, almost whether we will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."

"You—sinning!" exclaimed Delarey.

"Maurice, dear, you think too well of me."

Delarey flushed like a boy, and glanced quickly at Artois, who did not return his gaze.

"But if that's true, Emile," Hermione continued, "Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier will be friends again."

"Some day I know she will hold out the olive-branch, but what if he refuses it?"

"You literary people are dreadfully difficile."

"True. Our jealousies are ferocious, but so are the jealousies of thousands who can neither read nor write."

"Jealousy," she said, forgetting to eat in her keen interest in the subject. "I told you I didn't believe myself capable of it, but I don't know. The jealousy that is born of passion I might understand and suffer, perhaps, but jealousy of a talent greater than my own, or of one that I didn't possess—that seems to me inexplicable. I could never be jealous of a talent."

"You mean that you could never hate a person for a talent in them?"

"Yes."

"Suppose that some one, by means of a talent which you had not, won from you a love which you had? Talent is a weapon, you know."

"You think it is a weapon to conquer the affections! Ah, Emile, after all you don't know us!"

"You go too fast. I did not say a weapon to conquer the affection of a woman."

"You're speaking of men?"

"I know," Delarey said, suddenly, forgetting to be modest for once, "you mean that a man might be won away from one woman by a talent in another. Isn't that it?"

"Ah," said Hermione, "a man—I see."

She sat for a moment considering deeply, with her luminous eyes fixed on the food in her plate, food which she did not see.

"What horrible ideas you sometimes have, Emile," she said, at last.

"You mean what horrible truths exist," he answered, quietly.

"Could a man be won so? Yes, I suppose he might be if there were a combination."

"Exactly," said Artois.

"I see now. Suppose a man had two strains in him, say: the adoration of beauty, of the physical; and the adoration of talent, of the mental. He might fall in love with a merely beautiful woman and transfer his affections if he came across an equally beautiful woman who had some great talent."

"Or he might fall in love with a plain, talented woman, and be taken from her by one in whom talent was allied with beauty. But in either case are you sure that the woman deserted could never be jealous, bitterly jealous, of the talent possessed by the other woman? I think talent often creates jealousy in your sex."

"But beauty much oftener, oh, much! Every woman, I feel sure, could more easily be jealous of physical beauty in another woman than of mental gifts. There's something so personal in beauty."

"And is genius not equally personal?"

"I suppose it is, but I doubt if it seems so."

"I think you leave out of account the advance of civilization, which is greatly changing men and women in our day. The tragedies of the mind are increasing."

"And the tragedies of the heart—are they diminishing in consequence? Oh, Emile!" And she laughed.

"Hermione—your food! You are not eating anything!" said Delarey, gently, pointing to her plate. "And it's all getting cold."

"Thank you, Maurice."

She began to eat at once with an air of happy submission, which made Artois understand a good deal about her feeling for Delarey.

"The heart will always rule the head, I dare say, in this world where the majority will always be thoughtless," said Artois. "But the greatest jealousy, the jealousy which is most difficult to resist and to govern, is that in which both heart and brain are concerned. That is, indeed, a full-fledged monster."

Artois generally spoke with a good deal of authority, often without meaning to do so. He thought so clearly, knew so exactly what he was thinking and what he meant, that he felt very safe in conversation, and from this sense of safety sprang his air of masterfulness. It was an air that was always impressive, but to-night it specially struck Hermione. Now she laid down her knife and fork once more, to Delarey's half-amused despair, and exclaimed:

"I shall never forget the way you said that. Even if it were nonsense one would have to believe it for the moment, and of course it's dreadfully true. Intellect and heart suffering in combination must be far more terrible than the one suffering without the other. No, Maurice, I've really finished. I don't want any more. Let's have our coffee."

"The Turkish coffee," said Artois, with a smile. "Do you like Turkish coffee, Monsieur Delarey?"

"Yes, monsieur. Hermione has taught me to."

"Ah!"

"At first it seemed to me too full of grounds," he explained.

"Perhaps a taste for it must be an acquired one among Europeans. Do we have it here?"

"No, no," said Hermione, "Caminiti has taken my advice, and now there's a charming smoke-room behind this. Come along."

She got up and led the way out. The two men followed her, Artois coming last. He noticed now more definitely the very great contrast between Hermione and her future husband. Delarey, when in movement, looked more than ever like a Mercury. His footstep was light and elastic, and his whole body seemed to breathe out a gay activity, a fulness of the joy of life. Again Artois thought of Sicilian boys dancing the tarantella, and when they were in the small smoke-room, which Caminiti had fitted up in what he believed to be Oriental style, and which, though scarcely accurate, was quite cosey, he was moved to inquire:

"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"

"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins. But I have never been in Sicily or Italy."

"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to find that out. I notice it, too, sometimes, that touch of the blessed South. I shall take him there some day, and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see in England."

"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!" thought Artois. "What luck for you to go there with such a companion!"

They sat down and the two men began to smoke. Hermione never smoked because she had tried smoking and knew she hated it. They were alone in the room, which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by shaded lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he scarcely knew why. Perhaps the good dinner had comforted him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield to the charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was untainted and unspoiled by any awkward shyness.

Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was aware that he was more ready to be happy with the flying moment than he had been, or had expected to be that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his gray eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's notion of a Turkish divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths rise from his cigar, a light which made his face most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.

"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure, and with the thought came into her heart an even deeper love for Maurice. For it was a triumph, indeed, if Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed to her just then as if she had never known what perfect happiness was till now, when she sat between her best friend and her lover, and sensitively felt that in the room there were not three separate persons but a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable silence. Then an Italian boy brought in the coffee. Artois spoke to him in Italian. His eyes lit up as he answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect. When he had served the coffee he went out, glowing.

"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.

"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I—it doesn't matter to me. Wherever it is will be the same to me."

"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's profoundly true."

"Don't you—don't you know?" ventured Delarey.

"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."

He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they were.

"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that you have never known the happiness that makes of every place—Clapham, Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement—an Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered, had your ambition and your freedom—"

"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on life watching the manifestations of life."

"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good, Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one sees—one must see—everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery, not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps I don't put it well, but—"

"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."

"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.

His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration and love.

Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had arrived.

"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you bring to my mind at this moment."

"What's that, Emile?"

"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of which you speak—what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably, followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."

"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"

"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup of sorrow."

Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the vehement exclamation:

"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you, Emile."

"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"

He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.

"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life throws at your feet?"

Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy—for so he called the debatable land over which intuition held sway—Artois hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.

"Don't listen to me," he said. "I am the professional analyst of life. As I sit over a sentence, examining, selecting, rejecting, replacing its words, so do I sit over the emotions of myself and others till I cease really to live, and could almost find it in my head to try to prevent them from living, too. Live, live—enter into the garden of paradise and never mind what comes after."

"I could not do anything else," said Hermione. "It is unnatural to me to look forward. The 'now' nearly always has complete possession of me."

"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to peer round the corner to see what is coming. And you, Monsieur Delarey?"

"I!" said Delarey.

He had not expected to be addressed just then, and for a moment looked confused.

"I don't know if I can say," he answered, at last. "But I think if the present was happy I should try to live in that, and if it was sad I should have a shot at looking forward to something better."

"That's one of the best philosophies I ever heard," said Hermione, "and after my own heart. Long live the philosophy of Maurice Delarey!"

Delarey blushed with pleasure like a boy. Just then three men came in smoking cigars. Hermione looked at her watch.

"Past eleven," she said. "I think I'd better go. Emile, will you drive with me home?"

"I!" he said, with an unusual diffidence. "May I?"

He glanced at Delarey.

"I want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite understands. He knows you go back to Paris to-morrow."

They all got up, and Delarey at once held out his hand to Artois.

"I am glad to have been allowed to meet Hermione's best friend," he said, simply. "I know how much you are to her, and I hope you'll let me be a friend, too, perhaps, some day."

He wrung Artois's hand warmly.

"Thank you, monsieur," replied Artois.

He strove hard to speak as cordially as Delarey.

Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in a hansom driving down Regent Street. The fog had lifted, and it was possible to see to right and left of the greasy thoroughfare.

"Need we go straight back?" said Hermione. "Why not tell him to drive down to the Embankment? It's quiet there at night, and open and fine—one of the few fine things in dreary old London. And I want to have a last talk with you, Emile."

Artois pushed up the little door in the roof with his stick.

"The Embankment—Thames," he said to the cabman, with a strong foreign accent.

"Right, sir," replied the man, in the purest cockney.

As soon as the trap was shut down above her head Hermione exclaimed:

"Emile, I'm so happy, so—so happy! I think you must understand why now. You don't wonder any more, do you?"

"No, I don't wonder. But did I ever express any wonder?"

"I think you felt some. But I knew when you saw him it would go. He's got one beautiful quality that's very rare in these days, I think—reverence. I love that in him. He really reverences everything that is fine, every one who has fine and noble aspirations and powers. He reverences you."

"If that is the case he shows very little insight."

"Don't abuse yourself to me to-night. There's nothing the matter now, is there?"

Her intonation demanded a negative, but Artois did not hasten to give it. Instead he turned the conversation once more to Delarey.

"Tell me something more about him," he said. "What sort of family does he come from?"

"Oh, a very ordinary family, well off, but not what is called specially well-born. His father has a large shipping business. He's a cultivated man, and went to Eton and Oxford, as Maurice did. Maurice's mother is very handsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The Southern blood comes from her side."

"Oh—how?"

"Her mother was a Sicilian."

"Of the aristocracy, or of the people?"

"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter? I am not marrying Maurice's grandmother."

"How do you know that?"

"You mean that our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him to-morrow if he'd have me."

"I'm quite sure you would."

"Besides, probably the grandmother was a delicious old dear. But didn't you like Maurice, Emile? I felt so sure you did."

"I—yes, I liked him. I see his fascination. It is almost absurdly obvious, and yet it is quite natural. He is handsome and he is charming."

"And he's good, too."

"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of him as a Mercury."

"The messenger of the gods—yes, he is like that."

She laid her hand on his arm, as if her happiness and longing for sympathy in it impelled her to draw very near to a human being.

"A bearer of good tidings—that is what he has been to me. I want you to like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one else."

The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand to the Thames Embankment—a street that was obscure and that looked sad and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his hand and pushed her roughly. She fell up against some railings, caught hold of them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.

"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."

"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."

"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me—you for one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"

She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the spreading night.

"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't work, but I'm glad to say he does."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand Maurice, and that's the important matter."

They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side; on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more mystical sense of life and its strange and pathetic relation with nature and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his business, Hermione, her understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of existence?

"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"

"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"

"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in many."

"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."

"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by your impulses."

She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide. Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said:

"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly—don't be afraid now. What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at himself if she began to laugh.

But she said, gravely:

"Go on."

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery will be born."

"Yes? What sort of misery?"

"I don't know."

"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"

"To you."

"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"

"I think it must have been."

"Well?"

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."

"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has he faithfulness?"

"Oh, Emile!"

"You told me to be frank."

"And I wish you to be. Go on, say everything."

"I've only seen Delarey once, and I'll confess that I came prepared to see faults as clearly as, perhaps more clearly than, virtues. I don't pretend to read character at a glance. Only fools can do that—I am relying on their frequent assertion that they can. He strikes me as a man of great charm, with an unusual faculty of admiration for the gifts of others and a modest estimate of himself. I believe he's sincere."

"He is, through and through."

"I think so—now. But does he know his own blood? Our blood governs us when the time comes. He is modest about his intellect. I think it quick, but I doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining influence."

"Against what?"

"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."

"You speak almost as if he were a child," Hermione said. "He's much younger than I am, but he's twenty-four."

"He is very young looking, and you are at least twenty years ahead of him in all essentials. Don't you feel it?"

"I suppose—yes, I do."

"Mercury—he should be mercurial."

"He is. That's partly why I love him, perhaps. He is full of swiftness."

"So is the butterfly when it comes out into the sun."

"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me deliberately to lie down and roll in pessimism rather as a horse—"

"Why not say an ass?"

She laughed.

"An ass, then, my dear, lies down sometimes and rolls in dust. I think you are doing it to-night. I think you were preparing to do it this afternoon. Perhaps it is the effect of London upon you?"

"London—by-the-way, where are you going for your honeymoon? I am sure you know, though Monsieur Delarey may not."

"Why are you sure?"

"Your face to-night when I asked if it was to be Italian."

She laid her hand again upon his arm and spoke eagerly, forgetting in a moment his pessimism and the little cloud it had brought across her happiness.

"You're right; I've decided."

"Italy—and hotels?"

"No, a thousand times no!"

"Where then?"

"Sicily, and my peasant's cottage."

"The cottage on Monte Amato where you spent a summer four or five years ago contemplating Etna?"

"Yes. I've not said a word to Maurice, but I've taken it again. All the little furniture I had—beds, straw chairs, folding-tables—is stored in a big room in the village at the foot of the mountain. Gaspare, the Sicilian boy who was my servant, will superintend the carrying up of it on women's heads—his dear old grandmother takes the heaviest things, arm-chairs and so on—and it will all be got ready in no time. I'm having the house whitewashed again, and the shutters painted, and the stone vases on the terrace will be filled with scarlet geraniums, and—oh, Emile, I shall hear the piping of the shepherds in the ravine at twilight again with him, and see the boys dance the tarantella under the moon again with him, and—and—"

She stopped with a break in her voice.

"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued, after a moment. "Tell me you think we shall be happy in our garden of paradise—tell me that!"

But he only said, even more gravely:

"So you're taking him to the real South?"

"Yes, to the blue and the genuine gold, and the quivering heat, and the balmy nights when Etna sends up its plume of ivory smoke to the moon. He's got the south in his blood. Well, he shall see the south first with me, and he shall love it as I love it."

He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called forth a spark from him. And now she saw that, and said again:

"London is making you horrible to-night. You are doing London and yourself an injustice, and Maurice, too."

"It's very possible," he replied. "But—I can say it to you—I have a certain gift of—shall I call it divination?—where men and women are concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can, almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."

"What do you see for us, Emile? Don't you think we shall be happy together, then? Don't you think that we are suited to be happy together?"

When she asked Artois this direct question he was suddenly aware of a vagueness brooding in his mind, and knew that he had no definite answer to make.

"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing. It may be London. It may be my own egoism."

And then he suddenly explained himself to Hermione with the extraordinary frankness of which he was only capable when he was with her, or was writing to her.

"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't let my growling distress you. Your happiness has made me envious."

"I'll never believe it," she exclaimed. "You are too good a friend and too great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find some one?"

"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."

"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist, and yet I have often longed to be one."

"Why have you never tried to be one?"

"I hardly know. Perhaps in my inmost being I feel I never could be. I am too impulsive, too unrestrained, too shapeless in mind. If I wrote a book it might be interesting, human, heart-felt, true to life, I hope, not stupid, I believe; but it would be a chaos. You—how it would shock your critical mind! I could never select and prune and blend and graft. I should have to throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just leave them there."

"If you did that you might produce a human document that would live almost as long as literature, that even just criticism would be powerless to destroy."

"I shall never write that book, but I dare say I shall live it."

"Yes," he said. "You will live it, perhaps with Monsieur Delarey."

And he smiled.

"When is the wedding to be?"

"In January, I think."

"Ah! When you are in your garden of paradise I shall not be very far off—just across your blue sea on the African shore."

"Why, where are you going, Emile?"

"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan, among the pilgrims and the mosques, making some studies, taking some notes."

"For a book? Come over to Sicily and see us."

"I don't think you will want me there."

The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye, with a luscious smile in it, peered down upon them.

"'Ad enough of the river, sir?"

"Comment?" said Artois.

"We'd better go home, I suppose," Hermione said.

She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove in silence to Eaton Place.

CHAPTER III

Lucrezia Gabbi came out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite, along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that looked towards Etna and the sea. Lucrezia was dressed in her best. She wore a dark-stuff gown covered in the front by a long blue-and-white apron. Although really happiest in her mind when her feet were bare, she had donned a pair of white stockings and low slippers, and over her thick, dark hair was tied a handkerchief gay with a pattern of brilliant yellow flowers on a white ground. This was a present from Gaspare bought at the town of Cattaro at the foot of the mountains, and worn now for the first time in honor of a great occasion.

To-day Lucrezia was in the service of distinguished forestieri, and she was gazing now across the ravine straining her eyes to see a procession winding up from the sea: donkeys laden with luggage, and her new padrone and padrona pioneered by the radiant Gaspare towards their mountain home. It was a good day for their arrival. Nobody could deny that. Even Lucrezia, who was accustomed to fine weather, having lived all her life in Sicily, was struck to a certain blinking admiration as she stepped out on to the terrace, and murmured to herself and a cat which was basking on the stone seat that faced the cottage between broken columns, round which roses twined:

"Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"

On this morning of February the clearness of the atmosphere was in truth almost African. Under the cloudless sky every detail of the great view from the terrace stood out with a magical distinctness. The lines of the mountains were sharply defined against the profound blue. The forms of the gray rocks scattered upon their slopes, of the peasants' houses, of the olive and oak trees which grew thickly on the left flank of Monte Amato below the priest's house, showed themselves in the sunshine with the bold frankness which is part of the glory of all things in the south. The figures of stationary or moving goatherds and laborers, watching their flocks or toiling among the vineyards and the orchards, were relieved against the face of nature in the shimmer of the glad gold in this Eden, with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity, profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a jagged crest of beetling rock, the ruins of a Saracenic castle dominated a huddled village, whose houses seemed to cling frantically to the cliff, as if each one were in fear of being separated from its brethren and tossed into the sea. And far below that sea spread forth its waveless, silent wonder to a horizon-line so distant that the eyes which looked upon it could scarcely distinguish sea from sky—a line which surely united not divided two shades of flawless blue, linking them in a brotherhood which should be everlasting. Few sounds, and these but slight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of tressy olives beside a tiny stream.

Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had always been part of her life.

Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia. Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay, perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule track which wound upward from the distant town, in which the train from Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to think more naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities were to earn her.

Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and excited her.

She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats, hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers. Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy, but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.

Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey, was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in. Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from the summit of the mountain, and close to a grove of oaks and olive-trees, which grew among a turmoil of mighty boulders, he had terraced out the slope and set his country home. At the edge of the rough path which led to the cottage from the ravine below was a ruined Norman arch. This served as a portal of entrance. Between it and the cottage was a well surrounded by crumbling walls, with stone seats built into them. Passing that, one came at once to the terrace of earth, fronted by a low wall with narrow seats covered with white tiles, and divided by broken columns that edged the ravine and commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, but on Monte Amato Hermione's was the last, the most intrepid. None other ventured to cling to the warm earth so high above the sea and in a place so solitary. That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near the sky and very far away.

Now, after an earnest, ruminating glance at the cottage, Lucrezia walked across the terrace and reverently entered it by a door which opened onto a flight of three steps leading down to the terrace. Already she knew the interior by heart, but she had not lost her awe of it, her sense almost of being in a church when she stood among the furniture, the hangings, and the pictures which she had helped to arrange under Gaspare's orders. The room she now stood in was the parlor of the cottage, serving as dining-room, drawing-room, boudoir, and den. Although it must be put to so many purposes, it was only a small, square chamber, and very simply furnished. The walls, like all the walls of the cottage inside and out, were whitewashed. On the floor was a carpet that had been woven in Kairouan, the sacred African town where Artois was now staying and making notes for his new book. It was thick and rough, and many-colored almost as Joseph's coat; brilliant but not garish, for the African has a strange art of making colors friends instead of enemies, of blending them into harmonies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land; Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.

At the two small windows on either side of the door, which was half glass, half white-painted wood, were thin curtains of pale gray-blue and white, bought in the bazaars of Tunis. For furniture there were a folding-table of brown, polished wood, a large divan with many cushions, two deck-chairs of the telescope species, that can be made long or short at will, a writing-table, a cottage piano, and four round wicker chairs with arms. In one corner of the room stood a tall clock with a burnished copper face, and in another a cupboard containing glass and china. A door at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental portière. On the writing-table, and on some dwarf bookcases already filled with books left behind by Hermione on her last visit to Sicily, stood rough jars of blue, yellow, and white pottery, filled with roses and geraniums arranged by Gaspare. To the left of the room, as Lucrezia faced it, was a door leading into the bedroom, of the master and mistress.

After a long moment of admiring contemplation, Lucrezia went into this bedroom, in which she was specially interested, as it was to be her special care. All was white here, walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables, the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright, golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through whose window could be seen a space of far-off sea, a space of mountain-flank, and, when one came near to it, and the awning was drawn up, the snowy cone of Etna, struck now to the soul of Lucrezia a sense of half-puzzled peace. Her large eyes opened wider, and she laid her hands on her hips and fell into a sort of dream as she stood there, hearing only the faint and regular ticking of the clock in the sitting-room. She was well accustomed to the silence of the mountain world and never heeded it, but peace within four walls was almost unknown to her. Here no hens fluttered, no turkeys went to and fro elongating their necks, no children played and squalled, no women argued and gossiped, quarrelled and worked, no men tramped in and out, grumbled and spat. A perfectly clean and perfectly peaceful room—it was marvellous, it was—she sighed again. What must it be like to be gentlefolk, to have the money to buy calm and cleanliness?

Suddenly she moved, took her hands from her hips, settled her yellow handkerchief, and smiled. The silence had been broken by a sound all true Sicilians love, the buzz and the drowsy wail of the ceramella, the bagpipes which the shepherds play as they come down from the hills to the villages when the festival of the Natale is approaching. It was as yet very faint and distant, coming from the mountain-side behind the cottage, but Lucrezia knew the tune. It was part of her existence, part of Etna, the olive groves, the vineyards, and the sea, part of that old, old Sicily which dwells in the blood and shines in the eyes, and is alive in the songs and the dances of these children of the sun, and of legends and of mingled races from many lands. It was the "Pastorale," and she knew who was playing it—Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he played it, even the old man's thoughts were turned to dancing and the old woman's to love. But now he was being important, he was playing the ceramella, into which no shepherd could pour such a volume of breath as he, from which none could bring such a volume of warm and lusty music. It was Sebastiano coming down from the top of Monte Amato to welcome the forestieri.

The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace. Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced, pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously over his back.

"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the awning—"Sebastiano!"

Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more:

"Sebastiano!"

Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen, steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide, slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but very manly chin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.

He stared down at Lucrezia with a half-contemptuous humor, and she up at him with a wide-eyed, unconcealed adoration. Then he looked curiously round the room, with a sharp intelligence that took in every detail in a moment.

"Per Dio!" he ejaculated. "Per Dio!"

He looked at Lucrezia, folded his brawny arms on the window-sill, and said:

"They've got plenty of soldi."

Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.

"Gaspare says—"

"Oh, I know as much as Gaspare," interrupted Sebastiano, brusquely. "The signora is my friend. When she was here before I saw her many times. But for me she would never have taken the Casa del Prete."

"Why was that?" asked Lucrezia, with reverence.

"They told her in Marechiaro that it was not safe for a lady to live up here alone, that when the night came no one could tell what would happen."

"But, Gaspare—"

"Does Gaspare know every grotto on Etna? Has Gaspare lived eight years with the briganti? And the Mafia—has Gaspare—"

He paused, laughed, pulled his mustache, and added:

"If the signora had not been assured of my protection she would never have come up here."

"But now she has a husband."

"Yes."

He glanced again round the room.

"One can see that. Per Dio, it is like the snow on the top of Etna."

Lucrezia got up actively from the floor and came close to Sebastiano.

"What is the padrona like, Sebastiano?" she asked. "I have seen her, but I have never spoken to her."

"She is simpatica—she will do you no harm."

"And is she generous?"

"Ready to give soldi to every one who is in trouble. But if you once deceive her she will never look at you again."

"Then I will not deceive her," said Lucrezia, knitting her brows.

"Better not. She is not like us. She thinks to tell a lie is a sin against the Madonna, I believe."

"But then what will the padrone do?" asked Lucrezia, innocently.

"Tell his woman the truth, like all husbands," replied Sebastiano, with a broadly satirical grin. "As your man will some day, Lucrezia mia. All husbands are good and faithful. Don't you know that?"

"Macchè!"

She laughed loudly, with an incredulity quite free from bitterness.

"Men are not like us," she added. "They tell us whatever they please, and do always whatever they like. We must sit in the doorway and keep our back to the street for fear a man should smile at us, and they can stay out all night, and come back in the morning, and say they've been fishing at Isola Bella, or sleeping out to guard the vines, and we've got to say, 'Si, Salvatore!' or 'Si, Guido!' when we know very well—"

"What, Lucrezia?"

She looked into his twinkling eyes and reddened slightly, sticking out her under lip.

"I'm not going to tell you."

"You have no business to know."

"And how can I help—they're coming!"

Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace. Sebastiano lifted the ceramalla quickly from the window-sill and turned round, while Lucrezia darted out through the door, across the sitting-room, and out onto the terrace.

"Are they there, Sebastiano? Are they there?"

He stood by the terrace wall, shading his eyes with his hand.

"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.

Far off, winding up from the sea slowly among the rocks and the olive-trees, was a procession of donkeys, faintly relieved in the brilliant sunshine against the mountain-side.

"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four—there are four. The signore is walking, the signora is riding. Whose donkeys have they got? Gaspare's father's, of course. I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and—it is too far to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the 'Pastorale.' She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia—don't forget that—though she is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah! She will smile now and clap her hands when she hears."

He put the pipe to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and began to play the "Pastorale" with all his might, while Lucrezia listened, staring across the ravine at the creeping donkey, which was bearing Hermione upward to her garden of paradise near the sky.

CHAPTER IV

"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione, and you must be sure to—'"

"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard—Yes, it is, it is! Hush! Maurice—listen!"

Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath, looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished, with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.

"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"

Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an orange grove, murmuring peace. In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus. Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve, people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.

And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love for him and his for her.

Gaspare did not move. He loved the "Pastorale" almost without knowing that he loved it. It reminded him of the festa of Natale, when, as a child, dressed in a long, white garment, he had carried a blazing torch of straw down the steps of the church of San Pancrazio before the canopy that sheltered the Bambino. It was a part of his life, as his mother was, and Tito the donkey, and the vineyards, the sea, the sun. It pleased him to hear it, and to feel that his padrona from a far country loved it, and his isle, his "Paese" in which it sounded. So, though he had been impatient to reach the Casa del Prete and enjoy the reward of praise which he considered was his due for his forethought and his labors, he stood very still by Tito, with his great, brown eyes fixed, and the donkey switch drooping in the hand that hung at his side.

And Hermione for a moment gave herself entirely to her dream.

She had carried out the plan which she had made. She and Maurice Delarey had been married quietly, early one morning in London, and had caught the boat-train at Victoria, and travelled through to Sicily without stopping on the way to rest. She wanted to plunge Maurice in the south at once, not to lead him slowly, step by step, towards it. And so, after three nights in the train, they had opened their eyes to the quiet sea near Reggio, to the clustering houses under the mountains of Messina, to the high-prowed fishermen's boats painted blue and yellow, to the coast-line which wound away from the straits till it stole out to that almost phantasmal point where Siracusa lies, to the slope of Etna, to the orange gardens and the olives, and the great, dry water courses like giant highways leading up into the mountains. And from the train they had come up here into the recesses of the hills to hear their welcome of the "Pastorale." It was a contrast to make a dream, the roar of ceaseless travel melting into this radiant silence, this inmost heart of peace. They had rushed through great cities to this old land of mountains and of legends, and up there on the height from which the droning music dropped to them through the sunshine was their home, the solitary house which was to shelter their true marriage.

Delarey was almost confused by it all. Half dazed by the noise of the journey, he was now half dazed by the wonder of the quiet as he stood near Gaspare and listened to Sebastiano's music, and looked upward to the white terrace wall.

Hermione was to be his possession here, in this strange and far-off land, among these simple peasant people. So he thought of them, not versed yet in the complex Sicilian character. He listened, and he looked at Gaspare. He saw a boy of eighteen, short as are most Sicilians, but straight as an arrow, well made, active as a cat, rather of the Greek than of the Arab type so often met with in Sicily, with bold, well-cut features, wonderfully regular and wonderfully small, square, white teeth, thick, black eyebrows, and enormous brown eyes sheltered by the largest lashes he had ever seen. The very low forehead was edged by a mass of hair that had small gleams of bright gold here and there in the front, but that farther back on the head was of a brown so dark as to look nearly black. Gaspare was dressed in a homely suit of light-colored linen with no collar and a shirt open at the throat, showing a section of chest tanned by the sun. Stout mountain boots were on his feet, and a white linen hat was tipped carelessly to the back of his head, leaving his expressive, ardently audacious, but not unpleasantly impudent face exposed to the golden rays of which he had no fear.

As Delarey looked at him he felt oddly at home with him, almost as if he stood beside a young brother. Yet he could scarcely speak Gaspare's language, and knew nothing of his thoughts, his feelings, his hopes, his way of life. It was an odd sensation, a subtle sympathy not founded upon knowledge. It seemed to now into Delarey's heart out of the heart of the sun, to steal into it with the music of the "Pastorale."

"I feel—I feel almost as if I belonged here," he whispered to Hermione, at last.

She turned her head and looked down on him from her donkey. The tears were still in her eyes.

"I always knew you belonged to the blessed, blessed south," she said, in a low voice. "Do you care for that?"

She pointed towards the terrace.

"That music?"

"Yes."

"Tremendously, but I don't know why. Is it very beautiful?"

"I sometimes think it is the most beautiful music I have ever heard. At any rate, I have always loved it more than all other music, and now—well, you can guess if I love it now."

She dropped one hand against the donkey's warm shoulder. Maurice took it in his warm hand.

"All Sicily, all the real, wild Sicily seems to be in it. They play it in the churches on the night of the Natale," she went on, after a moment. "I shall never forget hearing it for the first time. I felt as if it took hold of my very soul with hands like the hands of the Bambino."

She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her cheek.

"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.

Gaspare lifted his switch and gave Tito a tap, calling out "Ah!" in a loud, manly voice. The donkey moved on, tripping carefully among the stones. They mounted slowly up towards the "Pastorale." Presently Hermione said to Maurice, who kept beside her in spite of the narrowness of the path:

"Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can you guess why?"

"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.

"It's this. I never expected to be perfectly happy. We all have our dreams, I suppose. We all think now and then, 'If only I could have this with that, this person in that place, I could be happy.' And perhaps we have sometimes a part of our dream turned into reality, though even that comes seldom. But to have the two, to have the two halves of our dream fitted together and made reality—isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was a girl, I always used to think—'If I could ever be with the one I loved in the south—alone, quite alone, quite away from the world, I could be perfectly happy.' Well, years after I thought that I came here. I knew at once I had found my ideal place. One-half of my dream was made real and was mine. That was much, wasn't it? But getting this part of what I longed for sometimes made me feel unutterably sad. I had never seen you then, but often when I sat on that little terrace up there I felt a passionate desire to have a human being whom I loved beside me. I loved no one then, but I wanted, I needed to love. Do men ever feel that? Women do, often, nearly always I think. The beauty made me want to love. Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the olives. Sometimes at night I saw distant lights, like fire-flies, lamps carried by peasants going to their homes in the mountains from a festa in honor of some saint, stealing upward through the darkness, or I saw the fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then—then I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation, the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now—now I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should he? What have I ever done to be worthy of such a gift?"

"You've been yourself," he answered.

At this moment the path narrowed and he had to fall behind, and they did not speak again till they had clambered up the last bit of the way, steep almost as the side of a house, passed through the old ruined arch, and came out upon the terrace before the Casa del Prete.

Sebastiano met them, still playing lustily upon his pipe, while the sweat dripped from his sunburned face; but Lucrezia, suddenly overcome by shyness, had disappeared round the corner of the cottage to the kitchen. The donkey boys were resting on the stone seats in easy attitudes, waiting for Gaspare's orders to unload, and looking forward to a drink of the Monte Amato wine. When they had had it they meant to carry out a plan devised by the radiant Gaspare, to dance a tarantella for the forestieri while Sebastiano played the flute. But no hint of this intention was to be given till the luggage had been taken down and carried into the house. Their bright faces were all twinkling with the knowledge of their secret. When at length Sebastiano had put down the ceramella and shaken Hermione and Maurice warmly by the hand, and Gaspare had roughly, but with roars of laughter, dragged Lucrezia into the light of day to be presented, Hermione took her husband in to see their home. On the table in the sitting-room lay a letter.

"A letter already!" she said.

There was a sound almost of vexation in her voice. The little white thing lying there seemed to bring a breath of the world she wanted to forget into their solitude.

"Who can have written?"

She took it up and felt contrition.

"It's from Emile!" she exclaimed. "How good of him to remember! This must be his welcome."

"Read it, Hermione," said Maurice. "I'll look after Gaspare."

She laughed.

"Better not. He's here to look after us. But you'll soon understand him, very soon, and he you. You speak different languages, but you both belong to the south. Let him alone, Maurice. We'll read this together. I'm sure it's for you as well as me."

And while Gaspare and the boys carried in the trunks she sat down by the table and opened Emile's letter. It was very short, and was addressed from Kairouan, where Artois had established himself for the spring in an Arab house. She began reading it aloud in French:

"This is a word—perhaps unwelcome, for I think I understand, dear friend, something of what you are feeling and of what you desire just now—a word of welcome to your garden of paradise. May there never be an angel with a flaming sword to keep the gate against you. Listen to the shepherds fluting, dream, or, better, live, as you are grandly capable of living, under the old olives of Sicily. Take your golden time boldly with both hands. Life may seem to most of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured thing, but when it is not so for a while to one who can think as you can think, the power of thought, of deep thought, intensifies its glory. You will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as might a saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with a heart that only your friends—I should like to dare to say only one friend—know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist here, in the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards Mecca, and prays that you may never leave your garden. E. A."

"Does the Sicilian grandmother respond to the magic of the south?"

When she drew near to the end of this letter Hermione hesitated.

"He—there's something," she said, "that is too kind to me. I don't think I'll read it."

"Don't," said Delarey. "But it can't be too kind."

She saw the postscript and smiled.

"And quite at the end there's an allusion to you."

"Is there?"

"I must read that."

And she read it.

"He needn't be afraid of the grandmother's not responding, need he, Maurice?"

"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you think? Why should it be? Who wouldn't love this place?"

And he went to the open door and looked out towards the sea.

"Who wouldn't?" he repeated.

"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with Etna for being the shape it is."

"What an ass!"

"I thought so, too. But, seriously, I expect the grandmother has something to say in that matter of your feeling already, as if you belonged here."

"Perhaps."

He was still looking towards the distant sea far down below them.

"Is that an island?" he asked.

"Where?" said Hermione, getting up and coming towards him. "Oh, that—no, it is a promontory, but it's almost surrounded by the sea. There is only a narrow ledge of rock, like a wall, connecting it with the main-land, and in the rock there's a sort of natural tunnel through which the sea flows. I've sometimes been to picnic there. On the plateau hidden among the trees there's a ruined house. I have spent many hours reading and writing in it. They call it, in Marechiaro, Casa delle Sirene—the house of the sirens."

"Questo vino è bello e fino,"

cried Gaspare's voice outside.

"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating the boys. Questo vino—oh, how glorious to be here in Sicily!"

She put her arm through Delarey's, and drew him out onto the terrace. Gaspare, Lucrezia, Sebastiano, and the three boys stood there with glasses of red wine in their hands raised high above their heads.

"Questo vino è bello e fino,

È portato da Castel Perini,

Faccio brindisi alla Signora Ermini,"

continued Gaspare, joyously, and with an obvious pride in his poetical powers.

They all drank simultaneously, Lucrezia spluttering a little out of shyness.

"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that doesn't rhyme, eh? Bravo! But we must drink, too."

Gaspare hastened to fill two more glasses.

"Now it's our turn," cried Hermione.

"Questo vino è bello e fino,

È portato da Castello a mare,

Faccio brindisi al Signor Gaspare."

The boys burst into a hearty laugh, and Gaspare's eyes gleamed with pleasure while Hermione and Maurice drank. Then Sebastiano drew from the inner pocket of his old jacket a little flute, smiling with an air of intense and comic slyness which contorted his face.

"Ah," said Hermione, "I know—it's the tarantella!"

She clapped her hands.

"It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only that—the tarantella!"

"Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically.

Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward, and giggled with all her heart. Sebastiano leaned his back against a column and put the flute to his lips.

"Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.

She made him sit down on one of the seats under the parlor window, facing the view, while the four boys took their places, one couple opposite to the other. Then Sebastiano began to twitter the tune familiar to the Sicilians of Marechiaro, in which all the careless pagan joy of life in the sun seems caught and flung out upon a laughing, dancing world. Delarey laid his hands on the warm tiles of the seat, leaned forward, and watched with eager eyes. He had never seen the tarantella, yet now with his sensation of expectation there was blended another feeling. It seemed to him as if he were going to see something he had known once, perhaps very long ago, something that he had forgotten and that was now going to be recalled to his memory. Some nerve in his body responded to Sebastiano's lively tune. A desire of movement came to him as he saw the gay boys waiting on the terrace, their eyes already dancing, although their bodies were still.

Gaspare bent forward, lifted his hands above his head, and began to snap his fingers in time to the music. A look of joyous invitation had come into his eyes—an expression that was almost coquettish, like the expression of a child who has conceived some lively, innocent design of which he thinks that no one knows except himself. His young figure surely quivered with a passion of merry mischief which was communicated to his companions. In it there began to flame a spirit that suggested undying youth. Even before they began to dance the boys were transformed. If they had ever known cares those cares had fled, for in the breasts of those who can really dance the tarantella there is no room for the smallest sorrow, in their hearts no place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or wonder, when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away goes everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan ecstasy of swift movement, and the leaping blood that is quick as the motes in a sunray falling from a southern sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them, and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione glanced at him and thought what a boy he looked. His eyes made her feel almost as if she were sitting with a child.

The mischief, the coquettish joy of the boys increased. They snapped their fingers more loudly, swayed their bodies, poised themselves first on one foot, then on the other, then abruptly, and with a wildness that was like the sudden crash of all the instruments in an orchestra breaking in upon the melody of a solitary flute, burst into the full frenzy of the dance. And in the dance each seemed to be sportively creative, ruled by his own sweet will.

"That's why I love the tarantella more than any other dance," Hermione murmured to her husband, "because it seems to be the invention of the moment, as if they were wild with joy and had to show it somehow, and showed it beautifully by dancing. Look at Gaspare now."

With his hands held high above his head, and linked together, Gaspare was springing into the air, as if propelled by one of those boards which are used by acrobats in circuses for leaping over horses. He had thrown off his hat, and his low-growing hair, which was rather long on the forehead, moved as he sprang upward, as if his excitement, penetrating through every nerve in his body, had filled it with electricity. While Hermione watched him she almost expected to see its golden tufts give off sparks in response to the sparkling radiance that flashed from his laughing eyes. For in all the wild activity of his changing movements Gaspare never lost his coquettish expression, the look of seductive mischief that seemed to invite the whole world to be merry and mad as he was. His ever-smiling lips and ever-smiling eyes defied fatigue, and his young body—grace made a living, pulsing, aspiring reality—suggested the tireless intensity of a flame. The other boys danced well, but Gaspare outdid them all, for they only looked gay while he looked mad with joy. And to-day, at this moment, he felt exultant. He had a padrona to whom he was devoted with that peculiar sensitive devotion of the Sicilian which, once it is fully aroused, is tremendous in its strength and jealous in its doggedness. He was in command of Lucrezia, and was respectfully looked up to by all his boy friends of Marechiaro as one who could dispense patronage, being a sort of purse-bearer and conductor of rich forestieri in a strange land. Even Sebastiano, a personage rather apt to be a little haughty in his physical strength, and, though no longer a brigand, no great respecter of others, showed him to-day a certain deference which elated his boyish spirit. And all his elation, all his joy in the present and hopes for the future, he let out in the dance. To dance the tarantella almost intoxicated him, even when he only danced it in the village among the contadini, but to-day the admiring eyes of his padrona were upon him. He knew how she loved the tarantella. He knew, too, that she wanted the padrone, her husband, to love it as she did. Gaspare was very shrewd to read a woman's thoughts so long as her love ran in them. Though but eighteen, he was a man in certain knowledge. He understood, almost unconsciously, a good deal of what Hermione was feeling as she watched, and he put his whole soul into the effort to shine, to dazzle, to rouse gayety and wonder in the padrone, who saw him dance for the first time. He was untiring in his variety and his invention. Sometimes, light-footed in his mountain boots, with an almost incredible swiftness and vim, he rushed from end to end of the terrace. His feet twinkled in steps so complicated and various that he made the eyes that watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace, and his arms and hands were never still, yet never, even for a second, fell into a curve that was ungraceful. Sometimes his head was bent whimsically forward as if in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body backward, exposing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his haunches, clapping his hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees, shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf promenading among a crowd of Follies. And always the spirit of the dance seemed to increase within him, and the intoxication of it to take more hold upon him, and his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and his body more active, more utterly untiring, till he was the living embodiment surely of all the youth and all the gladness of the world.

Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and now, as she danced in spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced not only in her own joy, but in his, she thought suddenly of that sentence in it—"Life may seem to most of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured, thing." Life a tortured thing! She was thinking now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts were leaping, spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare in the sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant reality. No dream, it was more beautiful than any dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of course, always known that in the world there is much joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the joy of the world. She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of love and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the joy of sane passion that fights not against any law of God or man, the joy of liberty in a joyous land where the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and toil, there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas in their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of gayety in their bold, dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the "Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory of the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment her heart was like the heart of a nymph scattering roses in a Bacchic triumph.

Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing quickly.

"What is it, Maurice?" she asked. "You—do you—"

"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she had not fully asked. "It drives me almost mad to sit still and see those boys. Gaspare's like a merry devil tempting one."

As if Gaspare had understood what Maurice said, he suddenly spun round from his companions, and began to dance in front of Maurice and Hermione, provocatively, invitingly, bending his head towards them, and laughing almost in their faces, but without a trace of impertinence. He did not speak, though his lips were parted, showing two rows of even, tiny teeth, but his radiant eyes called to them, scolded them for their inactivity, chaffed them for it, wondered how long it would last, and seemed to deny that it could last forever.

"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see anything so expressive?"

Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare, fascinated, completely under the spell of the dance. The blood was beginning to boil in his veins, warm blood of the south that he had never before felt in his body. Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of the blood." Maurice began to hear it now, to long to obey it.

Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of him and behind him, leaping from side to side, with a step in which one foot crossed over the other, and holding his body slightly curved inward. And all the time he kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in them.

"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga, signorino, venga—venga!"

He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped his fingers, and jumped back. Then he held out his hands to Delarey, with a gay authority that was irresistible.

"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"

All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away something—was it a shyness, a self-consciousness of love—that till now had held him back from the gratification of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all his life, with a natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that no pure-blooded Englishman could ever achieve, danced it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had danced it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did he imitated, with a swiftness and a certainty that were amazing, and Gaspare, intoxicated by having such a pupil, outdid himself in countless changing activities. It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched Delarey's startling aptitude in the tarantella, which, till this moment, he had considered the possession of those born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed to feel that this pupil might in time become the master, and to be put upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning to be too much for Delarey.

And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia had disappeared, suddenly mindful of some household duty.

When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive excitement, and when she watched his first steps, and noted the look of youth in him, the supple southern grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration which is the child of love. But another feeling followed—a feeling of melancholy. As she watched him dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between her and them. She was alone on her side of this gulf, quite alone. They were remote from her. She suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the south, and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of the beauty of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit of the south, all her passionate love of the south, she was not of it. She came to it as a guest. But Delarey was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing, the southern strain in his ancestry had been revived in him. The drop of southern blood in his veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.

Once again, and in all the glowing sunshine, with Etna and the sea before her, and the sound of Sebastiano's flute in her ears, she was on the Thames Embankment in the night with Artois, and heard his deep voice speaking to her.

"Does he know his own blood?" said the voice. "Our blood governs us when the time comes."

And again the voice said:

"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."

"The call of the blood." There was now something almost terrible to Hermione in that phrase, something menacing and irresistible. Were men, then, governed irrevocably, dominated by the blood that was in them? Artois had certainly seemed to imply that they were, and he knew men as few knew them. His powerful intellect, like a search-light, illumined the hidden places, discovering the concealed things of the souls of men. But Artois was not a religious man, and Hermione had a strong sense of religion, though she did not cling, as many do, to any one creed. If the call of the blood were irresistible in a man, then man was only a slave. The criminal must not be condemned, nor the saint exalted. Conduct was but obedience in one who had no choice but to obey. Could she believe that?

The dance grew wilder, swifter. Sebastiano quickened the time till he was playing it prestissimo. One of the boys, Giulio, dropped out exhausted. Then another, Alfio, fell against the terrace wall, laughing and wiping his streaming face. Finally Giuseppe gave in, too, obviously against his will. But Gaspare and Maurice still kept on. The game was certainly a duel now—a duel which would not cease till Sebastiano put an end to it by laying down his flute. But he, too, was on his mettle and would not own fatigue. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could not bear the dance any more. It was, perhaps, absurd of her. Her brain, fatigued by travel, was perhaps playing her tricks. But she felt as if Maurice were escaping from her in this wild tarantella, like a man escaping through a fantastic grotto from some one who called to him near its entrance. A faint sensation of something that was surely jealousy, the first she had ever known, stirred in her heart—jealousy of a tarantella.

"Maurice!" she said.

He did not hear her.

"Maurice!" she called. "Sebastiano—Gaspare—stop! You'll kill yourselves!"

Sebastiano caught her eye, finished the tune, and took the flute from his lips. In truth he was not sorry to be commanded to do the thing his pride of music forbade him to do of his own will. Gaspare gave a wild, boyish shout, and flung himself down on Giuseppe's knees, clasping him round the neck jokingly. And Maurice—he stood still on the terrace for a moment looking dazed. Then the hot blood surged up to his head, making it tingle under his hair, and he came over slowly, almost shamefacedly, and sat down by Hermione.

"This sun's made me mad, I think," he said, looking at her. "Why, how pale you are, Hermione!"

"Am I? No, it must be the shadow of the awning makes me look so. Oh, Maurice, you are indeed a southerner! Do you know, I feel—I feel as if I had never really seen you till now, here on this terrace, as if I had never known you as you are till now, now that I've watched you dance the tarantella."

"I can't dance it, of course. It was absurd of me to try."

"Ask Gaspare! No, I'll ask him. Gaspare, can the padrone dance the tarantella?"

"Eh—altro!" said Gaspare, with admiring conviction.

He got off Giuseppe's knee, where he had been curled up almost like a big kitten, came and stood by Hermione, and added:

"Per Dio, signora, but the padrone is like one of us!"

Hermione laughed. Now that the dance was over and the twittering flute was silent, her sense of loneliness and melancholy was departing. Soon, no doubt, she would be able to look back upon it and laugh at it as one laughs at moods that have passed away.

"This is his first day in Sicily, Gaspare."

"There are forestieri who come here every year, and who stay for months, and who can talk our language—yes, and can even swear in dialetto as we can—but they are not like the padrone. Not one of them could dance the tarantella like that. Per Dio!"

A radiant look of pleasure came into Maurice's face.

"I'm glad you've brought me here," he said. "Ah, when you chose this place for our honeymoon you understood me better than I understand myself, Hermione."

"Did I?" she said, slowly. "But no, Maurice, I think I chose a little selfishly. I was thinking of what I wanted. Oh, the boys are going, and Sebastiano."

That evening, when they had finished supper—they did not wish to test Lucrezia's powers too severely by dining the first day—they came out onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare were busily talking in the kitchen. Tito, the donkey, was munching his hay under the low-pitched roof of the out-house. Now and then they could faintly hear the sound of his moving jaws, Lucrezia's laughter, or Gaspare's eager voice. These fragmentary noises scarcely disturbed the great silence that lay about them, the night hush of the mountains and the sea. Hermione sat down on the seat in the terrace wall looking over the ravine. It was a moonless night, but the sky was clear and spangled with stars. There was a cool breeze blowing from Etna. Here and there upon the mountains shone solitary lights, and one was moving slowly through the darkness along the crest of a hill opposite to them, a torch carried by some peasant going to his hidden cottage among the olive-trees.

Maurice lit his cigar and stood by Hermione, who was sitting sideways and leaning her arms on the wall, and looking out into the wide dimness in which, somewhere, lay the ravine. He did not want to talk just then, and she kept silence. This was really their wedding night, and both of them were unusually conscious, but in different ways, of the mystery that lay about them, and that lay, too, within them. It was strange to be together up here, far up in the mountains, isolated in their love. Below the wall, on the side of the ravine, the leaves of the olives rustled faintly as the wind passed by. And this whisper of the leaves seemed to be meant for them, to be addressed to them. They were surely being told something by the little voices of the night.

"Maurice," Hermione said, at last, "does this silence of the mountains make you wish for anything?"

"Wish?" he said. "I don't know—no, I think not. I have got what I wanted. I have got you. Why should I wish for anything more? And I feel at home here. It's extraordinary how I feel at home."

"You! No, it isn't extraordinary at all."

She looked up at him, still keeping her arms on the terrace wall. His physical beauty, which had always fascinated her, moved her more than ever in the south, seemed to her to become greater, to have more meaning in this setting of beauty and romance. She thought of the old pagan gods. He was, indeed, suited to be their happy messenger. At that moment something within her more than loved him, worshipped him, felt for him an idolatry that had something in it of pain. A number of thoughts ran through her mind swiftly. One was this: "Can it be possible that he will die some day, that he will be dead?" And the awfulness, the unspeakable horror of the death of the body gripped her and shook her in the dark.

"Oh, Maurice!" she said. "Maurice!"

"What is it?"

She held out her hands to him. He took them and sat down by her.

"What is it, Hermione?" he said again.

"If beauty were only deathless!"

"But—but all this is, for us. It was here for the old Greeks to see, and I suppose it will be here—"

"I didn't mean that."

"I've been stupid," he said, humbly.

"No, my dearest—my dearest one. Oh, how did you ever love me?"

She had forgotten the warning of Artois. The dirty little beggar was staring at the angel and wanted the angel to know it.

"Hermione! What do you mean?"

He looked at her, and there was genuine surprise in his face and in his voice.

"How can you love me? I'm so ugly. Oh, I feel it here, I feel it horribly in the midst of—of all this loveliness, with you."

She hid her face against his shoulder almost like one afraid.

"But you are not ugly! What nonsense! Hermione!"

He put his hand under her face and raised it, and the touch of his hand against her cheek made her tremble. To-night she more than loved, she worshipped him. Her intellect did not speak any more. Its voice was silenced by the voice of the heart, by the voices of the senses. She felt as if she would like to go down on her knees to him and thank him for having loved her, for loving her. Abasement would have been a joy to her just then, was almost a necessity, and yet there was pride in her, the decent pride of a pure-natured woman who has never let herself be soiled.

"Hermione," he said, looking into her face. "Don't speak to me like that. It's all wrong. It puts me in the wrong place, I a fool and you—what you are. If that friend of yours could hear you—by Jove!"

There was something so boyish, so simple in his voice that Hermione suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, as she might have kissed a delightful child. She began to laugh through tears.

"Thank God you're not conceited!" she exclaimed.

"What about?" he asked.

But she did not answer. Presently they heard Gaspare's step on the terrace. He came to them bareheaded, with shining eyes, to ask if they were satisfied with Lucrezia. About himself he did not ask. He felt that he had done all things for his padrona as he alone could have done them, knowing her so well.

"Gaspare," Hermione said, "everything is perfect. Tell Lucrezia."

"Better not, signora. I will say you are fairly satisfied, as it is only the first day. Then she will try to do better to-morrow. I know Lucrezia."

And he gazed at them calmly with his enormous liquid eyes.

"Do not say too much, signora. It makes people proud."

She thought that she heard an odd Sicilian echo of Artois. The peasant lad's mind reflected the mind of the subtle novelist for a moment.

"Very well, Gaspare," she said, submissively.

He smiled at her with satisfaction.

"I understand girls," he said. "You must keep them down or they will keep you down. Every girl in Marechiaro is like that. We keep them down therefore."

He spoke calmly, evidently quite without thought that he was speaking to a woman.

"May I go to bed, signora?" he added. "I got up at four this morning."

"At four!"

"To be sure all was ready for you and the signore."

"Gaspare! Go at once. We will go to bed, too. Shall we, Maurice?"

"Yes. I'm ready."

Just as they were going up the steps into the house, he turned to take a last look at the night. Far down below him over the terrace wall he saw a bright, steady light.

"Is that on the sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish there at night?"

"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."

Gaspare shook his head.

"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.

"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."

"But no one lives there."

"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."

"Buon riposo, Gaspare."

And Maurice echoed it:

"Buon riposo."

As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near Tito's stable, Maurice added:

"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if I'd said it before, somehow."

"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are you coming, Maurice?"

He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.

CHAPTER V

That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world—a world that never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased, instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity, had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material. Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing, light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a "fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had been struck by in a London restaurant.

This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing seas.

"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the shining that came in answer to the words—"Let there be light!"

In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that there was nothing remarkable in his intellect. In Sicily she did not cease from realizing this, but she felt about it differently. In Sicily she actually loved and rejoiced in Delarey's mental shortcomings because they seemed to make for freshness, for boyishness, to link him more closely with the spring in their Eden. She adored in him something that was pagan, some spirit that seemed to shine on her from a dancing, playful, light-hearted world. And here in Sicily she presently grew to know that she would be a little saddened were her husband to change, to grow more thoughtful, more like herself. She had spoken to Artois of possible development in Maurice, of what she might do for him, and at first, just at first, she had instinctively exerted her influence over him to bring him nearer to her subtle ways of thought. And he had eagerly striven to respond, stirred by his love for her, and his reverence—not a very clever, but certainly a very affectionate reverence—for her brilliant qualities of brain. In those very first days together, isolated in their eyrie of the mountains, Hermione had let herself go—as she herself would have said. In her perfect happiness she felt that her mind was on fire because her heart was at peace. Wakeful, but not anxious, love woke imagination. The stirring of spring in this delicious land stirred all her eager faculties, and almost as naturally as a bird pours forth its treasure of music she poured forth her treasure, not only of love but of thought. For in such a nature as hers love prompts thought, not stifles it. In their long mountain walks, in their rides on muleback to distant villages, hidden in the recesses, or perched upon the crests of the rocks, in their quiet hours under the oak-trees when the noon wrapped all things in its cloak of gold, or on the terrace when the stars came out, and the shepherds led their flocks down to the valleys with little happy tunes, Hermione gave out all the sensitive thoughts, desires, aspirations, all the wonder, all the rest that beauty and solitude and nearness to nature in this isle of the south woke in her. She did not fear to be subtle, she did not fear to be trivial. Everything she noticed she spoke of, everything that the things she noticed suggested to her, she related. The sound of the morning breeze in the olive-trees seemed to her different from the sound of the breeze of evening. She tried to make Maurice hear, with her, the changing of the music, to make him listen, as she listened, to every sound, not only with the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came, like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then fading until taken softly by eternity—that was Hermione's feeling—that sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight, when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious attempt to compass the impossible.

All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of the phenomenon, a dancer in the exquisite tarantella. And Maurice, too, on that first day had he not obeyed Sebastiano's call? Soon she knew that when she had sat alone on the terrace seat, and seen the dancers losing all thought of time and the hour in the joy of their moving bodies, while hers was still, the scene had been prophetic. In that moment Maurice had instinctively taken his place in the mask of the spring and she hers. Their bodies had uttered their minds. She was the passionate watcher, but he was the passionate performer. Therefore she was his audience. She had travelled out to be in Sicily, but he, without knowing it, had travelled out to be Sicily.

There was a great difference between them, but, having realized it thoroughly, Hermione was able not to regret but to delight in it. She did not wish to change her lover, and she soon understood that were Maurice to see with her eyes, hear with her ears, and understand with her heart, he would be completely changed, and into something not natural, like a performing dog or a child prodigy, something that rouses perhaps amazement, combined too often with a faint disgust. And ceasing to desire she ceased to endeavor.

"I shall never develop Maurice," she thought, remembering her conversation with Artois. "And, thank God, I don't want to now."

And then she set herself to watch her Sicilian, as she loved to call him, enjoying the spring in Sicily in his own way, dancing the tarantella with surely the spirit of eternal youth. He had, she thought, heard the call of the blood and responded to it fully and openly, fearless and unashamed. Day by day, seeing his boyish happiness in this life of the mountains and the sea, she laughed at the creeping, momentary sense of apprehension that had been roused in her during her conversation with Artois upon the Thames Embankment. Artois had said that he distrusted what he loved. That was the flaw in an over-intellectual man. The mind was too alert, too restless, dogging the steps of the heart like a spy, troubling the heart with an eternal uneasiness. But she could trust where she loved. Maurice was open as a boy in these early days in the garden of paradise. He danced the tarantella while she watched him, then threw himself down beside her, laughing, to rest.

The strain of Sicilian blood that was in him worked in him curiously, making her sometimes marvel at the mysterious power of race, at the stubborn and almost tyrannical domination some dead have over some living, those who are dust over those who are quick with animation and passion. Everything that was connected with Sicily and with Sicilian life not only reached his senses and sank easily into his heart, but seemed also to rouse his mind to an activity that astonished her. In connection with Sicily he showed a swiftness, almost a cleverness, she never noted in him when things Sicilian were not in question.

For instance, like most Englishmen, Maurice had no great talent for languages. He spoke French fairly well, having had a French nurse when he was a child, and his mother had taught him a little Italian. But till now he had never had any desire to be proficient in any language except his own. Hermione, on the other hand, was gifted as a linguist, loving languages and learning them easily. Yet Maurice picked up—in his case the expression, usually ridiculous, was absolutely applicable—Sicilian with a readiness that seemed to Hermione almost miraculous. He showed no delight in the musical beauty of Italian. What he wanted, and what his mind—or was it rather what his ears and his tongue and his lips?—took, and held and revelled in, was the Sicilian dialect spoken by Lucrezia and Gaspare when they were together, spoken by the peasants of Marechiaro and of the mountains. To Hermione Gaspare had always talked Italian, incorrect, but still Italian, and she spoke no dialect, although she could often guess at what the Sicilians meant when they addressed her in their vigorous but uncouth jargon, different from Italian almost as Gaelic is from English. But Maurice very soon began to speak a few words of Sicilian. Hermione laughed at him and discouraged him jokingly, telling him that he must learn Italian thoroughly, the language of love, the most melodious language in the world.

"Italian!" he said. "What's the use of it? I want to talk to the people. A grammar! I won't open it. Gaspare's my professor. Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Gaspare came rushing bareheaded to them in the sun.

"The signora says I'm to learn Italian, but I say that I've Sicilian blood in my veins and must talk as you do."

"But I, signore, can speak Italian!" said Gaspare, with twinkling pride.

"As a bear dances. No, professor, you and I, we'll be good patriots. We'll speak in our mother-tongue. You rascal, you know we've begun already."

And looking mischievously at Hermione, he began to sing in a loud, warm voice:

"Cu Gabbi e Jochi e Parti e Mascarati,

Si fa lu giubileu universali.

Tiripi-tùmpiti, tùmpiti, tùmpiti,

Milli cardùbuli 'n culu ti pùncinu!"

Gaspare burst into a roar of delighted laughter.

"It's the tarantella over again," Hermione said. "You're a hopeless Sicilian. I give you up."

That same day she said to him:

"You love the peasants, don't you, Maurice?"

"Yes. Are you surprised?"

"No; at least I'm not surprised at your loving them."

"Well, then, Hermione?"

"Perhaps a little at the way you love them."

"What way's that?"

"Almost as they love each other—that's to say, when they love each other at all. Gaspare now! I believe you feel more as if he were a young brother of yours than as if he were your servant."

"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna [1] of a boy in spite of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die for his padrona."

"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a splendid quality."

"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said. "They're a lovable race."

"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but with tender eyes.

"Myself?"

"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"

Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining with happiness and a box under his arm.

"The signore knows."

"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him he should have a try to-day. We're going to a place close by on the mountain. He's warned off Ciccio and his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"

Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.

"Enough to write a novel on. Well—will you come, Hermione?"

"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going into the eye of the sun."

"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's that stone wall, and—"

"I'll stay here and listen to your music."

They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the gold, and singing as they went:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,

Morettina bella, ciao—"

Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat still on the seat by the ravine.

"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"

She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo—princes, senators, young men of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese. Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead. Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive! Things that had doubtless stirred in them—instincts, desires, repugnances, joys—were stirring in him, dominating his English inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat, socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman—and she was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high traditions—she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind, qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits, manners—what woman of breeding is not?—but even these could scarcely warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold beneath mud and forget the mud.

Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan aristocracy. He was near to the breast of Sicily, of that mother of many nations, who had come to conquer, and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled, but had left indefaceable traces behind them, traces of Norman of Greek of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan with characteristics blurred; he was of the soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond blossomed from it. The olive gave its fruit, and the vine its generous blood, and the orange its gold, at the word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's. How she loved his hands, and his eyes that shone with the lustre of the south! Had not this soil, in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her? She felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She had reaped and garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.

Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage, knowing she was alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat down on the seat under the window, divided from Hermione by the terrace, but able to see her, to feel companionship. Had the padrone been there Lucrezia would not have ventured to come. Gaspare had often explained to her her very humble position in the household. But Gaspare and the padrone were away on the mountain-top, and she could not resist being near to her padrona, for whom she already felt a very real affection and admiration.

"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling at her.

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on her fist.

"Gaspare's holes are always big."

She spoke as if in praise.

"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano is stronger."

As she said the last words a dreamy look came into her round face, and she dropped the hand that held the stocking into her lap.

"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."

"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."

Lucrezia said nothing.

"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"

Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.

"Si, signora."

"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."

Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly opposite to where Hermione was sitting.

"How old is he?"

"Twenty-five, signora."

"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The men all marry young round about Marechiaro."

Lucrezia began to darn.

"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry at once. It is better for a man."

"You understand men, Lucrezia?"

"Si, signora. They are all alike."

"And what are they like?"

"Oh, signora, you know as well as I do. They must have their own way and we must not think to have ours. They must roam where they like, love where they choose, day or night, and we must sit in the doorway and get to bed at dark, and not bother where they've been or what they've done. They say we've no right, except one or two. There's Francesco, to be sure. He's a lamb with Maria. She can sit with her face to the street. But she wouldn't sit any other way, and he knows it. But the rest! Eh, già!"

"You don't think much of men, Lucrezia!"

"Oh, signora, they're just as God made them. They can't help it any more than we can help—"

She stopped and pursed her lips suddenly, as if checking some words that were almost on them.

"Lucrezia, come here and sit by me."

Lucrezia looked up with a sort of doubtful pleasure and surprise.

"Signora?"

"Come here."

Lucrezia got up and came slowly to the seat by the ravine. Hermione took her hand.

"You like Sebastiano very much, don't you?"

Lucrezia hung her head.

"Si, signora," she whispered.

"Do you think he'd be good to a woman if she loved him?"

"I shouldn't care. Bad or good, I'd—I'd—"

Suddenly, with a sort of childish violence, she put her two hands on Hermione's arms.

"I want Sebastiano, signora; I want him!" she cried. "I've prayed to the Madonna della Rocca to give him to me; all last year I've prayed, and this. D'you think the Madonna's going to do it? Do you? Do you?"

Heat came out of her two hands, and heat flashed in her eyes. Her broad bosom heaved, and her lips, still parted when she had done speaking, seemed to interrogate Hermione fiercely in the silence. Before Hermione could reply two sounds came to them: from below in the ravine the distant drone of the ceramella, from above on the mountain-top the dry crack of a pistol-shot.

Swiftly Lucrezia turned and looked downward, but Hermione looked upward towards the bare flank that rose behind the cottage.

"It's Sebastiano, signora."

The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its player on the hidden path beneath the olive-trees.

A second pistol-shot rang out sharply.

"Go down and meet him, Lucrezia."

"May I—may I, really, signora?"

"Yes; go quickly."

Lucrezia bent down and kissed her padrona's hand.

"Bacio la mano, bacio la mano a Lei!"

Then, bareheaded, she went out from the awning into the glare of the sunshine, passed through the ruined archway, and disappeared among the rocks. She had gone to her music. Hermione stayed to listen to hers, the crack of the pistol up there near the blue sky.

Sebastiano was playing the tune she loved, the "Pastorale," but to-day she did not heed it. Indeed, now that she was left alone she was not conscious that she heard it. Her heart was on the hill-top near the blue.

Again and again the shots rang out. It seemed to Hermione that she knew which were fired by Maurice and which by Gaspare, and she whispered to herself "That's Maurice!" when she fancied one was his. Presently she was aware of some slight change and wondered what it was. Something had ceased, and its cessation recalled her mind to her surroundings. She looked round her, then down to the ravine, and then at once she understood. There was no more music from the ceramella. Lucrezia had met Sebastiano under the olives. That was certain. Hermione smiled. Her woman's imagination pictured easily enough why the player had stopped. She hoped Lucrezia was happy. Her first words, still more her manner, had shown Hermione the depth of her heart. There was fire there, fire that burned before a shrine when she prayed to the Madonna della Rocca. She was ready even to be badly treated if only she might have Sebastiano. It seemed to be all one to her. She had no illusions, but her heart knew what it needed.

Crack went the pistol up on the mountain-top.

"That's not Maurice!" Hermione thought.

There was another report, then another.

"That last one was Maurice!"

Lucrezia did not seem even to expect a man to be true and faithful. Perhaps she knew the Sicilian character too well. Hermione lifted her face up and looked towards the mountain. Her mind had gone once more to the Thames Embankment. As once she had mentally put Gaspare beside Artois, so now she mentally put Lucrezia. Lucrezia distrusted the south, and she was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she said, and evidently she thought that God had made them to run wild, careless of woman's feelings, careless of everything save their own vagrant desires. The tarantella—that was the dance of the soil here, the dance of the blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up joyously, eagerly, utterly—to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which brought with it a faint and creeping melancholy.

"Crack! Crack!"

She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith, and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.

"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the mountain-top. "Maurice!"

The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were too intent upon their sport to hear.

"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun. Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the sunshine.

"Signora! Signora!"

Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round Lucrezia.

Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of fear.

"Am I wanted up there?"

That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her body. She turned and began to descend towards the terrace.

And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she was conscious of a little stab of pain such as she had never known before. It was pain of the mind and of the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal of herself by her own intellect, she thought.

She stopped once more on the mountain-side.

"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself. "Am I going to be one of the women I despise?"

Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant, ministering to the soul with persecutions.

[1] The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning we convey by the word "trump."

CHAPTER VI

Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as Hermione came down to the terrace, and said:

"Buona sera, signora. Is the signore coming down yet?"

He flung out his arm towards the mountain.

"I don't know, Sebastiano. Why?"

"I've come with a message for him."

"Not for Lucrezia?"

Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing red, disappeared into the kitchen.

"Don't play with her, Sebastiano," said Hermione. "She's a good girl."

"I know that, signora."

"She deserves to be well treated."

Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into the ravine, turned round, and came back.

"Who's treating Lucrezia badly, signora?"

"I did not say anybody was."

"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves, signora. You don't know them as I do."

"D'you think any woman can take care of herself, Sebastiano?"

He looked into her face and laughed, but said nothing. Hermione sat down. She had a desire to-day, after Lucrezia's conversation with her, to get at the Sicilian man's point of view in regard to women.

"Don't you think women want to be protected?" she asked.

"What from, signora?"

There was still laughter in his eyes.

"Not from us, anyway," he added. "Lucrezia there—she wants me for her husband. All Marechiaro knows it."

Hermione felt that under the circumstances it was useless to blush for Lucrezia, useless to meet blatant frankness with sensitive delicacy.

"Do you want Lucrezia for your wife?" she said.

"Well, signora, I'm strong. A stick or a knife in my hand and no man can touch me. You've never seen me do the scherma con coltello? One day I'll show you with Gaspare. And I can play better even than the men from Bronte on the ceramella. You've heard me. Lucrezia knows I can have any girl I like."

There was a simplicity in his immense superiority to women that robbed it of offensiveness and almost made Hermione laugh. In it, too, she felt the touch of the East. Arabs had been in Sicily and left their traces there, not only in the buildings of Sicily, but in its people's songs, and in the treatment of the women by the men.

"And are you going to choose Lucrezia?" she asked, gravely.

"Signora, I wasn't sure. But yesterday, I had a letter from Messina. They want me there. I've got a job that'll pay me well to go to the Lipari Islands with a cargo."

"Are you a sailor, too?"

"Signora, I can do anything."

"And will you be long away?"

"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day, and when she cried I told her something else. We are 'promised.'"

"I am glad," Hermione said, holding out her hand to him.

He took it in an iron grip.

"Be very good to her when you're married, won't you?"

"Oh, she'll be all right with me," he answered, carelessly. "And I won't give her the slap in the face on the wedding-day."

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

There was a shrill cry from the mountain and Maurice and Gaspare came leaping down, scattering the stones, the revolvers still in their hands.

"Look, signora, look!" cried Gaspare, pulling a sheet of paper from his pocket and holding it proudly up. "Do you see the holes? One, two, three—"

He began to count.

"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?"

"You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us, Hermione?"

"Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me."

"You? Did you call?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said.

She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that had made her call him.

"What's the message, Sebastiano?" asked Maurice, in his stumbling Sicilian-Italian that was very imperfect, but that nevertheless had already the true accent of the peasants about Marechiaro.

"Signore, there will be a moon to-night."

"Già. Lo so."

"Are you sleepy, signorino?"

He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made his face look drowsy. Maurice laughed.

"No."

"Are you afraid of being naked in the sea at night? But you need not enter it. Are you afraid of sleeping at dawn in a cave upon the sands?"

"What is it all?" asked Maurice. "Gaspare, I understand you best."

"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fishing. Nito has sent. I told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"

Sebastiano nodded. Gaspare turned eagerly to Maurice.

"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!"

"Where? In a boat?"

"No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We take food, wine, red wine, and a net. Between twenty-two and twenty-three o'clock is the time to begin. And the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?"

"Like that."

Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air, keeping it absolutely level. Gaspare continued to explain with gathering excitement and persuasiveness, talking to his master as much by gesture as by the words that Maurice could only partially understand.

"The sea is calm. Nito has the net, but he will not go into the sea. Per Dio, he is birbante. He will say he has the rheumatism, I know, and walk like that." (Gaspare hobbled to and fro before them, making a face of acute suffering.) "He has asked for me. Hasn't Nito asked for me, Sebastiano?"

Here Gaspare made a grimace at Sebastiano, who answered, calmly:

"Yes, he has asked for you to come with the padrone."

"I knew it. Then I shall undress. I shall take one end of the net while Nito holds the other, and I shall go out into the sea. I shall go up to here." (He put his hands up to his chin, stretching his neck like one avoiding a rising wave.) "And I shall wade, you'll see!—and if I come to a hole I shall swim. I can swim for hours, all day if I choose."

"And all night too?" said Hermione, smiling at his excitement.

"Davvero! But at night I must drink wine to keep out the cold. I come out like this." (He shivered violently, making his teeth chatter.) "Then I drink a glass and I am warm, and when they have taken the fish I go in again. We fish all along the shore from Isola Bella round by the point there, where there's the Casa delle Sirene, and to the caves beyond the Caffè Berardi. And when we've got enough—many fish—at dawn we sleep on the sand. And when the sun is up Carmela will take the fish and make a frittura, and we all eat it and drink more wine, and then—"

"And then—you're ready for the Campo Santo?" said Hermione.

"No, signora. Then we will dance the tarantella, and come home up the mountain singing, 'O sole mio!' and 'A mezzanotte a punto,' and the song of the Mafioso, and—"

Hermione began to laugh unrestrainedly. Gaspare, by his voice, his face, his gestures, had made them assist at a veritable orgie of labor, feasting, sleep, and mirth, all mingled together and chasing one another like performers in a revel. Even his suggestion of slumber on the sands was violent, as if they were to sleep with a kind of fury of excitement and determination.

"Signora!" he cried, staring as if ready to be offended.

Then he looked at Maurice, who was laughing, too, threw himself back against the wall, opened his mouth, and joined in with all his heart. But suddenly he stopped. His face changed, became very serious.

"I may go, signora?" he asked. "No one can fish as I can. The others will not go in far, and they soon get cold and want to put on their clothes. And the padrone! I must take care of the padrone! Guglielmo, the contadino, will sleep in the house, I know. Shall I call him? Guglielmo! Guglielmo!"

He vanished like a flash, they scarcely knew in what direction.

"He's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive, that boy! Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something here that—"

He broke off, looked down at the broad sea shimmering in the sun, then said:

"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty—it goes to my head, it intoxicates me."

"You'll go to-night?" she said.

"D'you mind if I do?"

"Mind? No. I want you to go. I want you to revel in this happy time, this splendid, innocent, golden time. And to-morrow we'll watch for you, Lucrezia and I, watch for you down there on the path. But—you'll bring us some of the fish, Maurice? You won't forget us?"

"Forget you!" he said. "You shall have all—"

"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela rejects from the frittura."

"I'll go into the sea with Gaspare," said Maurice.

"I'm sure you will, and farther out even than he does."

"Ah, he'll never allow that. He'd swim to Africa first!"

That night, at twenty-one o'clock, Hermione and Lucrezia stood under the arch, and watched Maurice and Gaspare springing down the mountain-side as if in seven-leagued boots. Soon they disappeared into the darkness of the ravine, but for some time their loud voices could be heard singing lustily:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,

Morettina bella ciao,

Prima di partire

Un bacio ti voglio da';

Un bacio al papà,

Un bacio alla mammà,

Cinquanta alla mia fidanzata,

Che vado a far solda'."

"I wish I were a man, Lucrezia," said Hermione, when the voices at length died away towards the sea.

"Signora, we were made for the men. They weren't made for us. But I like being a girl."

"To-night. I know why, Lucrezia."

And then the padrona and the cameriera sat down together on the terrace under the stars, and talked together about the man the cameriera loved, and his exceeding glory.

Meanwhile, Maurice and Gaspare were giving themselves joyously to the glory of the night. The glamour of the moon, which lay full upon the terrace where the two women sat, was softened, changed to a shadowy magic, in the ravine where the trees grew thickly, but the pilgrims did not lower their voices in obedience to the message of the twilight of the night. The joy of life which was leaping within them defied the subtle suggestions of mystery, was careless because it was triumphant, and all the way down to the sea they sang, Gaspare changing the song when it suited his mood to do so; and Maurice, as in the tarantella, imitating him with the swiftness that is born of sympathy. For to-night, despite their different ages, ranks, ways of life, their gayety linked them together, ruled out the differences, and made them closely akin, as they had been in Hermione's eyes when they danced upon the terrace. They did not watch the night. They were living too strongly to be watchful. The spirit of the dancing faun was upon them, and guided them down among the rocks and the olive-trees, across the Messina road, white under the moon, to the stony beach of Isola Bella, where Nito was waiting for them with the net.

Nito was not alone. He had brought friends of his and of Gaspare's, and a boy who staggered proudly beneath a pannier filled with bread and cheese, oranges and apples, and dark blocks of a mysterious dolce. The wine-bottles were not intrusted to him, but were in the care of Giulio, one of the donkey-boys who had carried up the luggage from the station. Gaspare and his padrone were welcomed with a lifting of hats, and for a moment there was a silence, while the little group regarded the "Inglese" searchingly. Had Maurice felt any strangeness, any aloofness, the sharp and sensitive Sicilians would have at once been conscious of it, and light-hearted gayety might have given way to gravity, though not to awkwardness. But he felt, and therefore showed, none. His soft hat cocked at an impudent angle over his sparkling, dark eyes, his laughing lips, his easy, eager manner, and his pleasant familiarity with Gaspare at once reassured everybody, and when he cried out, "Ciao, amici, ciao!" and waved a pair of bathing drawers towards the sea, indicating that he was prepared to be the first to go in with the net, there was a general laugh, and a babel of talk broke forth—talk which he did not fully understand, yet which did not make him feel even for a moment a stranger.

Gaspare at once took charge of the proceedings as one born to be a leader of fishermen. He began by ordering wine to be poured into the one glass provided, placed it in Maurice's hand, and smiled proudly at his pupil's quick "Alla vostra salute!" before tossing it off. Then each one in turn, with an "Alla sua salute!" to Maurice, took a drink from the great, leather bottle; and Nito, shaking out his long coil of net, declared that it was time to get to work.

Gaspare cast a sly glance at Maurice, warning him to be prepared for a comedy, and Maurice at once remembered the scene on the terrace when Gaspare had described Nito's "birbante" character, and looked out for rheumatics.

"Who goes into the sea, Nito?" asked Gaspare, very seriously.

Nito's wrinkled and weather-beaten face assumed an expression of surprise.

"Who goes into the sea!" he ejaculated. "Why, don't we all know who likes wading, and can always tell the best places for the fish?"

He paused, then as Gaspare said nothing, and the others, who had received a warning sign from him, stood round with deliberately vacant faces, he added, clapping Gaspare on the shoulder, and holding out one end of the net:

"Off with your clothes, compare, and we will soon have a fine frittura for Carmela."

But Gaspare shook his head.

"In summer I don't mind. But this is early in the year, and, besides—"

"Early in the year! Who told me the signore distinto would—"

"And besides, compare, I've got the stomach-ache."

He deftly doubled himself up and writhed, while the lips of the others twitched with suppressed amusement.

"Comparedro, I don't believe it!"

"Haven't I, signorino?" cried Gaspare, undoubling himself, pointing to his middleman, and staring hard at Maurice.

"Si, si! È vero, è vero!" cried Maurice.

"I've been eating Zampaglione, and I am full. If I go into the sea to-night I shall die."

"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Nito, throwing up his hands towards the stars.

He dared not give the lie to the "signore distinto," yet he had no trust in Gaspare's word, and had gained no sort of conviction from his eloquent writhings.

"You must go in, Nito," said Gaspare.

"I—Madonna!"

"Why not?"

"Why not?" cried Nito, in a plaintive whine that was almost feminine. "I go into the sea with my rheumatism!"

Abruptly one of his legs gave way, and he stood before them in a crooked attitude.

"Signore," he said to Maurice. "I would go into the sea, I would stay there all night, for I love it, but Dr. Marini has forbidden me to enter it. See how I walk!"

And he began to hobble up and down exactly as Gaspare had on the terrace, looking over his shoulder at Maurice all the time to see whether his deception was working well. Gaspare, seeing that Nito's attention was for the moment concentrated, slipped away behind a boat that was drawn up on the beach; and Maurice, guessing what he was doing, endeavored to make Nito understand his sympathy.

"Molto forte—molto dolore?" he said.

"Si, signore!"

And Nito burst forth into a vehement account of his sufferings, accompanied by pantomime.

"It takes me in the night, signore! Madonna, it is like rats gnawing at my legs, and nothing will stop it. Pancrazia—she is my wife, signore—Pancrazia, she gets out of bed and she heats oil to rub it on, but she might as well put it on the top of Etna for all the good it does me. And there I lie like a—"

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

A wild shriek rent the air, and Gaspare, clad in a pair of bathing drawers, bounded out from behind the boat, gave Nito a cuff on the cheek, executed some steps of the tarantella, whirled round, snatched up one end of the net, and cried:

"Al mare, al mare!"

Nito's rheumatism was no more. His bent leg straightened itself as if by magic, and he returned Gaspare's cuff by an affectionate slap on his bare shoulder, exclaiming to Maurice:

"Isn't he terribile, signore? Isn't he terribile?"

Nito lifted up the other end of the net and they all went down to the shore.

That night it seemed to Delarey as if Sicily drew him closer to her breast. He did not know why he had now for the first time the sensation that at last he was really in his natural place, was really one with the soil from which an ancestor of his had sprung, and with the people who had been her people. That Hermione's absence had anything to do with his almost wild sense of freedom did not occur to him. All he knew was this, that alone among these Sicilian fishermen in the night, not understanding much of what they said, guessing at their jokes, and sharing in their laughter, without always knowing what had provoked it, he was perfectly at home, perfectly happy.

Gaspare went into the sea, wading carefully through the silver waters, and Maurice, from the shore, watched his slowly moving form, taking a lesson which would be useful to him later. The coast-line looked enchanted in the glory of the moon, in the warm silence of the night, but the little group of men upon the shore scarcely thought of its enchantment. They felt it, perhaps, sometimes faintly in their gayety, but they did not savor its wonder and its mystery as Hermione would have savored them had she been there.

The naked form of Gaspare, as he waded far out in the shallow sea, was like the form of a dream creature rising out of waves of a dream. When he called to them across the silver surely something of the magic of the night was caught and echoed in his voice. When he lifted the net, and its black and dripping meshes slipped down from his ghostly hands into the ghostly movement that was flickering about him, and the circles tipped with light widened towards sea and shore, there was a miracle of delicate and fantastic beauty delivered up tenderly like a marvellous gift to the wanderers of the dark hours. But Sicily scarcely wonders at Sicily. Gaspare was intent only on the catching of fish, and his companions smote the night with their jokes and their merry, almost riotous laughter.

The night wore on. Presently they left Isola Bella, crossed a stony spit of land, and came into a second and narrower bay, divided by a turmoil of jagged rocks and a bold promontory covered with stunted olive-trees, cactus, and seed-sown earth plots, from the wide sweep of coast that melted into the dimness towards Messina. Gathered together on the little stones of the beach, in the shadow of some drawn-up fishing-boats, they took stock of the fish that lay shining in the basket, and broke their fast on bread and cheese and more draughts from the generous wine-bottle.

Gaspare was dripping, and his thin body shook as he gulped down the wine.

"Basta Gaspare!" Maurice said to him. "You mustn't go in any more."

"No, no, signore, non basta! I can fish all night. Once the wine has warmed me, I can—"

"But I want to try it."

"Oh, signore, what would the signora say? You are a stranger. You will take cold, and then the signora will blame me and say I did not take proper care of my padrone."

But Delarey was determined. He stripped off his clothes, put on his bathing drawers, took up the net, and, carefully directed by the admiring though protesting Gaspare, he waded into the sea.

For a moment he shuddered as the calm water rose round him. Then, English fashion, he dipped under, with a splash that brought a roar of laughter to him from the shore.

"Meglio così!" he cried, coming up again in the moonlight. "Adesso sto bene!"

The plunge had made him suddenly feel tremendously young and triumphant, reckless with a happiness that thrilled with audacity. As he waded out he began to sing in a loud voice:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,

Morettina bella ciao,

Prima di partire

Un bacio ti voglio da'."

Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called out to him that his singing would frighten away the fish, and he was obediently silent. He imprisoned the song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of life and of the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed to be embracing him as it crept upward towards his throat. Nature was clasping him with amorous arms. Nature was taking him for her own.

"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why I'm so gloriously happy here, because I'm being right down natural."

His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare, and he suddenly found himself thinking of the night in London, when he had sat in the restaurant with Hermione and Artois and listened to their talk, reverently listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced by the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it, struck him as unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts which he had then admired and wondered at, as complicated and extraordinary. Something in him said, "That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about his body, the light of the moon upon him, the breath of the air in his wet face drove out his reverence for what he called "intellectuality," and something savage got hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping self within him, the self that was Sicilian.

As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the jagged rocks that shut out from his sight the wide sea and something else, he felt as if thinking and living were in opposition, as if the one were destructive of the other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which had often assailed him since he had known, and especially since he had loved, Hermione, died out of him, and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois, and almost despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body, out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have shouted like a boy.

He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.

"Signore, basta, basta! Giulio will go in now."

"Si! si!" cried Giulio, beginning to tug at his waistcoat buttons.

"Once more, Gaspare!" said Maurice. "Only once!"

"But if you take cold, signorino, the signora—"

"I sha'n't catch cold. Only once!"

He broke away, laughing, from Gaspare, and was swiftly in the sea. The Sicilians looked at him with admiration.

"E' veramente più Siciliano di noi!" exclaimed Nito.

The others murmured their assent. Gaspare glowed with pride in his pupil.

"I shall make the signore one of us," he said, as he deftly let out the coils of the net.

"But how long is he going to stay?" asked Nito. "Will he not soon be going back to his own country?"

For a moment Gaspare's countenance fell.

"When the heat comes," he began, doubtfully. Then he cheered up.

"Perhaps he will take me with him to England," he said.

This time Maurice waded with the net into the shadow of the rocks out of the light of the moon. The night was waning, and a slight chill began to creep into the air. A little breeze, too, sighed over the sea, ruffling its surface, died away, then softly came again. As he moved into the darkness Maurice was conscious that the buoyancy of his spirits received a slight check. The night seemed suddenly to have changed, to have become more mysterious. He began to feel its mystery now, to be aware of the strangeness of being out in the sea alone at such an hour. Upon the shore he saw the forms of his companions, but they looked remote and phantom-like. He did not hear their voices. Perhaps the slow approach of dawn was beginning to affect them, and the little wind that was springing up chilled their merriment and struck them to silence. Before him the dense blackness of the rocks rose like a grotesque wall carved in diabolic shapes, and as he stared at these shapes he had an odd fancy that they were living things, and that they were watching him at his labor. He could not get this idea, that he was being watched, out of his head, and for a moment he forgot about the fish, and stood still, staring at the monsters, whose bulky forms reared themselves up into the moonlight from which they banished him.

"Signore! Signorino!"

There came to him a cry of protest from the shore. He started, moved forward with the net, and went under water. He had stepped into a deep hole. Still holding fast to the net, he came up to the surface, shook his head, and struck out. As he did so he heard another cry, sharp yet musical. But this cry did not come from the beach where his companions were gathered. It rose from the blackness of the rocks close to him, and it sounded like the cry of a woman. He winked his eyes to get the water out of them, and swam for the rocks, heedless of his duty as a fisherman. But the net impeded him, and again there was a shout from the shore:

"Signorino! Signorino! E' pazzo Lei?"

Reluctantly he turned and swam back to the shallow water. But when his feet touched bottom he stood still. That cry of a woman from the mystery of the rocks had startled, had fascinated his ears. Suddenly he remembered that he must be near to that Casa delle Sirene, whose little light he had seen from the terrace of the priest's house on his first evening in Sicily. He longed to hear that woman's voice again. For a moment he thought of it as the voice of a siren, of one of those beings of enchantment who lure men on to their destruction, and he listened eagerly, almost passionately, while the ruffled water eddied softly about his breast. But no music stole to him from the blackness of the rocks, and at last he turned slowly and waded to the shore.

He was met with merry protests. Nito declared that the net had nearly been torn out of his hands. Gaspare, half undressed to go to his rescue, anxiously inquired if he had come to any harm. The rocks were sharp as razors near the point, and he might have cut himself to pieces upon them. He apologized to Nito and showed Gaspare that he was uninjured. Then, while the others began to count the fish, he went to the boats to put on his clothes, accompanied by Gaspare.

"Why did you swim towards the rocks, signorino?" asked the boy, looking at him with a sharp curiosity.

Delarey hesitated for a moment. He was inclined, he scarcely knew why, to keep silence about the cry he had heard. Yet he wanted to ask Gaspare something.

"Gaspare," he said, at last, as they reached the boats, "was any one of you on the rocks over there just now?"

He had forgotten to number his companions when he reached the shore. Perhaps one was missing, and had wandered towards the point to watch him fishing.

"No, signore. Why do you ask?"

Again Delarey hesitated. Then he said:

"I heard some one call out to me there."

He began to rub his wet body with a towel.

"Call! What did they call?"

"Nothing; no words. Some one cried out."

"At this hour! Who should be there, signore?"

The action of the rough towel upon his body brought a glow of warmth to Delarey, and the sense of mystery began to depart from his mind.

"Perhaps it was a fisherman," he said.

"They do not fish from there, signore. It must have been me you heard. When you went under the water I cried out. Drink some wine, signorino."

He held a glass full of wine to Delarey's lips. Delarey drank.

"But you've got a man's voice, Gaspare!" he said, putting down the glass and beginning to get into his clothes.

"Per Dio! Would you have me squeak like a woman, signore?"

Delarey laughed and said no more. But he knew it was not Gaspare's voice he had heard.

The net was drawn up now for the last time, and as soon as Delarey had dressed they set out to walk to the caves on the farther side of the rocks, where they meant to sleep till Carmela was about and ready to make the frittura. To reach them they had to clamber up from the beach to the Messina road, mount a hill, and descend to the Caffè Berardi, a small, isolated shanty which stood close to the sea, and was used in summer-time by bathers who wanted refreshment. Nito and the rest walked on in front, and Delarey followed a few paces behind with Gaspare. When they reached the summit of the hill a great sweep of open sea was disclosed to their view, stretching away to the Straits of Messina, and bounded in the far distance by the vague outlines of the Calabrian Mountains. Here the wind met them more sharply, and below them on the pebbles by the caffè they could see the foam of breaking waves. But to the right, and nearer to them, the sea was still as an inland pool, guarded by the tree-covered hump of land on which stood the house of the sirens. This hump, which would have been an islet but for the narrow wall of sheer rock which joined it to the main-land, ran out into the sea parallel to the road.

On the height, Delarey paused for a moment, as if to look at the wide view, dim and ethereal, under the dying moon.

"Is that Calabria?" he asked.

"Si, signore. And there is the caffè. The caves are beyond it. You cannot see them from here. But you are not looking, signorino!"

The boy's quick eyes had noticed that Delarey was glancing towards the tangle of trees, among which was visible a small section of the gray wall of the house of the sirens.

"How calm the sea is there!" Delarey said, swiftly.

"Si, signore. That is where you can see the light in the window from our terrace."

"There's no light now."

"How should there be? They are asleep. Andiamo?"

They followed the others, who were now out of sight. When they reached the caves, Nito and the boys had already flung themselves down upon the sand and were sleeping. Gaspare scooped out a hollow for Delarey, rolled up his jacket as a pillow for his padrone's head, murmured a "Buon riposo!" lay down near him, buried his face in his arms, and almost directly began to breathe with a regularity that told its tale of youthful, happy slumber.

It was dark in the cave and quite warm. The sand made a comfortable bed, and Delarey was luxuriously tired after the long walk and the wading in the sea. When he lay down he thought that he, too, would be asleep in a moment, but sleep did not come to him, though he closed his eyes in anticipation of it. His mind was busy in his weary body, and that little cry of a woman still rang in his ears. He heard it like a song sung by a mysterious voice in a place of mystery by the sea. Soon he opened his eyes. Turning a little in the sand, away from his companions, he looked out from the cave, across the sloping beach and the foam of the waves, to the darkness of trees on the island. (So he called the place of the siren's house to himself now, and always hereafter.) From the cave he could not see the house, but only the trees, a formless, dim mass that grew about it. The monotonous sound of wave after wave did not still the cry in his ears, but mingled with it, as must have mingled with the song of the sirens to Ulysses the murmur of breaking seas ever so long ago. And he thought of a siren in the night stealing to a hidden place in the rocks to watch him as he drew the net, breast high in the water. There was romance in his mind to-night, new-born and strange. Sicily had put it there with the wild sense of youth and freedom that still possessed him. Something seemed to call him away from this cave of sleep, to bid his tired body bestir itself once more. He looked at the dark forms of his comrades, stretched in various attitudes of repose, and suddenly he knew he could not sleep. He did not want to sleep. He wanted—what? He raised himself to a sitting posture, then softly stood up, and with infinite precaution stole out of the cave.

The coldness of the coming dawn took hold on him on the shore, and he saw in the east a mysterious pallor that was not of the moon, and upon the foam of the waves a light that was ghastly and that suggested infinite weariness and sickness. But he did not say this to himself. He merely felt that the night was quickly departing, and that he must hasten on his errand before the day came.

He was going to search for the woman who had cried out to him in the sea. And he felt as if she were a creature of the night, of the moon and of the shadows, and as if he could never hope to find her in the glory of the day.

CHAPTER VII

Delarey stole along the beach, walking lightly despite his fatigue. He felt curiously excited, as if he were on the heels of some adventure. He passed the Caffè Berardi almost like a thief in the night, and came to the narrow strip of pebbles that edged the still and lakelike water, protected by the sirens' isle. There he paused. He meant to gain that lonely land, but how? By the water lay two or three boats, but they were large and clumsy, impossible to move without aid. Should he climb up to the Messina road, traverse the spit of ground that led to the rocky wall, and try to make his way across it? The feat would be a difficult one, he thought. But it was not that which deterred him. He was impatient of delay, and the détour would take time. Between him and the islet was the waterway. Already he had been in the sea. Why not go in again? He stripped, packed his clothes into a bundle, tied roughly with a rope made of his handkerchief and bootlaces, and waded in. For a long way the water was shallow. Only when he was near to the island did it rise to his breast, to his throat, higher at last. Holding the bundle on his head with one hand, he struck out strongly and soon touched bottom again. He scrambled out, dressed on a flat rock, then looked for a path leading upward.

The ground was very steep, almost precipitous, and thickly covered with trees and with undergrowth. This undergrowth concealed innumerable rocks and stones which shifted under his feet and rolled down as he began to ascend, grasping the bushes and the branches. He could find no path. What did it matter? All sense of fatigue had left him. With the activity of a cat he mounted. A tree struck him across the face. Another swept off his hat. He felt that he had antagonists who wished to beat him back to the sea, and his blood rose against them. He tore down a branch that impeded him, broke it with his strong hands, and flung it away viciously. His teeth were set and his nerves tingled, and he was conscious of the almost angry joy of keen bodily exertion. The body—that was his God to-night. How he loved it, its health and strength, its willingness, its capacities! How he gloried in it! It had bounded down the mountain. It had gone into the sea and revelled there. It had fished and swum. Now it mounted upward to discovery, defying the weapons that nature launched against it. Splendid, splendid body!

He fought with the trees and conquered them. His trampling feet sent the stones leaping downward to be drowned in the sea. His swift eyes found the likely places for a foothold. His sinewy hands forced his enemies to assist him in the enterprise they hated. He came out on to the plateau at the summit of the island and stood still, panting, beside the house that hid there.

Its blind, gray wall confronted him coldly in the dimness, one shuttered window, like a shut eye, concealing the interior, the soul of the house that lay inside its body. In this window must have been set the light he had seen from the terrace. He wished there were a light burning now. Had he swum across the inlet and fought his way up through the wood only to see a gray wall, a shuttered window? That cry had come from the rocks, yet he had been driven by something within him to this house, connecting—he knew not why—the cry with it and with the far-off light that had been like a star caught in the sea. Now he said to himself that he should have gone back to the rocks and sought the siren there. Should he go now? He hesitated for a moment, leaning against the wall of the house.

"Maju torna, maju veni

Cu li belli soi ciureri;

Oh chi pompa chi nni fa;

Maju torna, maju è ccà!

"Maju torna, maju vinni,

Duna isca a li disinni;

Vinni riccu e ricchi fa,

Maju viva! Maju è ccà!"

He heard a girl's voice singing near him, whether inside the house or among the trees he could not at first tell. It sang softly yet gayly, as if the sun were up and the world were awake, and when it died away Delarey felt as if the singer must be in the dawn, though he stood still in the night. He put his ear to the shuttered window and listened.

"L'haju; nun l'haju?"

The voice was speaking now with a sort of whimsical and half-pathetic merriment, as if inclined to break into laughter at its own childish wistfulness.

"M'ama; nun m'ama?"

It broke off. He heard a little laugh. Then the song began again:

"Maju viju, e maju cògghiu,

Bona sorti di Diù vògghiu;

Ciuri di maju cògghiu a la campía,

Diù, pinzàticci vu a la sorti mia!"

The voice was not in the house. Delarey was sure of that now. He was almost sure, too, that it was the same voice which had cried out to him from the rocks. Moving with precaution, he stole round the house to the farther side, which looked out upon the open sea, keeping among the trees, which grew thickly about the house on three sides, but which left it unprotected to the sea-winds on the fourth.

A girl was standing in this open space, alone, looking seaward, with one arm out-stretched, one hand laid lightly, almost caressingly, upon the gnarled trunk of a solitary old olive-tree, the other arm hanging at her side. She was dressed in some dark, coarse stuff, with a short skirt, and a red handkerchief tied round her head, and seemed in the pale and almost ghastly light in which night and day were drawing near to each other to be tall and slim of waist. Her head was thrown back, as if she were drinking in the breeze that heralded the dawn—drinking it in like a voluptuary.

Delarey stood and watched her. He could not see her face.

She spoke some words in dialect in a clear voice. There was no one else visible. Evidently she was talking to herself. Presently she laughed again, and began to sing once more:

"Maju viju, e maju cògghiu,

A la me'casa guaj nu' nni vògghiu;

Ciuri di maju cògghiu a la campía,

Oru ed argentu a la sacchetta mia!"

There was an African sound in the girl's voice—a sound of mystery that suggested heat and a force that could be languorous and stretch itself at ease. She was singing the song the Sicilian peasant girls join in on the first of May, when the ciuri di maju is in blossom, and the young countrywomen go forth in merry bands to pick the flower of May, and, turning their eyes to the wayside shrine, or, if there be none near, to the east and the rising sun, lift their hands full of the flowers above their heads, and, making the sign of the cross, murmur devoutly:

"Divina Pruvidenza, pruvvidìtimi;

Divina Pruvidenza, cunsulàtimi;

Divina Pruvidenza è granni assai;

Cu' teni fidi a Diù, 'un pirisci mai!"

Delarey knew neither song nor custom, but his ears were fascinated by the voice and the melody. Both sounded remote and yet familiar to him, as if once, in some distant land—perhaps of dreams—he had heard them before. He wished the girl to go on singing, to sing on and on into the dawn while he listened in his hiding-place, but she suddenly turned round and stood looking towards him, as if something had told her that she was not alone. He kept quite still. He knew she could not see him, yet he felt as if she was aware that he was there, and instinctively he held his breath and leaned backward into deeper shadow. After a minute the girl took a step forward, and, still staring in his direction, called out:

"Padre?"

Then Delarey knew that it was her voice that he had heard when he was in the sea, and he suddenly changed his desire. Now he no longer wished to remain unseen, and without hesitation he came out from the trees. The girl stood where she was, watching him as he came. Her attitude showed neither surprise nor alarm, and when he was close to her, and could at last see her face, he found that its expression was one of simple, bold questioning. It seemed to be saying to him quietly, "Well, what do you want of me?"

Delarey was not acquainted with the Arab type of face. Had he been he would have at once been struck by the Eastern look in the girl's long, black eyes, by the Eastern cast of her regular, slightly aquiline features. Above her eyes were thin, jet-black eyebrows that looked almost as if they were painted. Her chin was full and her face oval in shape. She had hair like Gaspare's, black-brown, immensely thick and wavy, with tiny feathers of gold about the temples. She was tall, and had the contours of a strong though graceful girl just blooming into womanhood. Her hands were as brown as Delarey's, well shaped, but the hands of a worker. She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and brimful of lusty life.

After a minute of silence Delarey's memory recalled some words of Gaspare's, till then forgotten.

"You are Maddalena!" he said, in Italian.

The girl nodded.

"Si, signore."

She uttered the words softly, then fell into silence again, staring at him with her lustrous eyes, that were like black jewels.

"You live here with Salvatore?"

She nodded once more and began to smile, as if with pleasure at his knowledge of her.

Delarey smiled too, and made with his arms the motion of swimming. At that she laughed outright and broke into quick speech. She spoke vivaciously, moving her hands and her whole body. Delarey could not understand much of what she said, but he caught the words mare and pescatore, and by her gestures knew that she was telling him she had been on the rocks and had seen his mishap. Suddenly in the midst of her talk she uttered the little cry of surprise or alarm which he had heard as he came up above water, pointed to her lips to indicate that she had given vent to it, and laughed again with all her heart. Delarey laughed too. He felt happy and at ease with his siren, and was secretly amused at his thought in the sea of the magical being full of enchantment who sang to lure men to their destruction. This girl was simply a pretty, but not specially uncommon, type of the Sicilian contadina—young, gay, quite free from timidity, though gentle, full of the joy of life and of the nascent passion of womanhood, blossoming out carelessly in the sunshine of the season of flowers. She could sing, this island siren, but probably she could not read or write. She could dance, could perhaps innocently give and receive love. But there was in her face, in her manner, nothing deliberately provocative. Indeed, she looked warmly pure, like a bright, eager young animal of the woods, full of a blithe readiness to enjoy, full of hope and of unself-conscious animation.

Delarey wondered why she was not sleeping, and strove to ask her, speaking carefully his best Sicilian, and using eloquent gestures, which set her smiling, then laughing again. In reply to him she pointed towards the sea, then towards the house, then towards the sea once more. He guessed that some fisherman had risen early to go to his work, and that she had got up to see him off, and had been too wakeful to return to bed.

"Niente più sonno!" he said, opening wide his eyes.

"Niente! Niente!"

He feigned fatigue. She took his travesty seriously, and pointed to the house, inviting him by gesture to go in and rest there. Evidently she believed that, being a stranger, he could not speak or understand much of her language. He did not even try to undeceive her. It amused him to watch her dumb show, for her face spoke eloquently and her pretty, brown hands knew a language that was delicious. He had no longer any thought of sleep, but he felt curious to see the interior of the cottage, and he nodded his head in response to her invitation. At once she became the hospitable peasant hostess. Her eyes sparkled with eagerness and pleasure, and she went quickly by him to the door, which stood half open, pushed it back, and beckoned to him to enter.

He obeyed her, went in, and found himself almost in darkness, for the big windows on either side of the door were shuttered, and only a tiny flame, like a spark, burned somewhere among the dense shadows of the interior at some distance from him. Pretending to be alarmed at the obscurity, he put out his hand gropingly, and let it light on her arm, then slip down to her warm, strong young hand.

"I am afraid!" he exclaimed.

He heard her merry laugh and felt her trying to pull her hand away, but he held it fast, prolonging a joke that he found a pleasant one. In that moment he was almost as simple as she was, obeying his impulses carelessly, gayly, without a thought of wrong—indeed, almost without thought at all. His body was still tingling and damp with the sea-water. Her face was fresh with the sea-wind. He had never felt more wholesome or as if life were a saner thing.

She dragged her hand out of his at last; he heard a grating noise, and a faint light sputtered up, then grew steady as she moved away and set a match to a candle, shielding it from the breeze that entered through the open door with her body.

"What a beautiful house!" he cried, looking curiously around.

He saw such a dwelling as one may see in any part of Sicily where the inhabitants are not sunk in the direst poverty and squalor, a modest home consisting of two fair-sized rooms, one opening into the other. In each room was a mighty bed, high and white, with fat pillows, and a counterpane of many colors. At the head of each was pinned a crucifix and a little picture of the Virgin, Maria Addolorata, with a palm branch that had been blessed, and beneath the picture in the inner room a tiny light, rather like an English night-light near its end, was burning. It was this that Delarey had seen like a spark in the distance. At the foot of each bed stood a big box of walnut wood, carved into arabesques and grotesque faces. There were a few straw chairs and kitchen utensils. An old gun stood in a corner with a bundle of wood. Not far off was a pan of charcoal. There were also two or three common deal-tables, on one of which stood the remains of a meal, a big jar containing wine, a flat loaf of coarse brown bread, with a knife lying beside it, some green stuff in a plate, and a slab of hard, yellow cheese.

Delarey was less interested in these things than in the display of photographs, picture-cards, and figures of saints that adorned the walls, carefully arranged in patterns to show to the best advantage. Here were colored reproductions of actresses in languid attitudes, of peasants dancing, of babies smiling, of elaborate young people with carefully dressed hair making love with "Molti Saluti!" "Una stretta di Mano!" "Mando un bacio!" "Amicizia eterna!" and other expressions of friendship and affection, scribbled in awkward handwritings across and around them. And mingled with them were representations of saints, such as are sold at the fairs and festivals of Sicily, and are reverently treasured by the pious and superstitious contadine; San Pancrazio, Santa Leocanda, the protector of child-bearing women; Sant Aloe, the patron saint of the beasts of burden; San Biagio, Santo Vito, the patron saint of dogs; and many others, with the Bambino, the Immacolata, the Madonna di Loreto, the Madonna della Rocca.

In the faint light cast by the flickering candle, the faces of saints and actresses, of smiling babies, of lovers and Madonnas peered at Delarey as if curious to know why at such an hour he ventured to intrude among them, why he thus dared to examine them when all the world was sleeping. He drew back from them at length and looked again at the great bed with its fat pillows that stood in the farther room secluded from the sea-breeze. Suddenly he felt a longing to throw himself down and rest.

The girl smiled at him with sympathy.

"That is my bed," she said, simply. "Lie down and sleep, signorino."

Delarey hesitated for a moment. He thought of his companions. If they should wake in the cave and miss him what would they think, what would they do? Then he looked again at the bed. The longing to lie down on it was irresistible. He pointed to the open door.

"When the sun comes will you wake me?" he said.

He took hold of his arm with one hand, and made the motion of shaking himself.

"Sole," he said. "Quando c'è il sole."

The girl laughed and nodded.

"Si, signore—non dubiti!"

Delarey climbed up on to the mountainous bed.

"Buona notte, Maddalena!" he said, smiling at her from the pillow like a boy.

"Buon riposo, signorino!"

That was the last thing he heard. The last thing he saw was the dark, eager face of the girl lit up by the candle-flame watching him from the farther room. Her slight figure was framed by the doorway, through which a faint, sad light was stealing with the soft wind from the sea. Her lustrous eyes were looking towards him curiously, as if he were something of a phenomenon, as if she longed to understand his mystery.

Soon, very soon, he saw those eyes no more. He was asleep in the midst of the Madonnas and the saints, with the blessed palm branch and the crucifix and Maria Addolorata above his head.

The girl sat down on a chair just outside the door, and began to sing to herself once more in a low voice:

"Divina Pruvidenza, pruvvidìtimi;

Divina Pruvidenza, consulàtimi;

Divina Pruvidenza è granni assai;

Cu' teni fidi a Diù, 'un pirisci mai!"

Once, in his sleep, Delarey must surely have heard her song, for he began to dream that he was Ulysses sailing across the purple seas along the shores of an enchanted coast, and that he heard far off the sirens singing, and saw their shadowy forms sitting among the rocks and reclining upon the yellow sands. Then he bade his mariners steer the bark towards the shore. But when he drew near the sirens changed into devout peasant women, and their alluring songs into prayers uttered to the Bambino and the Virgin. But one watched him with eyes that gleamed like black jewels, and her lips smiled while they uttered prayers, as if they could murmur love words and kiss the lips of men.

"Signorino! Signorino!"

Delarey stirred on the great, white bed. A hand grasped him firmly, shook him ruthlessly.

"Signorino! C'è il sole!"

He opened his eyes reluctantly. Maddalena was leaning over him. He saw her bright face and curious young eyes, then the faces of the saints and the actresses upon the wall, and he wondered where he was and where Hermione was.

"Hermione!" he said.

"Cosa?" said Maddalena.

She shook him again gently. He stretched himself, yawned, and began to smile. She smiled back at him.

"C'è il sole!"

Now he remembered, lifted himself up, and looked towards the doorway. The first rays of the sun were filtering in and sparkling in the distance upon the sea. The east was barred with red.

He slipped down from the bed.

"The frittura!" he said, in English. "I must make haste!"

Maddalena laughed. She had never heard English before.

"Ditelo ancora!" she cried, eagerly.

They went but together on to the plateau and stood looking seaward.

"I—must—make—haste!" he said, speaking slowly and dividing the words.

"Hi—maust—maiki—'ai—isti!" she repeated, trying to imitate his accent.

He burst out laughing. She pouted. Then she laughed, too, peal upon peal, while the sunlight grew stronger about them. How fresh the wind was! It played with her hair, from which she had now removed the handkerchief, and ruffled the little feathers of gold upon her brow. It blew about her smooth, young face as if it loved to touch the soft cheeks, the innocent lips, the candid, unlined brow. The leaves of the olive-trees rustled and the brambles and the grasses swayed. Everything was in movement, stirring gayly into life to greet the coming day. Maurice opened his mouth and drew in the air to his lungs, expanding his chest. He felt inclined to dance, to sing, and very much inclined to eat.

"Addio, Maddalena!" he said, holding out his hand.

He looked into her eyes and added:

"Addio, Maddalena mia!"

She smiled and looked down, then up at him again.

"A rivederci, signorino!"

She took his hand warmly in hers.

"Yes, that's better. A rivederci!"

He held her hand for a moment, looking into her long and laughing eyes, and thinking how like a young animal's they were in their unwinking candor. And yet they were not like an animal's. For now, when he gazed into them, they did not look away from him, but continued to regard him, and always with an eager shining of curiosity. That curiosity stirred his manhood, fired him. He longed to reply to it, to give a quick answer to its eager question, its "what are you?" He glanced round, saw only the trees, the sea all alight with sun-rays, the red east now changing slowly into gold. Then he bent down, kissed the lips of Maddalena with a laugh, turned and descended through the trees by the way he had come. He had no feeling that he had done any wrong to Hermione, any wrong to Maddalena. His spirits were high, and he sang as he leaped down, agile as a goat, to the sea. He meant to return as he had come, and at the water's edge he stripped off his clothes once more, tied them into a bundle, plunged into the sea, and struck out for the beach opposite. As he did so, as the cold, bracing water seized him, he heard far above him the musical cry of the siren of the night. He answered it with a loud, exultant call.

That was her farewell and his—this rustic Hero's good-bye to her Leander.

When he reached the Caffè Berardi its door stood open, and a middle-aged woman was looking out seaward. Beyond, by the caves, he saw figures moving. His companions were awake. He hastened towards them. His morning plunge in the sea had given him a wild appetite.

"Frittura! Frittura!" he shouted, taking off his hat and waving it.

Gaspare came running towards him.

"Where have you been, signorino?"

"For a walk along the shore."

He still kept his hat in his hand.

"Why, your face is all wet, and so is your hair."

"I washed them in the sea. Mangiamo! Mangiamo!"

"You did not sleep?"

Gaspare spoke curiously, regarded him with inquisitive, searching eyes.

"I couldn't. I'll sleep up there when we get home."

He pointed to the mountain. His eyes were dancing with gayety.

"The frittura, Gasparino, the frittura! And then the tarantella, and then 'O sole mio'!"

He looked towards the rising sun, and began to sing at the top of his voice:

"O sole, o sole mio,

Sta 'n fronte a te,

Sta 'n fronte a te!"

Gaspare joined in lustily, and Carmela in the doorway of the Caffè Berardi waved a frying-pan at them in time to the music.

"Per Dio, Gaspare!" exclaimed Maurice, as they raced towards the house, each striving to be first there—"Per Dio, I never knew what life was till I came to Sicily! I never knew what happiness was till this morning!"

"The frittura! The frittura!" shouted Gaspare. "I'll be first!"

Neck and neck they reached the caffè as Nito poured the shining fish into Madre Carmela's frying-pan.

CHAPTER VIII

"They are coming, signora, they are coming! Don't you hear them?"

Lucrezia was by the terrace wall looking over into the ravine. She could not see any moving figures, but she heard far down among the olives and the fruit trees Gaspare's voice singing "O sole mio!" and while she listened another voice joined in, the voice of the padrone:

"Dio mio, but they are merry!" she added, as the song was broken by a distant peal of laughter.

Hermione came out upon the steps. She had been in the sitting-room writing a letter to Miss Townly, who sent her long and tearful effusions from London almost every day.

"Have you got the frying-pan ready, Lucrezia?" she asked.

"The frying-pan, signora!"

"Yes, for the fish they are bringing us."

Lucrezia looked knowing.

"Oh, signora, they will bring no fish."

"Why not? They promised last night. Didn't you hear?"

"They promised, yes, but they won't remember. Men promise at night and forget in the morning."

Hermione laughed. She had been feeling a little dull, but now the sound of the lusty voices and the laughter from the ravine filled her with a sudden cheerfulness, and sent a glow of anticipation into her heart.

"Lucrezia, you are a cynic."

"What is a cinico, signora?"

"A Lucrezia. But you don't know your padrone. He won't forget us."

Lucrezia reddened. She feared she had perhaps said something that seemed disrespectful.

"Oh, signora, there is not another like the padrone. Every one says so. Ask Gaspare and Sebastiano. I only meant that—"

"I know. Well, to-day you will understand that all men are not forgetful, when you eat your fish."

Lucrezia still looked very doubtful, but she said nothing more.

"There they are!" exclaimed Hermione.

She waved her hand and cried out. Life suddenly seemed quite different to her. These moving figures peopled gloriously the desert waste, these ringing voices filled with music the brooding silence of it. She murmured to herself a verse of scripture, "Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh with the morning," and she realized for the first time how absurdly sad and deserted she had been feeling, how unreasonably forlorn. By her present joy she measured her past—not sorrow exactly; she could not call it that—her past dreariness, and she said to herself with a little shock almost of fear, "How terribly dependent I am!"

"Mamma mia!" cried Lucrezia, as another shout of laughter came up from the ravine, "how merry and mad they are! They have had a good night's fishing."

Hermione heard the laughter, but now it sounded a little harsh in her ears.

"I wonder," she thought, as she leaned upon the terrace wall—"I wonder if he has missed me at all? I wonder if men ever miss us as we miss them?"

Her call, it seemed, had not been heard, nor her gesture of welcome seen, but now Maurice looked up, waved his cap, and shouted. Gaspare, too, took off his linen hat with a stentorian cry of "Buon giorno, signora."

"Signora!" said Lucrezia.

"Yes?"

"Look! Was not I right? Are they carrying anything?"

Hermione looked eagerly, almost passionately, at the two figures now drawing near to the last ascent up the bare mountain flank. Maurice had a stick in one hand, the other hung empty at his side. Gaspare still waved his hat wildly, holding it with both hands as a sailor holds the signalling-flag.

"Perhaps," she said—"perhaps it wasn't a good night, and they've caught nothing."

"Oh, signora, the sea was calm. They must have taken—"

"Perhaps their pockets are full of fish. I am sure they are."

She spoke with a cheerful assurance.

"If they have caught any fish, I know your frying-pan will be wanted," she said.

"Chi lo sa?" said Lucrezia, with rather perfunctory politeness.

Secretly she thought that the padrona had only one fault. She was a little obstinate sometimes, and disinclined to be told the truth. And certainly she did not know very much about men, although she had a husband.

Through the old Norman arch came Delarey and Gaspare, with hot faces and gay, shining eyes, splendidly tired with their exertions and happy in the thought of rest. Delarey took Hermione's hand in his. He would have kissed her before Lucrezia and Gaspare, quite naturally, but he felt that her hand stiffened slightly in his as he leaned forward, and he forbore. She longed for his kiss, but to receive it there would have spoiled a joy. And kind and familiar though she was with those beneath her, she could not bear to show the deeps of her heart before them. To her his kiss after her lonely night would be an event. Did he know that? She wondered.

He still kept her hand in his as he began to tell her about their expedition.

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked, thinking what a boy he looked in his eager, physical happiness.

"Ask Gaspare!"

"I don't think I need. Your eyes tell me."

"I never enjoyed any night so much before, out there under the moon. Why don't we always sleep out-of-doors?"

"Shall we try some night on the terrace?"

"By Jove, we will! What a lark!"

"Did you go into the sea?"

"I should think so! Ask Gaspare if I didn't beat them all. I had to swim, too."

"And the fish?" she said, trying to speak, carelessly.

"They were stunning. We caught an awful lot, and Mother Carmela cooked them to a T. I had an appetite, I can tell you, Hermione, after being in the sea."

She was silent for a moment. Her hand had dropped out of his. When she spoke again, she said:

"And you slept in the caves?"

"The others did."

"And you?"

"I couldn't sleep, so I went out on to the beach. But I'll tell you all that presently. You won't be shocked, Hermione, if I take a siesta now? I'm pretty well done—grandly tired, don't you know. I think I could get a lovely nap before collazione."

"Come in, my dearest," she said. "Collazione a little late, Lucrezia, not till half-past one."

"And the fish, signora?" asked Lucrezia.

"We've got quite enough without fish," said Hermione, turning away.

"Oh, by Jove!" Delarey said, as they went into the cottage, putting his hand into his jacket-pocket, "I've got something for you, Hermione."

"Fish!" she cried, eagerly, her whole face brightening. "Lucre—"

"Fish in my coat!" he interrupted, still not remembering. "No, a letter. They gave it me from the village as we came up. Here it is."

He drew out a letter, gave it to her, and went into the bedroom, while Hermione stood in the sitting-room by the dining-table with the letter in her hand.

It was from Artois, with the Kairouan postmark.

"It's from Emile," she said.

Maurice was closing the shutters, to make the bedroom dark.

"Is he still in Africa?" he asked, letting down the bar with a clatter.

"Yes," she said, opening the envelope. "Go to bed like a good boy while I read it."

She wanted his kiss so much that she did not go near to him, and spoke with a lightness that was almost like a feigned indifference. He thrust his gay face through the doorway into the sunshine, and she saw the beads of perspiration on his smooth brow above his laughing, yet half-sleepy eyes.

"Come and tuck me up afterwards!" he said, and vanished.

Hermione made a little movement as if to follow him, but checked it and unfolded the letter.

"4, Rue d'Abdul Kader, Kairouan.

My dear Friend,—This will be one of my dreary notes, but you must forgive me. Do you ever feel a heavy cloud of apprehension lowering over you, a sensation of approaching calamity, as if you heard the footsteps of a deadly enemy stealthily approaching you? Do you know what it is to lose courage, to fear yourself, life, the future, to long to hear a word of sympathy from a friendly voice, to long to lay hold of a friendly hand? Are you ever like a child in the dark, your intellect no weapon against the dread of formless things? The African sun is shining here as I sit under a palm-tree writing, with my servant, Zerzour, squatting beside me. It is so clear that I can almost count the veins in the leaves of the palms, so warm that Zerzour has thrown off his burnous and kept on only his linen shirt. And yet I am cold and seem to be in blackness. I write to you to gain some courage if I can. But I have gained none yet. I believe there must be a physical cause for my malaise, and that I am going to have some dreadful illness, and perhaps lay my bones here in the shadow of the mosques among the sons of Islam. Write to me. Is the garden of paradise blooming with flowers? Is the tree of knowledge of good weighed down with fruit, and do you pluck the fruit boldly and eat it every day? You told me in London to come over and see you. I am not coming. Do not fear. But how I wish that I could now, at this instant, see your strong face, touch your courageous hand! There is a sensation of doom upon me. Laugh at me as much as you like, but write to me. I feel cold—cold in the sun.

Emile."

When she had finished reading this letter, Hermione stood quite still with it in her hand, gazing at the white paper on which this cry from Africa was traced. It seemed to her that—a cry from across the sea for help against some impending fate. She had often had melancholy letters from Artois in the past, expressing pessimistic views about life and literature, anxiety about some book which he was writing and which he thought was going to be a failure, anger against the follies of men, the turn of French politics, or the degeneration of the arts in modern times. Diatribes she was accustomed to, and a definite melancholy from one who had not a gay temperament. But this letter was different from all the others. She sat down and read it again. For the moment she had forgotten Maurice, and did not hear his movements in the adjoining room. She was in Africa under a palm-tree, looking into the face of a friend with keen anxiety, trying to read the immediate future for him there.

"Maurice!" she called, presently, without getting up from her seat, "I've had such a strange letter from Emile. I'm afraid—I feel as if he were going to be dreadfully ill or have an accident."

There was no reply.

"Maurice!" she called again.

Then she got up and looked into the bedroom. It was nearly dark, but she could see her husband's black head on the pillow and hear a sound of regular breathing. He was asleep already; she had not received his kiss or tucked him up. She felt absurdly unhappy, as if she had missed a pleasure that could never come to her again. That, she thought, is one of the penalties of a great love, the passionate regret it spends on the tiny things it has failed of. At this moment she fancied—no, she felt sure—that there would always be a shadow in her life. She had lost Maurice's kiss after his return from his first absence since their marriage. And a kiss from his lips still seemed to her a wonderful, almost a sacred thing, not only a physical act, but an emblem of that which was mysterious and lay behind the physical. Why had she not let him kiss her on the terrace? Her sensitive reserve had made her loss. For a moment she thought she wished she had the careless mind of a peasant. Lucrezia loved Sebastiano with passion, but she would have let him kiss her in public and been proud of it. What was the use of delicacy, of sensitiveness, in the great, coarse thing called life? Even Maurice had not shared her feeling. He was open as a boy, almost as a peasant boy.

She began to wonder about him. She often wondered about him now in Sicily. In England she never had. She had thought there that she knew him as he, perhaps, could never know her. It seemed to her that she had been almost arrogant, filled with a pride of intellect. She was beginning to be humbler here, face to face with Etna.

Let him sleep, mystery wrapped in the mystery of slumber!

She sat down in the twilight, waiting till he should wake, watching the darkness of his hair upon the pillow.

Some time passed, and presently she heard a noise upon the terrace. She got up softly, went into the sitting-room, and looked out. Lucrezia was laying the table for collazione.

"Is it half-past one already?" she asked.

"Si, signora."

"But the padrone is still asleep!"

"So is Gaspare in the hay. Come and see, signora."

Lucrezia took Hermione by the hand and led her round the angle of the cottage. There, under the low roof of the out-house, dressed only in his shirt and trousers with his brown arms bare and his hair tumbled over his damp forehead, lay Gaspare on a heap of hay close to Tito, the donkey. Some hens were tripping and pecking by his legs, and a black cat was curled up in the hollow of his left armpit. He looked infinitely young, healthy, and comfortable, like an embodied carelessness that had flung itself down to its need.

"I wish I could sleep like that," said Hermione.

"Signora!" said Lucrezia, shocked. "You in the stable with that white dress! Mamma mia! And the hens!"

"Hens, donkey, cat, hay, and all—I should love it. But I'm too old ever to sleep like that. Don't wake him!"

Lucrezia was stepping over to Gaspare.

"And I won't wake the padrone. Let them both sleep. They've been up all night. I'll eat alone. When they wake we'll manage something for them. Perhaps they'll sleep till evening, till dinner-time."

"Gaspare will, signora. He can sleep the clock round when he's tired."

"And the padrone too, I dare say. All the better."

She spoke cheerfully, then went to sit down to her solitary meal.

The letter of Artois was her only company. She read it again as she ate, and again felt as if it had been written by a man over whom some real misfortune was impending. The thought of his isolation in that remote African city pained her warm heart. She compared it with her own momentary solitude, and chided herself for minding—and she did mind—the lonely meal. How much she had—everything almost! And Artois, with his genius, his fame, his liberty—how little he had! An Arab servant for his companion, while she for hers had Maurice! Her heart glowed with thankfulness, and, feeling how rich she was, she felt a longing to give to others—a longing to make every one happy, a longing specially to make Emile happy. His letter was horribly sad. Each time she looked at it she was made sad by it, even apprehensive. She remembered their long and close friendship, how she had sympathized with all his struggles, how she had been proud of possessing his confidence and of being asked to advise him on points connected with his work. The past returned to her, kindling fires in her heart, till she longed to be near him and to shed their warmth on him. The African sun shone upon him and left him cold, numb. How wonderful it was, she thought, that the touch of a true friend's hand, the smile of the eyes of a friend, could succeed where the sun failed. Sometimes she thought of herself, of all human beings, as pygmies. Now she felt that she came of a race of giants, whose powers were illimitable. If only she could be under that palm-tree for a moment beside Emile, she would be able to test the power she knew was within her, the glorious power that the sun lacked, to shed light and heat through a human soul. With an instinctive gesture she stretched out her hand as if to give Artois the touch he longed for. It encountered only the air and dropped to her side. She got up with a sigh.

"Poor old Emile!" she said to herself. "If only I could do something for him!"

The thought of Maurice sleeping calmly close to her made her long to say "Thank you" for her great happiness by performing some action of usefulness, some action that would help another—Emile for choice—to happiness, or, at least, to calm.

This longing was for a moment so keen in her that it was almost like an unconscious petition, like an unuttered prayer in the heart, "Give me an opportunity to show my gratitude."

She stood by the wall for a moment, looking over into the ravine and at the mountain flank opposite. Etna was startlingly clear to-day. She fancied that if a fly were to settle upon the snow on its summit she would be able to see it. The sea was like a mirror in which lay the reflection of the unclouded sky. It was not far to Africa. She watched a bird pass towards the sea. Perhaps it was flying to Kairouan, and would settle at last on one of the white cupolas of the great mosque there, the Mosque of Djama Kebir.

What could she do for Emile? She could at least write to him. She could renew her invitation to him to come to Sicily.

"Lucrezia!" she called, softly, lest she might waken Maurice.

"Signora?" said Lucrezia, appearing round the corner of the cottage.

"Please bring me out a pen and ink and writing-paper, will you?"

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia was standing beside Hermione. Now she turned to go into the house. As she did so she said:

"Ecco, Antonino from the post-office!"

"Where?" asked Hermione.

Lucrezia pointed to a little figure that was moving quickly along the mountain-path towards the cottage.

"There, signora. But why should he come? It is not the hour for the post yet."

"No. Perhaps it is a telegram. Yes, it must be a telegram."

She glanced at the letter in her hand.

"It's a telegram from Africa," she said, as if she knew.

And at that moment she felt that she did know.

Lucrezia regarded her with round-eyed amazement.

"But, signora, how can you—"

"There, Antonino has disappeared under the trees! We shall see him in a minute among the rocks. I'll go to meet him."

And she went quickly to the archway, and looked down the path where the lizards were darting to and fro in the sunshine. Almost directly Antonino reappeared, a small boy climbing steadily up the steep pathway, with a leather bag slung over his shoulder.

"Antonino!" she called to him. "Is it a telegram?"

"Si, signora!" he cried out.

He came up to her, panting, opened the bag, and gave her the folded paper.

"Go and get something to drink," she said. "To eat, too, if you're hungry."

Antonino ran off eagerly, while Hermione tore open the paper and read these words in French:

"Monsieur Artois dangerously ill; fear may not recover; he wished you to know.

Max Berton, Docteur Médecin, Kairouan."

Hermione dropped the telegram. She did not feel at all surprised. Indeed, she felt that she had been expecting almost these very words, telling her of a tragedy at which the letter she still held in her hand had hinted. For a moment she stood there without being conscious of any special sensation. Then she stooped, picked up the telegram, and read it again. This time it seemed like an answer to that unuttered prayer in her heart: "Give me an opportunity to show my gratitude." She did not hesitate for a moment as to what she would do. She would go to Kairouan, to close the eyes of her friend if he must die, if not to nurse him back to life.

Antonino was munching some bread and cheese and had one hand round a glass full of red wine.

"I'm going to write an answer," she said to him, "and you must run with it."

"Si, signora."

"Was it from Africa, signora?" asked Lucrezia.

"Yes."

Lucrezia's jaw fell, and she stared in superstitious amazement.

"I wonder," Hermione thought, "if Maurice—"

She went gently to the bedroom. He was still sleeping calmly. His attitude of luxurious repose, the sound of his quiet breathing, seemed strange to her eyes and ears at this moment, strange and almost horrible. For an instant she thought of waking him in order to tell him her news and consult with him about the journey. It never occurred to her to ask him whether there should be a journey. But something held her back, as one is held back from disturbing the slumber of a tired child, and she returned to the sitting-room, wrote out the following telegram:

"Shall start for Kairouan at once; wire me Tunisia Palace Hotel, Tunis,

Madame Delarey."

and sent Antonino with it flying down the hill. Then she got time-tables and a guide-book of Tunisia, and sat down at her writing-table to make out the journey; while Lucrezia, conscious that something unusual was afoot, watched her with solemn eyes.

Hermione found that she would gain nothing by starting that night. By leaving early the next morning she would arrive at Trapani in time to catch a steamer which left at midnight for Tunis, reaching Africa at nine on the following morning. From Tunis a day's journey by train would bring her to Kairouan. If the steamer were punctual she might be able to catch a train immediately on her arrival at Tunis. If not, she would have to spend one day there.

Already she felt as if she were travelling. All sense of peace had left her. She seemed to hear the shriek of engines, the roar of trains in tunnels and under bridges, to shake with the oscillation of the carriage, to sway with the dip and rise of the action of the steamer.

Swiftly, as one in haste, she wrote down times of departure and arrival: Cattaro to Messina, Messina to Palermo, Palermo to Trapani, Trapani to Tunis, Tunis to Kairouan, with the price of the ticket—a return ticket. When that was done and she had laid down her pen, she began for the first time to realize the change a morsel of paper had made in her life, to realize the fact of the closeness of her new knowledge of what was and what was coming to Maurice's ignorance. The travelling sensation within her, an intense interior restlessness, made her long for action, for some ardent occupation in which the body could take part. She would have liked to begin at once to pack, but all her things were in the bedroom where Maurice was sleeping. Would he sleep forever? She longed for him to wake, but she would not wake him. Everything could be packed in an hour. There was no reason to begin now. But how could she remain just sitting there in the great tranquillity of this afternoon of spring, looking at the long, calm line of Etna rising from the sea, while Emile, perhaps, lay dying?

She got up, went once more to the terrace, and began to pace up and down under the awning. She had not told Lucrezia that she was going on the morrow. Maurice must know first. What would he say? How would he take it? And what would he do? Even in the midst of her now growing sorrow—for at first she had hardly felt sorry, had hardly felt anything but that intense restlessness which still possessed her—she was preoccupied with that. She meant, when he woke, to give him the telegram, and say simply that she must go at once to Artois. That was all. She would not ask, hint at anything else. She would just tell Maurice that she could not leave her dearest friend to die alone in an African city, tended only by an Arab, and a doctor who came to earn his fee.

And Maurice—what would he say? What would he—do?

If only he would wake! There was something terrible to her in the contrast between his condition and hers at this moment.

And what ought she to do if Maurice—?

She broke off short in her mental arrangement of possible happenings when Maurice should wake.

The afternoon waned and still he slept. As she watched the light changing on the sea, growing softer, more wistful, and the long outline of Etna becoming darker against the sky, Hermione felt a sort of unreasonable despair taking possession of her. So few hours of the day were left now, and on the morrow this Sicilian life—a life that had been ideal—must come to an end for a time, and perhaps forever. The abruptness of the blow which had fallen had wakened in her sensitive heart a painful, almost an exaggerated sense of the uncertainty of the human fate. It seemed to her that the joy which had been hers in these tranquil Sicilian days, a joy more perfect than any she had conceived of, was being broken off short, as if it could never be renewed. With her anxiety for her friend mingled another anxiety, more formless, but black and horrible in its vagueness.

"If this should be our last day together in Sicily!" she thought, as she watched the light softening among the hills and the shadows of the olive-trees lengthening upon the ground.

"If this should be our last night together in the house of the priest!"

It seemed to her that even with Maurice in another place she could never know again such perfect peace and joy, and her heart ached at the thought of leaving it.

"To-morrow!" she thought. "Only a few hours and this will all be over!"

It seemed almost incredible. She felt that she could not realize it thoroughly and yet that she realized it too much, as in a nightmare one seems to feel both less and more than in any tragedy of a wakeful hour.

A few hours and it would all be over—and through those hours Maurice slept.

The twilight was falling when he stirred, muttered some broken words, and opened his eyes. He heard no sound, and thought it was early morning.

"Hermione!" he said, softly.

Then he lay still for a moment and remembered.

"By Jove! it must be long past time for déjeuner!" he thought.

He sprang up and put his head into the sitting-room.

"Hermione!" he called.

"Yes," she answered, from the terrace.

"What's the time?"

"Nearly dinner-time."

He burst out laughing.

"Didn't you think I was going to sleep forever?" he said.

"Almost," her voice said.

He wondered a little why she did not come to him, but only answered him from a distance.

"I'll dress and be out in a moment," he called.

"All right!"

Now that Maurice was awake at last, Hermione's grief at the lost afternoon became much more acute, but she was determined to conceal it. She remained where she was just then because she had been startled by the sound of her husband's voice, and was not sure of her power of self-control. When, a few minutes later, he came out upon the terrace with a half-amused, half-apologetic look on his face, she felt safer. She resolved to waste no time, but to tell him at once.

"Maurice," she said, "while you've been sleeping I've been living very fast and travelling very far."

"How, Hermione? What do you mean?" he asked, sitting down by the wall and looking at her with eyes that still held shadows of sleep.

"Something's happened to-day that's—that's going to alter everything."

He looked astonished.

"Why, how grave you are! But what? What could happen here?"

"This came."

She gave him the doctor's telegram. He read it slowly aloud.

"Artois!" he said. "Poor fellow! And out there in Africa all alone!"

He stopped speaking, looked at her, then leaned forward, put his arm round her shoulder, and kissed her gently.

"I'm awfully sorry for you, Hermione," he said. "Awfully sorry, I know how you must be feeling. When did it come?"

"Some hours ago."

"And I've been sleeping! I feel a brute."

He kissed her again.

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"Just to share a grief? That would have been horrid of me, Maurice!"

He looked again at the telegram.

"Did you wire?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Of course. Perhaps to-morrow, or in a day or two, we shall have better news, that he's turned the corner. He's a strong man, Hermione; he ought to recover. I believe he'll recover."

"Maurice," she said. "I want to tell you something."

"What, dear?"

"I feel I must—I can't wait here for news."

"But then—what will you do?"

"While you've been sleeping I've been looking out trains."

"Trains! You don't mean—"

"I must start for Kairouan to-morrow morning. Read this, too."

And she gave him Emile's letter.

"Doesn't that make you feel his loneliness?" she said, when he had finished it. "And think of it now—now when perhaps he knows that he is dying."

"You are going away," he said—"going away from here!"

His voice sounded as if he could not believe it.

"To-morrow morning!" he added, more incredulously.

"If I waited I might be too late."

She was watching him with intent eyes, in which there seemed to flame a great anxiety.

"You know what friends we've been," she continued. "Don't you think I ought to go?"

"I—perhaps—yes, I see how you feel. Yes, I see. But"—he got up—"to leave here to-morrow! I felt as if—almost as if we'd been here always and should live here for the rest of our lives."

"I wish to Heaven we could!" she exclaimed, her voice changing. "Oh, Maurice, if you knew how dreadful it is to me to go!"

"How far is Kairouan?"

"If I catch the train at Tunis I can be there the day after to-morrow."

"And you are going to nurse him, of course?"

"Yes, if—if I'm in time. Now I ought to pack before dinner."

"How beastly!" he said, just like a boy. "How utterly beastly! I don't feel as if I could believe it all. But you—what a trump you are, Hermione! To leave this and travel all that way—not one woman in a hundred would do it."

"Wouldn't you for a friend?"

"I!" he said, simply. "I don't know whether I understand friendship as you do. I've had lots of friends, of course, but one seemed to me very like another, as long as they were jolly."

"How Sicilian!" she thought.

She had heard Gaspare speak of his boy friends in much the same way.

"Emile is more to me than any one in the world but you," she said.

Her voice changed, faltered on the last word, and she walked along the terrace to the sitting-room window.

"I must pack now," she said. "Then we can have one more quiet time together after dinner."

Her last words seemed to strike him, for he followed her, and as she was going into the bedroom, he said:

"Perhaps—why shouldn't I—"

But then he stopped.

"Yes, Maurice!" she said, quickly.

"Where's Gaspare?" he asked. "We'll make him help with the packing. But you won't take much, will you? It'll only be for a few days, I suppose."

"Who knows?"

"Gaspare! Gaspare!" he called.

"Che vuole?" answered a sleepy voice.

"Come here."

In a moment a languid figure appeared round the corner. Maurice explained matters. Instantly Gaspare became a thing of quicksilver. He darted to help Hermione. Every nerve seemed quivering to be useful.

"And the signore?" he said, presently, as he carried a trunk into the room.

"The signore!" said Hermione.

"Is he going, too?"

"No, no!" said Hermione, swiftly.

She put her finger to her lips. Delarey was just coming into the room.

Gaspare said no more, but he shot a curious glance from padrona to padrone as he knelt down to lay some things in the trunk.

By dinner-time Hermione's preparations were completed. The one trunk she meant to take was packed. How hateful it looked standing there in the white room with the label hanging from the handle! She washed her face and hands in cold water, and came out onto the terrace where the dinner-table was laid. It was a warm, still night, like the night of the fishing, and the moon hung low in a clear sky.

"How exquisite it is here!" she said to Maurice, as they sat down. "We are in the very heart of calm, majestic calm. Look at that one star over Etna, and the outlines of the hills and of that old castle—"

She stopped.

"It brings a lump into my throat," she said, after a little pause. "It's too beautiful and too still to-night."

"I love being here," he said.

They ate their dinner in silence for some time. Presently Maurice began to crumble his bread.

"Hermione," he said. "Look here—"

"Yes, Maurice."

"I've been thinking—of course I scarcely know Artois, and I could be of no earthly use, but I've been thinking whether it would not be better for me to come to Kairouan with you."

For a moment Hermione's rugged face was lit up by a fire of joy that made her look beautiful. Maurice went on crumbling his bread.

"I didn't say anything at first," he continued, "because I—well, somehow I felt so fixed here, almost part of the place, and I had never thought of going till it got too hot, and especially not now, when the best time is only just beginning. And then it all came so suddenly. I was still more than half asleep, too, I believe," he added, with a little laugh, "when you told me. But now I've had time, and—why shouldn't I come, too, to look after you?"

As he went on speaking the light in Hermione's face flickered and died out. It was when he laughed that it vanished quite away.

"Thank you, Maurice," she said, quietly. "Thank you, dear. I should love to have you with me, but it would be a shame!"

"Why?"

"Why? Why—the best time here is only just beginning, as you say. It would be selfish to drag you across the sea to a sick-bed, or perhaps to a death-bed."

"But the journey?"

"Oh, I am accustomed to being a lonely woman. Think how short a time we've been married! I've nearly always travelled alone."

"Yes, I know," he said. "Of course there's no danger. I didn't mean that, only—"

"Only you were ready to be unselfish," she said. "Bless you for it. But this time I want to be unselfish. You must stay here to keep house, and I'll come back the first moment I can—the very first. Let's try to think of that—of the day when I come up the mountain again to my—to our garden of paradise. All the time I'm away I shall pray for the moment when I see these columns of the terrace above me, and the geraniums, and—and the white wall of our little—home."

She stopped. Then she added:

"And you."

"Yes," he said. "But you won't see me on the terrace."

"Why not?"

"Because, of course, I shall come to the station to meet you. That day will be a festa."

She said nothing more. Her heart was very full, and of conflicting feelings and of voices that spoke in contradiction one of another. One or two of these voices she longed to hush to silence, but they were persistent. Then she tried not to listen to what they were saying. But they were pitilessly distinct.

Dinner was soon over, and Gaspare came to clear away. His face was very grave, even troubled. He did not like this abrupt departure of his padrona.

"You will come back, signora?" he said, as he drew away the cloth and prepared to fold up the table and carry it in-doors.

Hermione managed to laugh.

"Why, of course, Gaspare! Did you think I was going away forever?"

"Africa is a long way off."

"Only nine hours from Trapani. I may be back very soon. Will you forget me?"

"Did I forget my padrona when she was in England?" the boy replied, his expressive face suddenly hardening and his great eyes glittering with sullen fires.

Hermione quickly laid her hand on his.

"I was only laughing. You know your padrona trusts you to remember her as she remembers you."

Gaspare lifted up her hand quickly, kissed it, and hurried away, lifting his own hand to his eyes.

"These Sicilians know how to make one love them," said Hermione, with a little catch in her voice. "I believe that boy would die for me if necessary."

"I'm sure he would," said Maurice. "But one doesn't find a padrona like you every day."

"Let us walk to the arch," she said. "I must take my last look at the mountains with you."

Beyond the archway there was a large, flat rock, a natural seat from which could be seen a range of mountains that was invisible from the terrace. Hermione often sat on this rock alone, looking at the distant peaks, whose outlines stirred her imagination like a wild and barbarous music. Now she drew down Maurice beside her and kept his hand in hers. She was thinking of many things, among others of the little episode that had just taken place with Gaspare. His outburst of feeling, like fire bursting up through a suddenly opened fissure in the crust of the earth, had touched her and something more. It had comforted her, and removed from her a shadowy figure that had been approaching her, the figure of a fear. She fixed her eyes on the mountains, dark under the silver of the moon.

"Maurice," she said. "Do you often try to read people?"

The pleasant look of almost deprecating modesty that Artois had noticed on the night when they dined together in London came to Delarey's face.

"I don't know that I do, Hermione," he said. "Is it easy?"

"I think—I'm thinking it especially to-night—that it is horribly difficult. One's imagination seizes hold of trifles, and magnifies them and distorts them. From little things, little natural things, one deduces—I mean one takes a midget and makes of it a monster. How one ought to pray to see clear in people one loves! It's very strange, but I think that sometimes, just because one loves, one is ready to be afraid, to doubt, to exaggerate, to think a thing is gone when it is there. In friendship one is more ready to give things their proper value—perhaps because everything is of less value. Do you know that to-night I realize for the first time the enormous difference there is between the love one gives in love and the love one gives in friendship?"

"Why, Hermione?" he asked, simply.

He was looking a little puzzled, but still reverential.

"I love Emile as a friend. You know that."

"Yes. Would you go to Kairouan if you didn't?"

"If he were to die it would be a great sorrow, a great loss to me. I pray that he may live. And yet—"

Suddenly she took his other hand in hers.

"Oh, Maurice, I've been thinking to-day, I'm thinking now—suppose it were you who lay ill, perhaps dying! Oh, the difference in my feeling, in my dread! If you were to be taken from me, the gap in my life! There would be nothing—nothing left."

He put his arm round her, and was going to speak, but she went on:

"And if you were to be taken from me how terrible it would be to feel that I'd ever had one unkind thought of you, that I'd ever misinterpreted one look or word or action of yours, that I'd ever, in my egoism or my greed, striven to thwart one natural impulse of yours, or to force you into travesty away from simplicity! Don't—don't ever be unnatural or insincere with me, Maurice, even for a moment, even for fear of hurting me. Be always yourself, be the boy that you still are and that I love you for being."

She put her head on his shoulder, and he felt her body trembling.

"I think I'm always natural with you," he said.

"You're as natural as Gaspare. Only once, and—and that was my fault, I know; but you mean so much to me, everything, and your honesty with me is like God walking with me."

She lifted her head and stood up.

"Please God we'll have many more nights together here," she said—"many more blessed, blessed nights. The stillness of the hills is like all the truth of the world, sifted from the falsehood and made into one beautiful whole. Oh, Maurice, there is a Heaven on earth—when two people love each other in the midst of such a silence as this."

They went slowly back through the archway to the terrace. Far below them the sea gleamed delicately, almost like a pearl. In the distance, towering above the sea, the snow of Etna gleamed more coldly, with a bleaker purity, a suggestion of remote mysteries and of untrodden heights. Above the snow of Etna shone the star of evening. Beside the sea shone the little light in the house of the sirens.

And as they stood for a moment before the cottage in the deep silence of the night, Hermione looked up at the star above the snow. But Maurice looked down at the little light beside the sea.

CHAPTER IX

Only when Hermione was gone, when the train from which she waved her hand had vanished along the line that skirted the sea, and he saw Gaspare winking away two tears that were about to fall on his brown cheeks, did Maurice begin to realize the largeness of the change that fate had wrought in his Sicilian life. He realized it more sharply when he had climbed the mountain and stood once more upon the terrace before the house of the priest. Hermione's personality was so strong, so aboundingly vital, that its withdrawal made an impression such as that made by an intense silence suddenly succeeding a powerful burst of music. Just at first Maurice felt startled, almost puzzled like a child, inclined to knit his brows and stare with wide eyes and wonder what could be going to happen to him in a world that was altered. Now he was conscious of being far away from the land where he had been born and brought up, conscious of it as he had not been before, even on his first day in Sicily. He did not feel an alien. He had no sensation of exile. But he felt, as he had not felt when with Hermione, the glory of this world of sea and mountains, of olive-trees and vineyards, the strangeness of its great welcome to him, the magic of his readiness to give himself to it.

He had been like a dancing faun in the sunshine and the moonlight of Sicily. Now, for a moment, he stood still, very still, and watched and listened, and was grave, and was aware of himself, the figure in the foreground of a picture that was marvellous.

The enthusiasm of Hermione for Sicily, the flood of understanding of it, and feeling for it that she had poured out in the past days of spring, instead of teaching Maurice to see and to feel, seemed to have kept him back from the comprehension to which they had been meant to lead him. With Hermione, the watcher, he had been but as a Sicilian, another Gaspare in a different rank of life. Without Hermione he was Gaspare and something more. It was as if he still danced in the tarantella, but had now for the moment the power to stand and watch his performance and see that it was wonderful.

This was just at first, in the silence that followed the music.

He gazed at Etna, and thought: "How extraordinary that I'm living up here on a mountain and looking at the smoke from Etna, and that there's no English-speaking person here but me!" He looked at Gaspare and at Lucrezia, and thought: "What a queer trio of companions we are! How strange and picturesque those two would look in England, how different they are from the English, and yet how at home with them I feel! By Jove, it's wonderful!" And then he was thrilled by a sense of romance, of adventure, that had never been his when his English wife was there beside him, calling his mind to walk with hers, his heart to beat with hers, calling with the great sincerity of a very perfect love.

"The poor signora!" said Gaspare. "I saw her beginning to cry when the train went away. She loves my country and cannot bear to leave it. She ought to live here always, as I do."

"Courage, Gaspare!" said Maurice, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "She'll come back very soon."

Gaspare lifted his hand to his eyes, then drew out a red-and-yellow handkerchief with "Caro mio" embroidered on it and frankly wiped them.

"The poor signora!" he repeated. "She did not like to leave us."

"Let's think of her return," said Maurice.

He turned away suddenly from the terrace and went into the house.

When he was there, looking at the pictures and books, at the open piano with some music on it, at a piece of embroidery with a needle stuck through the half-finished petal of a flower, he began to feel deserted. The day was before him. What was he going to do? What was there for him to do? For a moment he felt what he would have called "stranded." He was immensely accustomed to Hermione, and her splendid vitality of mind and body filled up the interstices of a day with such ease that one did not notice that interstices existed, or think they could exist. Her physical health and her ardent mind worked hand-in-hand to create around her an atmosphere into which boredom could not come, yet from which bustle was excluded. Maurice felt the silence within the house to be rather dreary than peaceful. He touched the piano, endeavoring to play with one finger the tune of "O sole mio!" He took up two or three books, pulled the needle out of Hermione's embroidery, then stuck it in again. The feeling of loss began to grow upon him. Oddly enough, he thought, he had not felt it very strongly at the station when the train ran out. Nor had it been with him upon the terrace. There he had been rather conscious of change than of loss—of change that was not without excitement. But now—He began to think of the days ahead of him with a faint apprehension.

"But I'll live out-of-doors," he said to himself. "It's only in the house that I feel bad like this. I'll live out-of-doors and take lots of exercise, and I shall be all right."

He had again taken up a book, almost without knowing it, and now, holding it in his hand, he went to the head of the steps leading to the terrace and looked out. Gaspare was sitting by the wall with a very dismal face. He stared silently at his master for a minute. Then he said:

"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa. It would have been better."

"It was impossible, Gaspare," Maurice said, rather hastily. "She is going to a poor signore who is ill."

"I know."

The boy paused for a moment. Then he said:

"Is the signore her brother?"

"Her brother! No."

"Is he a relation?"

"No."

"Is he very old?"

"Certainly not."

Gaspare repeated:

"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa."

This time he spoke with a certain doggedness. Maurice, he scarcely knew why, felt slightly uncomfortable and longed to create a diversion. He looked at the book he was holding in his hand and saw that it was The Thousand and One Nights, in Italian. He wanted to do something definite, to distract his thoughts—more than ever now after his conversation with Gaspare. An idea occurred to him.

"Come under the oak-trees, Gaspare," he said, "and I'll read to you. It will be a lesson in accent. You shall be my professore."

"Si, signore."

The response was listless, and Gaspare followed his master with listless footsteps down the little path that led to the grove of oak-trees that grew among giant rocks, on which the lizards were basking.

"There are stories of Africa in this book," said Maurice, opening it.

Gaspare looked more alert.

"Of where the signora will be?"

"Chi lo sa?"

He lay down on the warm ground, set his back against a rock, opened the book at hazard, and began to read slowly and carefully, while Gaspare, stretched on the grass, listened, with his chin in the palm of his hand. The story was of the fisherman and the Genie who was confined in a casket, and soon Gaspare was entirely absorbed by it. He kept his enormous brown eyes fixed upon Maurice's face, and moved his lips, silently forming, after him, the words of the tale. When it was finished he said:

"I should not like to be kept shut up like that, signore. If I could not be free I would kill myself. I will always be free."

He stretched himself on the warm ground like a young animal, then added:

"I shall not take a wife—ever."

Maurice shut the book and stretched himself, too, then moved away from the rock, and lay at full length with his hands clasped behind his head and his eyes, nearly shut, fixed upon the glimmer of the sea.

"Why not, Gasparino?"

"Because if one has a wife one is not free."

"Hm!"

"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano when he was shut up in the box."

"And I?" Maurice said, suddenly sitting up. "What about me?"

For the first time it seemed to occur to Gaspare that he was speaking to a married man. He sat up, too.

"Oh, but you—you are a signore and rich. It is different. I am poor. I shall have many loves, first one and then another, but I shall never take a wife. My father wishes me to when I have finished the military service, but"—and he laughed at his own ingenious comparison—"I am like the Mago Africano when he was let out of the casket. I am free, and I will never let myself be stoppered-up as he did. Per Dio!"

Suddenly Maurice frowned.

"It isn't like—" he began.

Then he stopped. The lines in his forehead disappeared, and he laughed.

"I am pretty free here, too," he said. "At least, I feel so."

The dreariness that had come upon him inside the cottage had disappeared now that he was in the open air. As he looked down over the sloping mountain flank—dotted with trees near him, but farther away bare and sunbaked—to the sea with its magic coast-line, that seemed to promise enchantments to wilful travellers passing by upon the purple waters, as he turned his eyes to the distant plain with its lemon groves, its winding river, its little vague towns of narrow houses from which thin trails of smoke went up, and let them journey on to the great, smoking mountain lifting its snows into the blue, and its grave, not insolent, panache, he felt an immense sense of happy-go-lucky freedom with the empty days before him. His intellect was loose like a colt on a prairie. There was no one near to catch it, to lead it to any special object, to harness it and drive it onward in any fixed direction. He need no longer feel respect for a cleverness greater than his own, or try to understand subtleties of thought and sensation that were really outside of his capacities. He did not say this to himself, but whence sprang this new and dancing feeling of emancipation that was coming upon him? Why did he remember the story he had just been reading, and think of himself for a moment as a Genie emerging cloudily into the light of day from a narrow prison which had been sunk beneath the sea? Why? For, till now, he had never had any consciousness of imprisonment. One only becomes conscious of some things when one is freed from them. Maurice's happy efforts to walk on the heights with the enthusiasms of Hermione had surely never tired him, but rather braced him. Yet, left alone with peasants, with Lucrezia and Gaspare, there was something in him, some part of his nature, which began to frolic like a child let out of school. He felt more utterly at his ease than he had ever felt before. With these peasants he could let his mind be perfectly lazy. To them he seemed instructed, almost a god of knowledge.

Suddenly Maurice laughed, showing his white teeth. He stretched up his arms to the blue heaven and the sun that sent its rays filtering down to him through the leaves of the oak-trees, and he laughed again gently.

"What is it, signore?"

"It is good to live, Gaspare. It is good to be young out here on the mountain-side, and to send learning and problems and questions of conscience to the devil. After all, real life is simple enough if only you'll let it be. I believe the complications of life, half of them, and its miseries too, more than half of them, are the inventions of the brains of the men and women we call clever. They can't let anything alone. They bother about themselves and everybody else. By Jove, if you knew how they talk about life in London! They'd make you think it was the most complicated, rotten, intriguing business imaginable; all misunderstandings and cross-purposes, and the Lord knows what. But it isn't. It's jolly simple, or it can be. Here we are, you and I, and we aren't at loggerheads, and we've got enough to eat and a pair of boots apiece, and the sun, and the sea, and old Etna behaving nicely—and what more do we want?"

"Signore—"

"Well?"

"I don't understand English."

"Mamma mia!" Delarey roared with laughter. "And I've been talking English. Well, Gaspare, I can't say it in Sicilian—can I? Let's see."

He thought a minute. Then he said:

"It's something like this. Life is simple and splendid if you let it alone. But if you worry it—well, then, like a dog, it bites you."

He imitated a dog biting. Gaspare nodded seriously.

"Mi piace la vita," he remarked, calmly.

"E anche mi piace a me," said Maurice. "Now I'll give you a lesson in English, and when the signora comes back you can talk to her."

"Si, signore."

The afternoon had gone in a flash. Evening came while they were still under the oak-trees, and the voice of Lucrezia was heard calling from the terrace, with the peculiar baaing intonation that is characteristic of southern women of the lower classes.

Gaspare baaed ironically in reply.

"It isn't dinner-time already?" said Maurice, getting up reluctantly.

"Yes, meester sir, eef you pleesi," said Gaspare, with conscious pride. "We go way."

"Bravo. Well, I'm getting hungry."

As Maurice sat alone at dinner on the terrace, while Gaspare and Lucrezia ate and chattered in the kitchen, he saw presently far down below the shining of the light in the house of the sirens. It came out when the stars came out, this tiny star of the sea. He felt a little lonely as he sat there eating all by himself, and when the light was kindled near the water, that lay like a dream waiting to be sweetly disturbed by the moon, he was pleased as by the greeting of a friend. The light was company. He watched it while he ate. It was a friendly light, more friendly than the light of the stars to him. For he connected it with earthly things—things a man could understand. He imagined Maddalena in the cottage where he had slept preparing the supper for Salvatore, who was presently going off to sea to spear fish, or net them, or take them with lines for the market on the morrow. There was bread and cheese on the table, and the good red wine that could harm nobody, wine that had all the laughter of the sun-rays in it. And the cottage door was open to the sea. The breeze came in and made the little lamp that burned beneath the Madonna flicker. He saw the big, white bed, and the faces of the saints, of the actresses, of the smiling babies that had watched him while he slept. And he saw the face of his peasant hostess, the face he had kissed in the dawn, ere he ran down among the olive-trees to plunge into the sea. He saw the eyes that were like black jewels, the little feathers of gold in the hair about her brow. She was a pretty, simple girl. He liked the look of curiosity in her eyes. To her he was something touched with wonder, a man from a far-off land. Yet she was at ease with him and he with her. That drop of Sicilian blood in his veins was worth something to him in this isle of the south. It made him one with so much, with the sunburned sons of the hills and of the sea-shore, with the sunburned daughters of the soil. It made him one with them—or more—one of them. He had had a kiss from Sicily now—a kiss in the dawn by the sea, from lips fresh with the sea wind and warm with the life that is young. And what had it meant to him? He had taken it carelessly with a laugh. He had washed it from his lips in the sea. Now he remembered it, and, in thought, he took the kiss again, but more slowly, more seriously. And he took it at evening, at the coming of night, instead of at dawn, at the coming of day—his kiss from Sicily.

He took it at evening.

He had finished dinner now, and he pushed back his chair and drew a cigar from his pocket. Then he struck a match. As he was putting it to the cigar he looked again towards the sea and saw the light.

"Damn!"

"Signore!"

Gaspare came running.

"I didn't call, Gaspare, I only said 'Mamma mia!' because I burned my fingers."

He struck another match and lit the cigar.

"Signore—" Gaspare began, and stopped.

"Yes? What is it?"

"Signore, I—Lucrezia, you know, has relatives at Castel Vecchio."

Castel Vecchio was the nearest village, perched on the hill-top opposite, twenty minutes' walk from the cottage.

"Ebbene?"

"Ebbene, signorino, to-night there is a festa in their house. It is the festa of Pancrazio, her cousin. Sebastiano will be there to play, and they will dance, and—"

"Lucrezia wants to go?"

"Si, signore, but she is afraid to ask."

"Afraid! Of course she can go, she must go. Tell her. But at night can she come back alone?"

"Signore, I am invited, but I said—I did not like the first evening that the padrona is away—if you would come they would take it as a great honor."

"Go, Gaspare, take Lucrezia, and bring her back safely."

"And you, signore?"

"I would come, too, but I think a stranger would spoil the festa."

"Oh no, signore, on the contrary—"

"I know—you think I shall be sad alone."

"Si, signore."

"You are good to think of your padrone, but I shall be quite content. You go with Lucrezia and come back as late as you like. Tell Lucrezia! Off with you!"

Gaspare hesitated no longer. In a few minutes he had put on his best clothes and a soft hat, and stuck a large, red rose above each ear. He came to say good-bye with Lucrezia on his arm. Her head was wrapped in a brilliant yellow-and-white shawl with saffron-colored fringes. They went off together laughing and skipping down the stony path like two children.

When their footsteps died away Delarey, who had walked to the archway to see them off, returned slowly to the terrace and began to pace up and down, puffing at his cigar. The silence was profound. The rising moon cast its pale beams upon the white walls of the cottage, the white seats of the terrace. There was no wind. The leaves of the oaks and the olive-trees beneath the wall were motionless. Nothing stirred. Above the cottage the moonlight struck on the rocks, showed the nakedness of the mountain-side. A curious sense of solitude, such as he had never known before, took possession of Delarey. It did not make him feel sad at first, but only emancipated, free as he had never yet felt free, like one free in a world that was curiously young, curiously unfettered by any chains of civilization, almost savagely, primitively free. So might an animal feel ranging to and fro in a land where man had not set foot. But he was an animal without its mate in the wonderful breathless night. And the moonlight grew about him as he walked, treading softly he scarce knew why, to and fro, to and fro.

Hermione was nearing the coast now. Soon she would be on board the steamer and on her way across the sea to Africa. She would be on her way to Africa—and to Artois.

Delarey recalled his conversation with Gaspare, when the boy had asked him whether Artois was Hermione's brother, or a relation, or whether he was old. He remembered Gaspare's intonation when he said, almost sternly, "The signora should have taken us with her to Africa." Evidently he was astonished. Why? It must have been because he—Delarey—had let his wife go to visit a man in a distant city alone. Sicilians did not understand certain things. He had realized his own freedom—now he began to realize Hermione's. How quickly she had made up her mind. While he was sleeping she had decided everything. She had even looked out the trains. It had never occurred to her to ask him what to do. And she had not asked him to go with her. Did he wish she had?

A new feeling began to stir within him, unreasonable, absurd. It had come to him with the night and his absolute solitude in the night. It was not anger as yet. It was a faint, dawning sense of injury, but so faint that it did not rouse, but only touched gently, almost furtively, some spirit drowsing within him, like a hand that touches, then withdraws itself, then steals forward to touch again.

He began to walk a little faster up and down, always keeping along the terrace wall.

He was primitive man to-night, and primitive feelings were astir in him. He had not known he possessed them, yet he—the secret soul of him—did not shrink from them in any surprise. To something in him, some part of him, they came as things not unfamiliar.

Suppose he had shown surprise at Hermione's project? Suppose he had asked her not to go? Suppose he had told her not to go? What would she have said? What would she have done? He had never thought of objecting to this journey, but he might have objected. Many a man would have objected. This was their honeymoon—hers and his. To many it would seem strange that a wife should leave her husband during their honeymoon, to travel across the sea to another man, a friend, even if he were ill, perhaps dying. He did not doubt Hermione. No one who knew her as he did could doubt her, yet nevertheless, now that he was quite companionless in the night, he felt deserted, he felt as if every one else were linked with life, while he stood entirely alone. Hermione was travelling to her friend. Lucrezia and Gaspare had gone to their festa, to dance, to sing, to joke, to make merry, to make love—who knew? Down in the village the people were gossiping at one another's doors, were lounging together in the piazza, were playing cards in the caffès, were singing and striking the guitars under the pepper-trees bathed in the rays of the moon. And he—what was there for him in this night that woke up desires for joy, for the sweetness of the life that sings in the passionate aisles of the south?

He stood still by the wall. Two or three lights twinkled on the height where Castel Vecchio perched clinging to its rock above the sea. Sebastiano was there setting his lips to the ceramella, and shooting bold glances of tyrannical love at Lucrezia out of his audacious eyes. The peasants, dressed in their gala clothes, were forming in a circle for the country dance. The master of the ceremonies was shouting out his commands in bastard French: "Tournez!" "À votre place!" "Prenez la donne!" "Dansez toutes!" Eyes were sparkling, cheeks were flushing, lips were parting as gay activity created warmth in bodies and hearts. Then would come the tarantella, with Gaspare spinning like a top and tripping like a Folly in a veritable madness of movement. And as the night wore on the dance would become wilder, the laughter louder, the fire of jokes more fierce. Healths would be drunk with clinking glasses, brindisi shouted, tricks played. Cards would be got out. There would be a group intent on "Scopa," another calling "Mi staio!" "Carta da vente!" throwing down the soldi and picking them up greedily in "Sette e mezzo." Stories would be told, bets given and taken. The smoke would curl up from the long, black cigars the Sicilians love. Dark-browed men and women, wild-haired boys, and girls in gay shawls, with great rings swinging from their ears, would give themselves up as only southerners can to the joy of the passing moment, forgetting poverty, hardship, and toil, grinding taxation, all the cares and the sorrows that encompass the peasant's life, forgetting the flight of the hours, forgetting everything in the passion of the festa, the dedication of all their powers to the laughing worship of fun.

Yes, the passing hour would be forgotten. That was certain. It would be dawn ere Lucrezia and Gaspare returned.

Delarey's cigar was burned to a stump. He took it from his lips and threw it with all his force over the wall towards the sea. Then he put his hands on the wall and leaned over it, fixing his eyes on the sea. The sense of injury grew in him. He resented the joys of others in this beautiful night, and he felt as if all the world were at a festa, as if all the world were doing wonderful things in the wonderful night, while he was left solitary to eat out his heart beneath the moon. He did not reason against his feelings and tell himself they were absurd. The dancing faun does not reason in his moments of ennui. He rebels. Delarey rebelled.

He had been invited to the festa and he had refused to go—almost eagerly he had refused. Why? There had been something secret in his mind which had prompted him. He had said—and even to himself—that he did not go lest his presence might bring a disturbing element into the peasants' gayety. But was that his reason?

Leaning over the wall he looked down upon the sea. The star that seemed caught in the sea smiled at him, summoned him. Its gold was like the gold, the little feathers of gold in the dark hair of a Sicilian girl singing the song of the May beside the sea:

"Maju torna, maju veni

Cu li belli soi ciureri—"

He tried to hum the tune, but it had left his memory. He longed to hear it once more under the olive-trees of the Sirens' Isle.

Again his thought went to Hermione. Very soon she would be out there, far out on the silver of the sea. Had she wanted him to go with her? He knew that she had. Yet she had not asked him to go, had not hinted at his going. Even she had refused to let him go. And he had not pressed it. Something had held him back from insisting, something secret, and something secret had kept her from accepting his suggestion. She was going to her greatest friend, to the man she had known intimately, long before she had known him—Delarey—and he was left alone. In England he had never had a passing moment of jealousy of Artois; but now, to-night, mingled with his creeping resentment against the joys of the peasants, of those not far from him under the moon of Sicily, there was a sensation of jealousy which came from the knowledge that his wife was travelling to her friend. That friend might be dead, or she might nurse him back to life. Delarey thought of her by his bedside, ministering to him, performing the intimate offices of the attendant on a sick man, raising him up on his pillows, putting a cool hand on his burning forehead, sitting by him at night in the silence of a shadowy room, and quite alone.

He thought of all this, and the Sicilian that was in him grew suddenly hot with a burning sense of anger, a burning desire for action, preventive or revengeful. It was quite unreasonable, as unreasonable as the vagrant impulse of a child, but it was strong as the full-grown determination of a man. Hermione had belonged to him. She was his. And the old Sicilian blood in him protested against that which would be if Artois were still alive when she reached Africa.

But it was too late now. He could do nothing. He could only look at the shining sea on which the ship would bear her that very night.

His inaction and solitude began to torture him. If he went in he knew he could not sleep. The mere thought of the festa would prevent him from sleeping. Again he looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio. He saw only one now, and imagined it set in the window of Pancrazio's house. He even fancied that down the mountain-side and across the ravine there floated to him the faint wail of the ceramella playing a dance measure.

Suddenly he knew that he could not remain all night alone on the mountain-side.

He went quickly into the cottage, got his soft hat, then went from room to room, closing the windows and barring the wooden shutters. When he had come out again upon the steps and locked the cottage door he stood for a moment hesitating with the large door-key in his hand. He said to himself that he was going to the festa at Castel Vecchio. Of course he was going there, to dance the country dances and join in the songs of Sicily. He slipped the key into his pocket and went down the steps to the terrace. But there he hesitated again. He took the key out of his pocket, looked at it as it lay in his hand, then put it down on the sill of the sitting-room window.

"If any one comes, there isn't very much to steal," he thought. "And, perhaps—" Again he looked at the lights of Castel Vecchio, then down towards the sea. The star of the sea shone steadily and seemed to summon him. He left the key on the window-sill, with a quick gesture pulled his hat-brim down farther over his eyes, hastened along the terrace, and, turning to the left beyond the archway, took the path that led through the olive-trees towards Isola Bella and the sea.

Through the wonderful silence of the night among the hills there came now a voice that was thrilling to his ears—the voice of youth by the sea calling to the youth that was in him.

Hermione was travelling to her friend. Must he remain quite friendless?

All the way down to the sea he heard the calling of the voice.

CHAPTER X

As dawn was breaking, Lucrezia and Gaspare climbed slowly up the mountain-side towards the cottage. Lucrezia's eyes were red, for she had just bidden good-bye to Sebastiano, who was sailing that day for the Lipari Isles, and she did not know how soon he would be back. Sebastiano had not cried. He loved change, and was radiant at the prospect of his voyage. But Lucrezia's heart was torn. She knew Sebastiano, knew his wild and adventurous spirit, his reckless passion for life, and the gifts it scatters at the feet of lusty youth. There were maidens in the Lipari Isles. They might be beautiful. She had scarcely been jealous of Sebastiano before her betrothal to him, for then she had had no rights over him, and she was filled with the spirit of humbleness that still dwells in the women of Sicily, the spirit that whispers "Man may do what he will." But now something had arisen within her to do battle with that spirit. She wanted Sebastiano for her very own, and the thought of his freedom when away tormented her.

Gaspare comforted her in perfunctory fashion.

"What does it matter?" he said. "When you are married you can keep him in the house, and make him spin the flax for you."

And he laughed aloud. But when they drew near to the cottage he said:

"Zitta, Lucrezia! The padrone is asleep. We must steal in softly and not waken him."

On tiptoe they crept along the terrace.

"He will have left the door open for us," whispered Gaspare. "He has the revolver beside him and will not have been afraid."

But when they stood before the steps the door was shut. Gaspare tried it gently. It was locked.

"Phew!" he whistled. "We cannot get in, for we cannot wake him."

Lucrezia shivered. Sorrow had made her feel cold.

"Mamma mia!" she began.

But Gaspare's sharp eyes had spied the key lying on the window-sill. He darted to it and picked it up. Then he stared at the locked door and at Lucrezia.

"But where is the padrone?" he said. "Oh, I know! He locked the door on the inside and then put the key out of the window. But why is the bedroom window shut? He always sleeps with it open!"

Quickly he thrust the key into the lock, opened the door, and entered the dark sitting-room. Holding up a warning hand to keep Lucrezia quiet, he tiptoed to the bedroom door, opened it without noise, and disappeared, leaving Lucrezia outside. After a minute or two he came back.

"It is all right. He is sleeping. Go to bed."

Lucrezia turned to go.

"And never mind getting up early to make the padrone's coffee," Gaspare added. "I will do it. I am not sleepy. I shall take the gun and go out after the birds."

Lucrezia looked surprised. Gaspare was not in the habit of relieving her of her duties. On the contrary, he was a strict taskmaster. But she was tired and preoccupied. So she made no remark and went off to her room behind the house, walking heavily and untying the handkerchief that was round her head.

When she had gone, Gaspare stood by the table, thinking deeply. He had lied to Lucrezia. The padrone was not asleep. His bed had not been slept in. Where had he gone? Where was he now?

The Sicilian servant, if he cares for his padrone, feels as if he had a proprietor's interest in him. He belongs to his padrone and his padrone belongs to him. He will allow nobody to interfere with his possession. He is intensely jealous of any one who seeks to disturb the intimacy between his padrone and himself, or to enter into his padrone's life without frankly letting him know it and the reason for it. The departure of Hermione had given an additional impetus to Gaspare's always lively sense of proprietorship in Maurice. He felt as if he had been left in charge of his padrone, and had an almost sacred responsibility to deliver him up to Hermione happy and safe when she returned. This absence, therefore, startled and perturbed him—more—made him feel guilty of a lapse from his duty. Perhaps he should not have gone to the festa. True, he had asked the padrone to accompany him. But still—

He went out onto the terrace and looked around him. The dawn was faint and pale. Wreaths of mist, like smoke trails, hung below him, obscuring the sea. The ghostly cone of Etna loomed into the sky, extricating itself from swaddling bands of clouds which shrouded its lower flanks. The air was chilly upon this height, and the aspect of things was gray and desolate, without temptation, without enchantment, to lure men out from their dwellings.

What could have kept the padrone from his sleep till this hour?

Gaspare shivered a little as he stared over the wall. He was thinking—thinking furiously. Although scarcely educated at all, he was exceedingly sharp-witted, and could read character almost as swiftly and surely as an Arab. At this moment he was busily recalling the book he had been reading for many weeks in Sicily, the book of his padrone's character, written out for him in words, in glances, in gestures, in likes and dislikes, most clearly in actions. Mentally he turned the leaves until he came to the night of the fishing, to the waning of the night, to the journey to the caves, to the dawn when he woke upon the sand and found that the padrone was not beside him. His brown hand tightened on the stick he held, his brown eyes stared with the glittering acuteness of a great bird's at the cloud trails hiding the sea below him—hiding the sea, and all that lay beside the sea.

There was no one on the terrace. But there was a figure for a moment on the mountain-side, leaping downward. The ravine took it and hid it in a dark embrace. Gaspare had found what he sought, a clew to guide him. His hesitation was gone. In his uneducated and intuitive mind there was no longer any room for a doubt. He knew that his padrone was where he had been in that other dawn, when he slipped away from the cave where his companions were sleeping.

Surefooted as a goat, and incited to abnormal activity by a driving spirit within him that throbbed with closely mingled curiosity, jealousy, and anger, Gaspare made short work of the path in the ravine. In a few minutes he came out on to the road by Isola Bella. On the shore was a group of fishermen, all of them friends of his, getting ready their fishing-tackle, and hauling down the boats to the gray sea for the morning's work. Some of them hailed him, but he took no notice, only pulled his soft hat down sideways over his cheek, and hurried on in the direction of Messina, keeping to the left side of the road and away from the shore, till he gained the summit of the hill from which the Caffè Berardi and the caves were visible. There he stopped for a moment and looked down. He saw no one upon the shore, but at some distance upon the sea there was a black dot, a fishing-boat. It was stationary. Gaspare knew that its occupant must be hauling in his net.

"Salvatore is out then!" he muttered to himself, as he turned aside from the road onto the promontory, which was connected by the black wall of rock with the land where stood the house of the sirens. This wall, forbidding though it was, and descending sheer into the deep sea on either side, had no terrors for him. He dropped down to it with a sort of skilful carelessness, then squatted on a stone, and quickly unlaced his mountain boots, pulled his stockings off, slung them with the boots round his neck, and stood up on his bare feet. Then, balancing himself with his out-stretched arms, he stepped boldly upon the wall. It was very narrow. The sea surged through it. There was not space on it to walk straight-footed, even with only one foot at a time upon the rock. Gaspare was obliged to plant his feet sideways, the toes and heels pointing to the sea on either hand. But the length of the wall was short, and he went across it almost as quickly as if he had been walking upon the road. Heights and depths had no terrors for him in his confident youth. And he had been bred up among the rocks, and was a familiar friend of the sea. A drop into it would have only meant a morning bath. Having gained the farther side, he put on his stockings and boots, grasped his stick, and began to climb upward through the thickly growing trees towards the house of the sirens. His instinct had told him upon the terrace that the padrone was there. Uneducated people have often marvellously retentive memories for the things of every-day life. Gaspare remembered the padrone's question about the little light beside the sea, his answer to it, the way in which the padrone had looked towards the trees when, in the dawn, they stood upon the summit of the hill and he pointed out the caves where they were going to sleep. He remembered, too, from what direction the padrone came towards the caffè when the sun was up—and he knew.

As he drew near to the cottage he walked carefully, though still swiftly, but when he reached it he paused, bent forward his head, and listened. He was in the tangle of coarse grass that grew right up to the north wall of the cottage, and close to the angle which hid from him the sea-side and the cottage door. At first he heard nothing except the faint murmur of the sea upon the rocks. His stillness now was as complete as had been his previous activity, and in the one he was as assured as in the other. Some five minutes passed. Again and again, with a measured monotony, came to him the regular lisp of the waves. The grass rustled against his legs as the little wind of morning pushed its way through it gently, and a bird chirped above his head in the olive-trees and was answered by another bird. And just then, as if in reply to the voices of the birds, he heard the sound of human voices. They were distant and faint almost as the lisp of the sea, and were surely coming towards him from the sea.

When Gaspare realized that the speakers were not in the cottage he crept round the angle of the wall, slipped across the open space that fronted the cottage door, and, gaining the trees, stood still in almost exactly the place where Maurice had stood when he watched Maddalena in the dawn.

The voices sounded again and nearer. There was a little laugh in a girl's voice, then the dry twang of the plucked strings of a guitar, then silence. After a minute the guitar strings twanged again, and a girl's voice began to sing a peasant song, "Zampagnaro."

At the end of the verse there was an imitation of the ceramella by the voice, humming, or rather whining, bouche fermée. As it ceased a man's voice said:

"Ancora! Ancora!"

The girl's voice began the imitation again, and the man's voice joined in grotesquely, exaggerating the imitation farcically and closing it with a boyish shout.

In response, standing under the trees, Gaspare shouted. He had meant to keep silence; but the twang of the guitar, with its suggestion of a festa, the singing voices, the youthful laughter, and the final exclamation ringing out in the dawn, overcame the angry and suspicious spirit that had hitherto dominated him. The boy's imp of fun was up and dancing within him. He could not drive it out or lay it to rest.

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

His voice died away, and was answered by a silence that seemed like a startled thing holding its breath.

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

He called again, lustily, leaped out from the trees, and went running across the open space to the edge of the plateau by the sea. A tiny path wound steeply down from here to the rocks below, and on it, just under the concealing crest of the land, stood the padrone with Maddalena. Their hands were linked together, as if they had caught at each other sharply for sympathy or help. Their faces were tense and their lips parted. But as they saw Gaspare's light figure leaping over the hill edge, his dancing eyes fixed shrewdly, with a sort of boyish scolding, upon them, their hands fell apart, their faces relaxed.

"Gasparino!" said Maurice. "It was you who called!"

"Si, signore."

He came up to them. Maddalena's oval face had flushed, and she dropped the full lids over her black eyes as she said:

"Buon giorno, Gaspare."

"Buon giorno, Donna Maddalena."

Then they stood there for a moment in silence. Maurice was the first to speak again.

"But why did you come here?" he said. "How did you know?"

Already the sparkle of merriment had dropped out of Gaspare's face as the feeling of jealousy, of not having been completely trusted, returned to his mind.

"Did not the signore wish me to know?" he said, almost gruffly, with a sort of sullen violence. "I am sorry."

Maurice touched the back of his hand, giving it a gentle, half-humorous slap.

"Don't be an ass, Gaspare. But how could you guess where I had gone?"

"Where did you go before, signore, when you could not sleep?"

At this thrust Maurice imitated Maddalena and reddened slightly. It seemed to him as if he had been living under glass while he had fancied himself enclosed in rock that was impenetrable by human eyes. He tried to laugh away his slight confusion.

"Gaspare, you are the most birbante boy in Sicily!" he said. "You are like a Mago Africano."

"Signorino, you should trust me," returned the boy, sullenly.

His own words seemed to move him, as if their sound revealed to him the whole of the injury that had been inflicted upon his amour propre, and suddenly angry tears started into his eyes.

"I thought I was a servant of confidence" (un servitore di confidenza), he added, bitterly.

Maurice was amazed at the depth of feeling thus abruptly shown to him. This was the first time he had been permitted to look for a moment deep down into that strange volcano, a young and passionate Sicilian heart. As he looked, swift and short as was his glance, his amazement died away. Narcissus saw himself in the stream. Maurice saw, or believed he saw, his heart's image, trembling perhaps and indistinct, far down in the passion of Gaspare. So could he have been with a padrone had fate made his situation in life a different one. So could he have felt had something been concealed from him.

Maurice said nothing in reply. Maddalena was there. They walked in silence to the cottage door, and there, rather like a detected school-boy, he bade her good-bye, and set out through the trees with Gaspare.

"That's not the way, is it?" Maurice said, presently, as the boy turned to the left.

"How did you come, signore?"

"I!"

He hesitated. Then he saw the uselessness of striving to keep up a master's pose with this servant of the sea and of the hills.

"I came by water," he said, smiling. "I swam, Gasparino."

The boy answered the smile, and suddenly the tension between them was broken, and they were at their ease again.

"I will show you another way, signore, if you are not afraid."

Maurice laughed out gayly.

"The way of the rocks?" he said.

"Si, signore. But you must go barefooted and be as nimble as a goat."

"Do you doubt me, Gasparino?"

He looked at the boy hard, with a deliberately quizzing kindness, that was gay but asked forgiveness, too, and surely promised amendment.

"I have never doubted my padrone."

They said nothing more till they were at the wall of rock. Then Gaspare seemed struck by hesitation.

"Perhaps—" he began. "You are not accustomed to the rocks, signore, and—"

"Silenzio!" cried Maurice, bending down and pulling off his boots and stockings.

"Do like this, signore!"

Gaspare slung his boots and stockings round his neck. Maurice imitated him.

"And now give me your hand—so—without pulling."

"But you hadn't—"

"Give me your hand, signore!"

It was an order. Maurice obeyed it, feeling that in these matters Gaspare had the right to command.

"Walk as I do, signore, and keep step with me."

"Bene!"

"And look before you. Don't look down at the sea."

"Va bene."

A moment, and they were across. Maurice blew out his breath.

"By Jove!" he said, in English.

He sat down on the grass, put his hand on his knees, and looked back at the rock and at the precipices.

"I'm glad I can do that!" he said.

Something within him was revelling, was dancing a tarantella as the sun came up, lifting its blood-red rim above the sea-line in the east. He looked over the trees.

"Maddalena saw us!" he cried.

He had caught sight of her among the olive-trees watching them, with her two hands held flat against her breast.

"Addio, Maddalena!"

The girl started, waved her hand, drew back, and disappeared.

"I'm glad she saw us."

Gaspare laughed, but said nothing. They put on their boots and stockings, and started briskly off towards Monte Amato. When they had crossed the road, and gained the winding path that led eventually into the ravine, Maurice said:

"Well, Gaspare?"

"Well, signorino?"

"Have you forgiven me?"

"It is not for a servant to forgive his padrone, signorino," said the boy, but rather proudly.

Maurice feared that his sense of injury was returning, and continued, hastily:

"It was like this, Gaspare. When you and Lucrezia had gone I felt so dull all alone, and I thought, 'every one is singing and dancing and laughing except me.'"

"But I asked you to accompany us, signorino," Gaspare exclaimed, reproachfully.

"Yes, I know, but—"

"But you thought we did not want you. Well, then, you do not know us!"

"Now, Gaspare, don't be angry again. Remember that the padrona has gone away and that I depend on you for everything."

At the last words Gaspare's face, which had been lowering, brightened up a little. But he was not yet entirely appeased.

"You have Maddalena," he said.

"She is only a girl."

"Oh, girls are very nice."

"Don't be ridiculous, Gaspare. I hardly know Maddalena."

Gaspare laughed; not rudely, but as a boy laughs who is sure he knows the world from the outer shell to inner kernel.

"Oh, signore, why did you go down to the sea instead of coming to the festa?"

Maurice did not answer at once. He was asking himself Gaspare's question. Why had he gone to the Sirens' Isle? Gaspare continued:

"May I say what I think, signore? You know I am Sicilian, and I know the Sicilians."

"What is it?"

"Strangers should be careful what they do in my country."

"Madonna! You call me a stranger?"

It was Maurice's turn to be angry. He spoke with sudden heat. The idea that he was a stranger—a straniero—in Sicily seemed to him ridiculous—almost offensive.

"Well, signore, you have only been here a little while. I was born here and have never been anywhere else."

"It is true. Go on then."

"The men of Sicily are not like the English or the Germans. They are jealous of their women. I have been told that in your country, on festa days, if a man likes a girl and she likes him he can take her for a walk. Is it true?"

"Quite true."

"He cannot walk with her here. He cannot even walk with her down the street of Marechiaro alone. It would be a shame."

"But there is no harm in it."

"Who knows? It is not our custom. We walk with our friends and the girls walk with their friends. If Salvatore, the father of Maddalena, knew—"

He did not finish his sentence, but, with sudden and startling violence, made the gesture of drawing out a knife and thrusting it upward into the body of an adversary. Maurice stopped on the path. He felt as if he had seen a murder.

"Ecco!" said Gaspare, calmly, dropping his hand, and staring into Maurice's face with his enormous eyes, which never fell before the gaze of another.

"But—but—I mean no harm to Maddalena."

"It does not matter."

"But she did not tell me. She is ready to talk with me."

"She is a silly girl. She is flattered to see a stranger. She does not think. Girls never think."

He spoke with utter contempt:

"Have you seen Salvatore, signore?"

"No—yes."

"You have seen him?"

"Not to speak to. When I came down the cottage was shut up. I waited—"

"You hid, signore?"

Maurice's face flushed. An angry word rose to his lips, but he checked it and laughed, remembering that he had to deal with a boy, and that Gaspare was devoted to him.

"Well, I waited among the trees—birbante!"

"And you saw Salvatore?"

"He came out and went down to the fishing."

"Salvatore is a terrible man. He used to beat his wife Teresa."

"P'f! Would you have me be afraid of him?"

Maurice's blood was up. Even his sense of romance was excited. He felt that he was in the coils of an adventure, and his heart leaped, but not with fear.

"Fear is not for men. But the padrona has left you with me because she trusts me and because I know Sicily."

It seemed to Maurice that he was with an inflexible chaperon, against whose dominion it would be difficult, if not useless, to struggle. They were walking on again, and had come into the ravine. Water was slipping down among the rocks, between the twisted trunks of the olive-trees. Its soft sound, and the cool dimness in this secret place, made Maurice suddenly realize that he had passed the night without sleep, and that he would be glad to rest. It was not the moment for combat, and it was not unpleasant, after all—so he phrased it in his mind—to be looked after, thought for, educated in the etiquette of the Enchanted Isle by a son of its soil, with its wild passions and its firm repressions linked together in his heart.

"Gasparino," he said, meekly. "I want you to look after me. But don't be unkind to me. I'm older than you, I know, but I feel awfully young here, and I do want to have a little fun without doing any harm to anybody, or getting any harm myself. One thing I promise you, that I'll always trust you and tell you what I'm up to. There! Have you quite forgiven me now?"

Gaspare's face became radiant. He felt that he had done his duty, and that he was now properly respected by one whom he looked up to and of whom he was not merely the servant, but also the lawful guardian.

They went up to the cottage singing in the morning sunshine.

CHAPTER XI

"Signorino! Signorino!"

Maurice lifted his head lazily from the hands that served it as a pillow, and called out, sleepily:

"Che cosa c'é?"

"Where are you, signorino?"

"Down here under the oak-trees."

He sank back again, and looked up at the section of deep-blue sky that was visible through the leaves. How he loved the blue, and gloried in the first strong heat that girdled Sicily to-day, and whispered to his happy body that summer was near, the true and fearless summer that comes to southern lands. Through all his veins there crept a subtle sense of well-being, as if every drop of his blood were drowsily rejoicing. Three days had passed, had glided by, three radiant nights, warm, still, luxurious. And with each his sense of the south had increased, and with each his consciousness of being nearer to the breast of Sicily. In those days and nights he had not looked into a book or glanced at a paper. What had he done? He scarcely knew. He had lived and felt about him the fingers of the sun touching him like a lover. And he had chattered idly to Gaspare about Sicilian things, always Sicilian things; about the fairs and the festivals, Capo d'Anno and Carnevale, martedì grasso with its Tavulata, the solemn family banquet at which all the relations assemble and eat in company, the feasts of the different saints, the peasant marriages and baptisms, the superstitions—Gaspare did not call them so—that are alive in Sicily, and that will surely live till Sicily is no more; the fear of the evil-eye and of spells, and the best means of warding them off, the "guaj di lu linu," the interpretation of dreams, the power of the Mafia, the legends of the brigands, and the vanished glory of Musolino. Gaspare talked without reserve to his padrone, as to another Sicilian, and Maurice was never weary of listening. All that was of Sicily caught his mind and heart, was full of meaning to him, and of irresistible fascination. He had heard the call of the blood once for all and had once for all responded to it.

But the nights he had loved best. For then he slept under the stars. When ten o'clock struck he and Gaspare carried out one of the white beds onto the terrace, and he slipped into it and lay looking up at the clear sky, and at the dimness of the mountain flank, and at the still silhouettes of the trees, till sleep took him, while Gaspare, rolled up in a rug of many colors, snuggled up on the seat by the wall with his head on a cushion brought for him by the respectful Lucrezia. And they awoke at dawn to see the last star fade above the cone of Etna, and the first spears of the sun thrust up out of the stillness of the sea.

"Signorino, ecco la posta!"

And Gaspare came running down from the terrace, the wide brim of his white linen hat flapping round his sun-browned face.

"I don't want it, Gaspare. I don't want anything."

"But I think there's a letter from the signora!"

"From Africa?"

Maurice sat up and held out his hand.

"Yes, it is from Kairouan. Sit down, Gaspare, and I'll tell you what the padrona says."

Gaspare squatted on his haunches like an Oriental, not touching the ground with his body, and looked eagerly at the letter that had come across the sea. He adored his padrona, and was longing for news of her. Already he had begun to send her picture post-cards, laboriously written over. "Tanti saluti carissima Signora Pertruni, a rividici, e suno il suo servo fidelisimo per sempre—Martucci Gaspare. Adio! Adio! Ciao! Ciao!" What would she say? And what message would she send to him? His eyes sparkled with affectionate expectation.

"Hotel de France, Kairouan.

My Dearest,—I cannot write very much, for all my moments ought to be given up to nursing Emile. Thank God, I arrived in time. Oh, Maurice, when I saw him I can't tell you how thankful I was that I had not hesitated to make the journey, that I had acted at once on my first impulse to come here. And how I blessed God for having given me an unselfish husband who trusted me completely, and who could understand what true friendship between man and woman means, and what one owes to a friend. You might so easily have misunderstood, and you are so blessedly understanding. Thank you, dearest, for seeing that it was right of me to go, and for thinking of nothing but that. I feel so proud of you, and so proud to be your wife. Well, I caught the train at Tunis mercifully, and got here at evening. He is frightfully ill. I hardly recognized him. But his mind is quite clear, though he suffers terribly. He was poisoned by eating some tinned food, and peritonitis has set in. We can't tell yet whether he will live or die. When he saw me come in he gave me such a look of gratitude, although he was writhing with pain, that I couldn't help crying. It made me feel so ashamed of having had any hesitation in my heart about coming away from our home and our happiness. And it was difficult to give it all up, to come out of paradise. That last night I felt as if I simply couldn't leave you, my darling. But I'm glad and thankful I've done it. I have to do everything for him. The doctor's rather an ass, very French and excitable, but he does his best. But I have to see to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices and the ice, and—poor fellow, he does suffer so, but he's awfully brave and determined to live. He says he will live if it's only to prove that I came in time to save him. And yet, when I look at him, I feel as if—but I won't give up hope. The heat here is terrible, and tries him very much now he is so desperately ill, and the flies—but I don't want to bother you with my troubles. They're not very great—only one. Do you guess what that is? I scarcely dare to think of Sicily. Whenever I do I feel such a horrible ache in my heart. It seems to me as if I had not seen your face or touched your hand for centuries, and sometimes—and that's the worst of all—as if I never should again, as if our time together and our love were a beautiful dream, and God would never allow me to dream it again. That's a little morbid, I know, but I think it's always like that with a great happiness, a happiness that is quite complete. It seems almost a miracle to have had it even for a moment, and one can scarcely believe that one will be allowed to have it again. But, please God, we will. We'll sit on the terrace again together, and see the stars come out, and—The doctor's come and I must stop. I'll write again almost directly. Good-night, my dearest. Buon riposo. Do you remember when you first heard that? Somehow, since then I always connect the words with you. I won't send my love, because it's all in Sicily with you. I'll send it instead to Gaspare. Tell him I feel happy that he is with the padrone, because I know how faithful and devoted he is. Tanti saluti a Lucrezia. Oh, Maurice, pray that I may soon be back. You do want me, don't you?

Hermione."

Maurice looked up from the letter and met Gaspare's questioning eyes.

"There's something for you," he said.

And he read in Italian Hermione's message. Gaspare beamed with pride and pleasure.

"And the sick signore?" he asked. "Is he better?"

Maurice explained how things were.

"The signora is longing to come back to us," he said.

"Of course she is," said Gaspare, calmly.

Then suddenly he jumped up.

"Signorino," he said. "I am going to write a letter to the signora. She will like to have a letter from me. She will think she is in Sicily."

"And when you have finished, I will write," said Maurice.

"Si, signore."

And Gaspare ran off up the hill towards the cottage, leaving his master alone.

Maurice began to read the letter again, slowly. It made him feel almost as if he were with Hermione. He seemed to see her as he read, and he smiled. How good she was and true, and how enthusiastic! When he had finished the second reading of the letter he laid it down, and put his hands behind his head again, and looked up at the quivering blue. Then he thought of Artois. He remembered his tall figure, his robust limbs, his handsome, powerful face. It was strange to think that he was desperately ill, perhaps dying. Death—what must that be like? How deep the blue looked, as if there were thousands of miles of it, as if it stretched on and on forever! Artois, perhaps, was dying, but he felt as if he could never die, never even be ill. He stretched his body on the warm ground. The blue seemed to deny the fact of death. He tried to imagine Artois in bed in the heat of Africa, with the flies buzzing round him. Then he looked again at the letter, and reread that part in which Hermione wrote of her duties as sick-nurse.

"I have to see to everything, and be always there to put on the poultices and the ice."

He read those words again and again, and once more he was conscious of a stirring of anger, of revolt, such as he had felt on the night after Hermione's departure when he was alone on the terrace. She was his wife, his woman. What right had she to be tending another man? His imagination began to work quickly now, and he frowned as he looked up at the blue. He forgot all the rest of Hermione's letter, all her love of him and her longing to be back in Sicily with him, and thought only of her friendship for Artois, of her ministrations to Artois. And something within him sickened at the thought of the intimacy between patient and nurse, raged against it, till he felt revengeful. The wild unreasonableness of his feeling did not occur to him now. He hated that his wife should be performing these offices for Artois; he hated that she had chosen to go to him, that she had considered it to be her duty to go.

Had it been only a sense of duty that had called her to Africa?

When he asked himself this question he could not hesitate what answer to give. Even this new jealousy, this jealousy of the Sicilian within him, could not trick him into the belief that Hermione had wanted to leave him.

Yet his feeling of bitterness, of being wronged, persisted and grew.

When, after a very long time, Gaspare came to show him a letter written in large, round hand, he was still hot with the sense of injury. And a new question was beginning to torment him. What must Artois think?

"Aren't you going to write, signorino?" asked Gaspare, when Maurice had read his letter and approved it.

"I?" he said.

He saw an expression of surprise on Gaspare's face.

"Yes, of course. I'll write now. Help me up. I feel so lazy!"

Gaspare seized his hands and pulled, laughing. Maurice stood up and stretched.

"You are more lazy than I, signore," said Gaspare. "Shall I write for you, too?"

"No, no."

He spoke abstractedly.

"Don't you know what to say?"

Maurice looked at him swiftly. The boy had divined the truth. In his present mood it would be difficult for him to write to Hermione. Still, he must do it. He went up to the cottage and sat down at the writing-table with Hermione's letter beside him.

He read it again carefully, then began to write. Now he was faintly aware of the unreason of his previous mood and quite resolved not to express it, but while he was writing of his every-day life in Sicily a vision of the sick-room in Africa came before him again. He saw his wife shut in with Artois, tending him. It was night, warm and dark. The sick man was hot with fever, and Hermione bent over him and laid her cool hand on his forehead.

Abruptly Maurice finished his letter and thrust it into an envelope.

"Here, Gaspare!" he said. "Take the donkey and ride down with these to the post."

"How quick you have been, signore! I believe my letter to the signora is longer than yours."

"Perhaps it is. I don't know. Off with you!"

When Gaspare was gone, Maurice felt restless, almost as he had felt on the night when he had been left alone on the terrace. Then he had been companioned by a sensation of desertion, and had longed to break out into some new life, to take an ally against the secret enemy who was attacking him. He had wanted to have his Emile Artois as Hermione had hers. That was the truth of the matter. And his want had led him down to the sea. And now again he looked towards the sea, and again there was a call from it that summoned him.

He had not seen Maddalena since Gaspare came to seek him in the Sirens' Isle. He had scarcely wanted to see her. The days had glided by in the company of Gaspare, and no moment of them had been heavy or had lagged upon its way.

But now he heard again the call from the sea.

Hermione was with her friend. Why should not he have his? But he did not go down the path to the ravine, for he thought of Gaspare. He had tricked him once, while he slept in the cave, and once Gaspare had tracked him to the sirens' house. They had spoken of the matter of Maddalena. He knew Gaspare. If he went off now to see Maddalena the boy would think that the sending him to the post was a pretext, that he had been deliberately got out of the way. Such a crime could never be forgiven. Maurice knew enough about the Sicilian character to be fully aware of that. And what had he to hide? Nothing. He must wait for Gaspare, and then he could set out for the sea.

It seemed to him a long time before he saw Tito, the donkey, tripping among the stones, and heard Gaspare's voice hailing him from below. He was impatient to be off, and he shouted out:

"Presto, Gaspare, presto!"

He saw the boy's arm swing as he tapped Tito behind with his switch, and the donkey's legs moving in a canter.

"What is it, signorino? Has anything happened?"

"No. But—Gaspare, I'm going down to the sea."

"To bathe?"

"I may bathe. I'm not sure. It depends upon how I go."

"You are going to the Casa delle Sirene?"

Maurice nodded.

"I didn't care to go off while you were away."

"Do you wish me to come with you, signorino?"

The boy's great eyes were searching him, yet he did not feel uncomfortable, although he wished to stand well with Gaspare. They were near akin, although different in rank and education. Between their minds there was a freemasonry of the south.

"Do you want to come?" he said.

"It's as you like, signore."

He was silent for a moment; then he added:

"Salvatore might be there now. Do you want him to see you?"

"Why not?"

A project began to form in his mind. If he took Gaspare with him they might go to the cottage more naturally. Gaspare knew Salvatore and could introduce him, could say—well, that he wanted sometimes to go out fishing and would take Salvatore's boat. Salvatore would see a prospect of money. And he—Maurice—did want to go out fishing. Suddenly he knew it. His spirits rose and he clapped Gaspare on the back.

"Of course I do. I want to know Salvatore. Come along. We'll take his boat one day and go out fishing."

Gaspare's grave face relaxed in a sly smile.

"Signorino!" he said, shaking his hand to and fro close to his nose. "Birbante!"

There was a world of meaning in his voice. Maurice laughed joyously. He began to feel like an ingenious school-boy who was going to have a lark. There was neither thought of evil nor even a secret stirring of desire for it in him.

"A rivederci, Lucrezia!" he cried.

And they set off.

When they were not far from the sea, Gaspare said:

"Signorino, why do you like to come here? What is the good of it?"

They had been walking in silence. Evidently these questions were the result of a process of thought which had been going on in the boy's mind.

"The good!" said Maurice. "What is the harm?"

"Well, here in Sicily, when a man goes to see a girl it is because he wants to love her."

"In England it is different, Gaspare. In England men and women can be friends. Why not?"

"You want just to be a friend of Maddalena?"

"Of course. I like to talk to the people. I want to understand them. Why shouldn't I be friends with Maddalena as—as I am with Lucrezia?"

"Oh, Lucrezia is your servant."

"It's all the same."

"But perhaps Maddalena doesn't know. We are Sicilians here, signore."

"What do you mean? That Maddalena might—nonsense, Gaspare!"

There was a sound as of sudden pleasure, even sudden triumph, in his voice.

"Are you sure you understand our girls, signore?"

"If Maddalena does like me there's no harm in it. She knows who I am now. She knows I—she knows there is the signora."

"Si, signore. There is the signora. She is in Africa, but she is coming back."

"Of course!"

"When the sick signore gets well?"

Maurice said nothing. He felt sure Gaspare was wondering again, wondering that Hermione was in Africa.

"I cannot understand how it is in England," continued the boy. "Here it is all quite different."

Again jealousy stirred in Maurice and a sensation almost of shame. For a moment he felt like a Sicilian husband at whom his neighbors point the two fingers of scorn, and he said something in his wrath which was unworthy.

"You see how it is," he said. "If the signora can go to Africa to see her friend, I can come down here to see mine. That is how it is with the English."

He did not even try to keep the jealousy out of his voice, his manner. Gaspare leaped to it.

"You did not like the signora to go to Africa!"

"Oh, she will come back. It's all right," Maurice answered, hastily. "But, while she is there, it would be absurd if I might not speak to any one."

Gaspare's burden of doubt, perhaps laid on his young shoulders by his loyalty to his padrona, was evidently lightened.

"I see, signore," he said. "You can each have a friend. But have you explained to Maddalena?"

"If you think it necessary, I will explain."

"It would be better, because she is Sicilian and she must think you love her."

"Gaspare!"

The boy looked at him keenly and smiled.

"You would like her to think that?"

Maurice denied it vigorously, but Gaspare only shook his head and said:

"I know, I know. Girls are nicest when they think that, because they are pleased and they want us to go on. You think I see nothing, signorino, but I saw it all in Maddalena's face. Per Dio!"

And he laughed aloud, with the delight of a boy who has discovered something, and feels that he is clever and a man. And Maurice laughed too, not without a pride that was joyous. The heart of his youth, the wild heart, bounded within him, and the glory of the sun, and the passionate blue of the sea seemed suddenly deeper, more intense, more sympathetic, as if they felt with him, as if they knew the rapture of youth, as if they were created to call it forth, to condone its carelessness, to urge it to some almost fierce fulfilment.

"Salvatore is there, signorino."

"How do you know?"

"I saw the smoke from his pipe. Look, there it is again!"

A tiny trail of smoke curled up; and faded in the blue.

"I will go first because of Maddalena. Girls are silly. If I do this at her she will understand. If not she may show her father you have been here before."

He closed one eye in a large and expressive wink.

"Birbante!"

"It is good to be birbante sometimes."

He went out from the trees and Maurice heard his voice, then a man's, then Maddalena's. He waited where he was till he heard Gaspare say:

"The padrone is just behind. Signorino, where are you?"

"Here!" he answered, coming into the open with a careless air.

Before the cottage door in the sunshine a great fishing-net was drying, fastened to two wooden stakes. Near it stood Salvatore, dressed in a dark-blue jersey, with a soft black hat tilted over his left ear, above which was stuck a yellow flower. Maddalena was in the doorway looking very demure. It was evident that the wink of Gaspare had been seen and comprehended. She stole a glance at Maurice but did not move. Her father took off his hat with an almost wildly polite gesture, and said, in a loud voice:

"Buona sera, signore."

"Buona sera," replied Maurice, holding out his hand.

Salvatore took it in a large grasp.

"You are the signore who lives up on Monte Amato with the English lady?"

"Yes."

"I know. She has gone to Africa."

He stared at Maurice while he spoke, with small, twinkling eyes, round which was a minute and intricate web of wrinkles, and again Maurice felt almost—or was it quite?—ashamed. What were these Sicilians thinking of him?

"The signora will be back almost directly," he said. "Is this your daughter?"

"Yes, Maddalena. Bring a chair for the signore, Maddalena."

Maddalena obeyed. There was a slight flush on her face and she did not look at Maurice. Gaspare stood pulling gently at the stretched-out net, and smiling. That he enjoyed the mild deceit of the situation was evident. Maurice, too, felt amused and quite at his ease now. His sensation of shame had fleeted away, leaving only a conviction that Hermione's absence gave him a right to snatch all the pleasure he could from the hands of the passing hour.

He drew out his cigar-case and offered it to Salvatore.

"One day I want to come fishing with you if you'll take me," he said.

Salvatore looked eager. A prospect of money floated before him:

"I can show you fine sport, signore," he answered, taking one of the long Havanas and examining it with almost voluptuous interest as he turned it round and round in his salty, brown fingers. "But you should come out at dawn, and it is far from the mountain to the sea."

"Couldn't I sleep here, so as to be ready?"

He stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking at her feet, and twisting the front of her short dress, but her lips were twitching with a smile which she tried to repress.

"Couldn't I sleep here to-night?" he added, boldly.

Salvatore looked more eager. He loved money almost as an Arab loves it, with anxious greed. Doubtless Arab blood ran in his veins. It was easy to see from whom Maddalena had inherited her Eastern appearance. She reproduced, on a diminished scale, her father's outline of face, but that which was gentle, mysterious, and alluring in her, in him was informed with a rugged wildness. There was something bird-like and predatory in his boldly curving nose with its narrow nostrils, in his hard-lipped mouth, full of splendid teeth, in his sharp and pushing chin. His whole body, wide-shouldered and deep-chested, as befitted a man of the sea, looked savage and fierce, but full of an intensity of manhood that was striking, and his gestures and movements, the glance of his penetrating eyes, the turn of his well-poised head, revealed a primitive and passionate nature, a nature with something of the dagger in it, steely, sharp, and deadly.

"But, signore, our home is very poor. Look, signore!"

A turkey strutted out through the doorway, elongating its neck and looking nervously intent.

"Ps—sh—sh—sh!"

He shooed it away, furiously waving his arms.

"And what could you eat? There is only bread and wine."

"And the yellow cheese!" said Maurice.

"The—?" Salvatore looked sharply interrogative.

"I mean, there is always cheese, isn't there, in Sicily, cheese and macaroni? But if there isn't, it's all right. Anything will do for me, and I'll buy all the fish we take from you, and Maddalena here shall cook it for us when we come back from the sea. Will you, Maddalena?"

"Si, signore."

The answer came in a very small voice.

"The signore is too good."

Salvatore was looking openly voracious now.

"I can sleep on the floor."

"No, signore. We have beds, we have two fine beds. Come in and see."

With not a little pride he led Maurice into the cottage, and showed him the bed on which he had already slept.

"That will be for the signore, Gaspare."

"Si—è molto bello."

"Maddalena and I—we will sleep in the outer room."

"And I, Salvatore?" demanded the boy.

"You! Do you stay too?"

"Of course. Don't I stay, signore?"

"Yes, if Lucrezia won't be frightened."

"It does not matter if she is. When we do not come back she will keep Guglielmo, the contadino."

"Of course you must stay. You can sleep with me. And to-night we'll play cards and sing and dance. Have you got any cards, Salvatore?"

"Si, signore. They are dirty, but—"

"That's all right. And we'll sit outside and tell stories, stories of brigands and the sea. Salvatore, when you know me, you'll know I'm a true Sicilian."

He grasped Salvatore's hand, but he looked at Maddalena.

CHAPTER XII

Night had come to the Sirens' Isle—a night that was warm, gentle, and caressing. In the cottage two candles were lit, and the wick was burning in the glass before the Madonna. Outside the cottage door, on the flat bit of ground that faced the wide sea, Salvatore and his daughter, Maurice and Gaspare, were seated round the table finishing their simple meal, for which Salvatore had many times apologized. Their merry voices, their hearty laughter rang out in the darkness, and below the sea made answer, murmuring against the rocks.

At the same moment in an Arab house Hermione bent over a sick man, praying against death, whose footsteps she seemed already to hear coming into the room and approaching the bed on which he tossed, white with agony. And when he was quiet for a little and ceased from moving, she sat with her hand on his and thought of Sicily, and pictured her husband alone under the stars upon the terrace before the priest's house, and imagined him thinking of her. The dry leaves of a palm-tree under the window of the room creaked in the light wind that blew over the flats, and she strove to hear the delicate rustling of the leaves of olive-trees.

Salvatore had little food to offer his guests, only bread, cheese, and small, black olives; but there was plenty of good red wine, and when the time of brindisi was come Salvatore and Gaspare called for health after health, and rivalled each other in wild poetic efforts, improvising extravagant compliments to Maurice, to the absent signora, to Maddalena, and even to themselves. And with each toast the wine went down till Maurice called a halt.

"I am a real Sicilian," he said. "But if I drink any more I shall be under the table. Get out the cards, Salvatore. Sette e mezzo, and I'll put down the stakes. No one to go above twenty-five centesimi, with fifty for the doubling. Gaspare's sure to win. He always does. And I've just one cigar apiece. There's no wind. Bring out the candles and let's play out here."

Gaspare ran for the candles while Salvatore got the cards, well-thumbed and dirty. Maddalena's long eyes were dancing. Such a festa as this was rare in her life, for, dwelling far from the village, she seldom went to any dance or festivity. Her blood was warm with the wine and with joy, and the youth in her seemed to flow like the sea in a flood-tide. Scarcely ever before had she seen her harsh father so riotously gay, so easy with a stranger, and she knew in her heart that this was her festival. Maurice's merry and ardent eyes told her that, and Gaspare's smiling glances of boyish understanding. She felt excited, almost light-headed, childishly proud of herself. If only some of the girls of Marechiaro could see, could know!

When the cards were thrown upon the table, and Maurice had dealt out a lira to each one of the players as stakes, and cried, "Maddalena and I'll share against you, Salvatore, and Gaspare!" she felt that she had nothing more to wish for, that she was perfectly happy. But she was happier still when, after a series of games, Maurice pushed back his chair and said:

"I've had enough. Salvatore, you are like Gaspare, you have the devil's luck. Together you can't be beaten. But now you play against each other and let's see who wins. I'll put down twenty-five lire. Play till one of you's won every soldo of it. Play all night if you like."

And he counted out the little paper notes on the table, giving two to Salvatore and two to Gaspare, and putting one under a candlestick.

"I'll keep the score," he added, pulling out a pencil and a sheet of paper. "No play higher than fifty, with a lira when one of you makes 'sette e mezzo' with under four cards."

"Per Dio!" cried Gaspare, flushed with excitement. "Avanti, Salvatore!"

"Avanti, Avanti!" cried Salvatore, in answer, pulling his chair close up to the table, and leaning forward, looking like a handsome bird of prey in the faint candlelight.

They cut for deal and began to play, while Maddalena and Maurice watched.

When Sicilians gamble they forget everything but the game and the money which it brings to them or takes from them. Salvatore and Gaspare were at once passionately intent on their cards, and as the night drew on and fortune favored first one and then the other, they lost all thought of everything except the twenty-five lire which were at stake. When Maddalena slipped away into the darkness they did not notice her departure, and when Maurice laid down the paper on which he had tried to keep the score, and followed her, they were indifferent. They needed no score-keeper, for they had Sicilian memories for money matters. Over the table they leaned, the two candles, now burning low, illuminating their intense faces, their violent eyes, their brown hands that dealt and gathered up the cards, and held them warily, alert for the cheating that in Sicily, when possible, is ever part of the game.

"Carta da cinquanta!"

They had forgotten Maurice's limit for the stakes.

"Carta da cento!"

Their voices died away from Maurice's ears as he stole through the darkness seeking Maddalena.

Where had she gone, and why? The last question he could surely answer, for as she stole past him silently, her long, mysterious eyes, that seemed to hold in their depths some enigma of the East, had rested on his with a glance that was an invitation. They had not boldly summoned him. They had lured him, as an echo might, pathetic in its thrilling frailty. And now, as he walked softly over the dry grass, he thought of those eyes as he had first seen them in the pale light that had preceded the dawn. Then they had been full of curiosity, like a young animal's. Now surely they were changed. Once they had asked a question. They delivered a summons to-night. What was in them to-night? The mystery of young maidenhood, southern, sunlit, on the threshold of experience, waking to curious knowledge, to a definite consciousness of the meaning of its dreams, of the truth of its desires.

When he was out of hearing of the card-players Maurice stood still. He felt the breath of the sea on his face. He heard the murmur of the sea everywhere around him, a murmur that in its level monotony excited him, thrilled him, as the level monotony of desert music excites the African in the still places of the sand. His pulses were beating, and there was an almost savage light in his eyes. Something in the atmosphere of the sea-bound retreat made him feel emancipated, as if he had stepped out of the prison of civilized life into a larger, more thoughtless existence, an existence for which his inner nature fitted him, for which he had surely been meant all these years that he had lived, unconscious of what he really was and of what he really needed.

"How happy I could have been as a Sicilian fisherman!" he thought. "How happy I could be now!"

"St! St!"

He looked round quickly.

"St! St!"

It must be Maddalena, but where was she? He moved forward till he was at the edge of the land where the tiny path wound steeply downward to the sea. There she was standing with her face turned in his direction, and her lips opened to repeat the little summoning sound.

"How did you know I was there?" he said, whispering, as he joined her. "Did you hear me come?"

"No, signore."

"Then—"

"Signorino, I felt that you were there."

He smiled. It pleased him to think that he threw out something, some invisible thread, perhaps, that reached her and told her of his nearness. Such communication made sympathy. He did not say it to himself, but his sensation to-night was that everything was in sympathy with him, the night with its stars, the sea with its airs and voices, Maddalena with her long eyes and her brown hands, and her knowledge of his presence when she did not see or hear him.

"Let us go down to the sea," he said.

He longed to be nearer to that low and level sound that moved and excited him in the night.

"Father's boat is there," she said. "It is so calm to-night that he did not bring it round into the bay."

"If we go out in it for a minute, will he mind?"

A sly look came into her face.

"He will not know," she said. "With all that money Gaspare and he will play till dawn. Per Dio, signore, you are birbante!"

She gave a little low laugh.

"So you think I—"

He stopped. What need was there to go on? She had read him and was openly rejoicing in what she thought his slyness.

"And my father," she added, "is a fox of the sea, signore. Ask Gaspare if there is another who is like him. You will see! When they stop playing at dawn the twenty-five lire will be in his pocket!"

She spoke with pride.

"But Gaspare is so lucky," said Maurice.

"Gaspare is only a boy. How can he cheat better than my father?"

"They cheat, then!"

"Of course, when they can. Why not, madonna!"

Maurice burst out laughing.

"And you call me birbante!" he said.

"To know what my father loves best! Signorino! Signorino!"

She shook her out-stretched forefinger to and fro near her nose, smiling, with her head a little on one side like a crafty child.

"But why, Maddalena—why should I wish your father to play cards till the dawn. Tell me that! Why should not I wish him, all of us, to go to bed?"

"You are not sleepy, signorino!"

"I shall be in the morning when it's time to fish."

"Then perhaps you will not fish."

"But I must. That is why I have stayed here to-night, to be ready to go to sea in the morning."

She said nothing, only smiled again. He felt a longing to shake her in joke. She was such a child now. And yet a few minutes ago her dark eyes had lured him, and he had felt almost as if in seeking her he sought a mystery.

"Don't you believe me?" he asked.

But she only answered, with her little gesture of smiling rebuke:

"Signorino! Signorino!"

He did not protest, for now they were down by the sea, and saw the fishing-boats swaying gently on the water.

"Get in Maddalena. I will row."

He untied the rope, while she stepped lightly in, then he pushed the boat off, jumping in himself from the rocks.

"You are like a fisherman, signore," said Maddalena.

He smiled and drew the great bladed oars slowly through the calm water, leaning towards her with each stroke and looking into her eyes.

"I wish I were really a fisherman," he said, "like your father!"

"Why, signore?" she asked, in astonishment.

"Because it's a free life, because it's a life I should love."

She still looked at him with surprise.

"But a fisherman has few soldi, signorino."

"Maddalena," he said, letting the oars drift in the water, "there's only one good thing in the world, and that is to be free in a life that is natural to one."

He drew up his feet onto the wooden bench and clasped his hands round his knees, and sat thus, looking at her while she faced him in the stern of the boat. He had not turned the boat round. So Maddalena had her face towards the land, while his was set towards the open sea.

"It isn't having many soldi that makes happiness," he went on. "Gaspare thinks it is, and Lucrezia, and I dare say your father would—"

"Oh yes, signore! In Sicily we all think so!"

"And so they do in England. But it isn't true."

"But if you have many soldi you can do anything."

He shook his head.

"No you can't. I have plenty of soldi, but I can't always live here, I can't always live as I do now. Some day I shall have to go away from Sicily—I shall have to go back and live in London."

As he said the last words he seemed to see London rise up before him in the night, with shadowy domes and towers and chimneys; he seemed to hear through the exquisite silence of night upon the sea the mutter of its many voices.

"It's beastly there! It's beastly!"

And he set his teeth almost viciously.

"Why must you go, then, signorino?"

"Why? Oh, I have work to do."

"But if you are rich why must you work?"

"Well—I—I can't explain in Italian. But my father expects me to."

"To get more rich?"

"Yes, I suppose."

"But if you are rich why cannot you live as you please?"

"I don't know, Maddalena. But the rich scarcely ever live really as they please, I think. Their soldi won't let them, perhaps."

"I don't understand, signore."

"Well, a man must do something, must get on, and if I lived always here I should do nothing but enjoy myself."

He was silent for a minute. Then he said:

"And that's all I want to do, just to enjoy myself here in the sun."

"Are you happy here, signorino?"

"Yes, tremendously happy."

"Why?"

"Why—because it's Sicily here! Aren't you happy?"

"I don't know, signorino."

She said it with simplicity and looked at him almost as if she were inquiring of him whether she were happy or not. That look tempted him.

"Don't you know whether you are happy to-night?" he asked, putting an emphasis on the last word, and looking at her more steadily, almost cruelly.

"Oh, to-night—it is a festa."

"A festa? Why?"

"Why? Because it is different from other nights. On other nights I am alone with my father."

"And to-night you are alone with me. Does that make it a festa?"

She looked down.

"I don't know, signorino."

The childish merriment and slyness had gone out of her now, and there was a softness almost of sentimentality in her attitude, as she drooped her head and moved one hand to and fro on the gunwale of the boat, touching the wood, now here, now there, as if she were picking up something and dropping it gently into the sea.

Suddenly Maurice wondered about Maddalena. He wondered whether she had ever had a Sicilian lover, whether she had one now.

"You are not 'promised,' are you, Maddalena?" he asked, leaning a little nearer to her. He saw the red come into her brown skin. She shook her head without looking up or speaking.

"I wonder why," he said. "I think—I think there must be men who want you."

She slightly raised her head.

"Oh yes, there are, signore. But—but I must wait till my father chooses one."

"Your father will choose the man who is to be your husband?"

"Of course, signore."

"But perhaps you won't like him."

"Oh, I shall have to like him, signore."

She did not speak with any bitterness or sarcasm, but with perfect simplicity. A feeling of pity that was certainly not Sicilian but that came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled withered, sun-dried hag, while she was yet young in years.

"I wish," he said—"I wish, when you have to marry, I could choose your husband, Maddalena."

She lifted her head quite up and regarded him with wonder.

"You, signorino! Why?"

"Because I would choose a man who would be very good to you, who would love you and work for you and always think of you, and never look at another woman. That is how your husband should be."

She looked more wondering.

"Are you like that, then, signore?" she asked. "With the signora?"

Maurice unclasped his hands from his knees, and dropped his feet down from the bench.

"I!" he said, in a voice that had changed. "Oh—yes—I don't know."

He took the oars again and began to row farther out to sea.

"I was talking about you," he said, almost roughly.

"I have never seen your signora," said Maddalena. "What is she like?" Maurice saw Hermione before him in the night, tall, flat, with her long arms, her rugged, intelligent face, her enthusiastic brown eyes.

"Is she pretty?" continued Maddalena. "Is she as young as I am?"

"She is good, Maddalena," Maurice answered.

"Is she santa?"

"I don't mean that. But she is good to every one."

"But is she pretty, too?" she persisted. "And young?"

"She is not at all old. Some day you shall see—"

He checked himself. He had been going to say, "Some day you shall see her."

"And she is very clever," he said, after a moment.

"Clever?" said Maddalena, evidently not understanding what he meant.

"She can understand many things and she has read many books."

"But what is the good of that? Why should a girl read many books?"

"She is not a girl."

"Not a girl!"

She looked at him with amazed eyes and her voice was full of amazement.

"How old are you, signorino?" she asked.

"How old do you think?"

She considered him carefully for a long time.

"Old enough to make the visit," she said, at length.

"The visit?"

"Yes."

"What? Oh, do you mean to be a soldier?"

"Si, signore."

"That would be twenty, wouldn't it?"

She nodded.

"I am older than that. I am twenty-four."

"Truly?"

"Truly."

"And is the signora twenty-four, too?"

"Maddalena!" Maurice exclaimed, with a sudden impatience that was almost fierce. "Why do you keep on talking about the signora to-night? This is your festa. The signora is in Africa, a long way off—there—across the sea." He stretched out his arm, and pointed towards the wide waters above which the stars were watching. "When she comes back you can see her, if you wish—but now—"

"When is she coming back?" asked the girl.

There was an odd pertinacity in her character, almost an obstinacy, despite her young softness and gentleness.

"I don't know," Maurice said, with difficulty controlling his gathering impatience.

"Why did she go away?"

"To nurse some one who is ill."

"She went all alone across the sea?"

"Yes."

Maddalena turned and looked into the dimness of the sea with a sort of awe.

"I should be afraid," she said, after a pause.

And she shivered slightly.

Maurice had let go the oars again. He felt a longing to put his arm round her when he saw her shiver. The night created many longings in him, a confusion of longings, of which he was just becoming aware.

"You are a child," he said, "and have never been away from your 'paese.'"

"Yes, I have."

"Where?"

"I have been to the fair of San Felice."

He smiled.

"Oh—San Felice! And did you go in the train?"

"Oh no, signore. I went on a donkey. It was last year, in June. It was beautiful. There were women there in blue silk dresses with ear-rings as long as that"—she measured their length in the air with her brown fingers—"and there was a boy from Napoli, a real Napolitano, who sang and danced as we do not dance here. I was very happy that day. And I was given an image of Sant' Abbondio."

She looked at him with a sort of dignity, as if expecting him to be impressed.

"Carissima!" he whispered, almost under his breath.

Her little air of pride, as of a travelled person, enchanted him, even touched him, he scarcely knew why, as he had never been enchanted or touched by any London beauty.

"I wish I had been at the fair with you. I would have given you—"

"What, signorino?" she interrupted, eagerly.

"A blue silk dress and a pair of ear-rings longer—much longer—than those women wore."

"Really, signorino? Really?"

"Really and truly! Do you doubt me?"

"No."

She sighed.

"How I wish you had been there! But this year—"

She stopped, hesitating.

"Yes—this year?"

"In June there will be the fair again."

He moved from his seat, softly and swiftly, turned the boat's prow towards the open sea, then went and sat down by her in the stern.

"We will go there," he said, "you and I and Gaspare—"

"And my father."

"All of us together."

"And if the signora is back?"

Maurice was conscious of a desire that startled him like a sudden stab from something small and sharp—the desire that on that day Hermione should not be with him in Sicily.

"I dare say the signora will not be back."

"But if she is, will she come, too?"

"Do you think you would like it better if she came?"

He was so close to her now that his shoulder touched hers. Their faces were set seaward and were kissed by the breath of the sea. Their eyes saw the same stars and were kissed by the light of the stars. And the subtle murmur of the tide spoke to them both as if they were one.

"Do you?" he repeated. "Do you think so?"

"Chi lo sa?" she responded.

He thought, when she said that, that her voice sounded less simple than before.

"You do know!" he said.

She shook her head.

"You do!" he repeated.

He stretched out his hand and took her hand. He had to take it.

"Why don't you tell me?"

She had turned her head away from him, and now, speaking as if to the sea, she said:

"Perhaps if she was there you could not give me the blue silk dress and the—and the ear-rings. Perhaps she would not like it."

For a moment he thought he was disappointed by her answer. Then he knew that he loved it, for its utter naturalness, its laughable naïveté. It seemed, too, to set him right in his own eyes, to sweep away a creeping feeling that had been beginning to trouble him. He was playing with a child. That was all. There was no harm in it. And when he had kissed her in the dawn he had been kissing a child, playfully, kindly, as a big brother might. And if he kissed her now it would mean nothing to her. And if it did mean something—just a little more—to him, that did not matter.

"Bambina mia!" he said.

"I am not a bambina," she said, turning towards him again.

"Yes you are."

"Then you are a bambino."

"Why not? I feel like a boy to-night, like a naughty little boy."

"Naughty, signorino?"

"Yes, because I want to do something that I ought not to do."

"What is it?"

"This, Maddalena."

And he kissed her. It was the first time he had kissed her in darkness, for on his second visit to the sirens' house he had only taken her hand and held it, and that was nothing. The kiss in the dawn had been light, gay, a sort of laughing good-bye to a kind hostess who was of a class that, he supposed, thought little of kisses. But this kiss in the night, on the sea, was different. Only when he had given it did he understand how different it was, how much more it meant to him. For Maddalena returned it gently with her warm young lips, and her response stirred something at his heart that was surely the very essence of the life within him.

He held her hands.

"Maddalena!" he said, and there was in his voice a startled sound. "Maddalena!"

Again Hermione had risen up before him in the night, almost as one who walked upon the sea. He was conscious of wrong-doing. The innocence of his relation with Maddalena seemed suddenly to be tarnished, and the happiness of the starry night to be clouded. He felt like one who, in summer, becomes aware of a heaviness creeping into the atmosphere, the message of a coming tempest that will presently transform the face of nature. Surely there was a mist before the faces of the stars.

She said nothing, only looked at him as if she wanted to know many things which only he could tell her, which he had begun to tell her. That was her fascination for his leaping youth, his wild heart of youth—this ignorance and this desire to know. He had sat in spirit at the feet of Hermione and loved her with a sort of boyish humbleness. Now one sat at his feet. And the attitude woke up in him a desire that was fierce in its intensity—the desire to teach Maddalena the great realities of love.

"Hi—yi—yi—yi—yi!"

Faintly there came to them a cry across the sea.

"Gaspare!" Maurice said.

He turned his head. In the darkness, high up, he saw a light, descending, ascending, then describing a wild circle.

"Hi—yi—yi—yi!"

"Row back, signorino! They have done playing, and my father will be angry."

He moved, took the oars, and sent the boat towards the island. The physical exertion calmed him, restored him to himself.

"After all," he thought, "there is no harm in it."

And he laughed.

"Which has won, Maddalena?" he said, looking back at her over his shoulder, for he was standing up and rowing with his face towards the land.

"I hope it is my father, signorino. If he has got the money he will not be angry; but if Gaspare has it—"

"Your father is a fox of the sea, and can cheat better than a boy. Don't be frightened."

When they reached the land, Salvatore and Gaspare met them. Gaspare's face was glum, but Salvatore's small eyes were sparkling.

"I have won it all—all!" he said. "Ecco!"

And he held out his hand with the notes.

"Salvatore is birbante!" said Gaspare, sullenly. "He did not win it fairly. I saw him—"

"Never mind, Gaspare!" said Maurice.

He put his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"To-morrow I'll give you the same," he whispered.

"And now," he added, aloud, "let's go to bed. I've been rowing Maddalena round the island and I'm tired. I shall sleep like a top."

As they went up the steep path he took Salvatore familiarly by the arm.

"You are too clever, Salvatore," he said. "You play too well for Gaspare."

Salvatore chuckled and handled the five-lire notes voluptuously.

"Cci basu li manu!" he said. "Cci basu li manu!"

CHAPTER XIII

Maurice lay on the big bed in the inner room of the siren's house, under the tiny light that burned before Maria Addolorata. The door of the house was shut, and he heard no more the murmur of the sea. Gaspare was curled up on the floor, on a bed made of some old sacking, with his head buried in his jacket, which he had taken off to use as a pillow. In the far room Maddalena and her father were asleep. Maurice could hear their breathing, Maddalena's light and faint, Salvatore's heavy and whistling, and degenerating now and then into a sort of stifled snore. But sleep did not come to Maurice. His eyes were open, and his clasped hands supported his head. He was thinking, thinking almost angrily.

He loved joy as few Englishmen love it, but as many southerners love it. His nature needed joy, was made to be joyous. And such natures resent the intrusion into their existence of any complications which make for tragedy as northern natures seldom resent anything. To-night Maurice had a grievance against fate, and he was considering it wrathfully and not without confusion.

Since he had kissed Maddalena in the night he was disturbed, almost unhappy. And yet he was surely face to face with something that was more than happiness. The dancing faun was dimly aware that in his nature there was not only the capacity for gayety, for the performance of the tarantella, but also a capacity for violence which he had never been conscious of when he was in England. It had surely been developed within him by the sun, by the coming of the heat in this delicious land. It was like an intoxication of the blood, something that went to head as well as heart. He wondered what it meant, what it might lead him to. Perhaps he had been faintly aware of its beginnings on that day when jealousy dawned within him as he thought of his wife, his woman, nursing her friend in Africa. Now it was gathering strength like a stream flooded by rains, but it was taking a different direction in its course.

He turned upon the pillow so that he could see the light burning before the Madonna. The face of the Madonna was faintly visible—a long, meek face with downcast eyes. Maddalena crossed herself often when she looked at that face. Maurice put up his hand to make the sign, then dropped it with a heavy sigh. He was not a Catholic. His religion—what was it? Sunworship perhaps, the worship of the body, the worship of whim. He did not know or care much. He felt so full of life and energy that the far, far future after death scarcely interested him. The present was his concern, the present after that kiss in the night. He had loved Hermione. Surely he loved her now. He did love her now. And yet when he had kissed her he had never been shaken by the headstrong sensation that had hold of him to-night, the desire to run wild in love. He looked up to Hermione. The feeling of reverence had been a governing factor in his love for her. Now it seemed to him that a feeling of reverence was a barrier in the path of love, something to create awe, admiration, respect, but scarcely the passion that irresistibly draws man to woman. And yet he did love Hermione. He was confused, horribly confused.

For he knew that his longing was towards Maddalena.

He would like to rise up in the dawn, to take her in his arms, to carry her off in a boat upon the sea, or to set her on a mule and lead her up far away into the recesses of the mountains. By rocky paths he would lead her, beyond the olives and the vines, beyond the last cottage of the contadini, up to some eyrie from which they could look down upon the sunlit world. He wanted to be in wildness with her, inexorably divided from all the trammels of civilization. A desire of savagery had hold upon him to-night. He did not go into detail. He did not think of how they would pass their days. Everything presented itself to him broadly, tumultuously, with a surging, onward movement of almost desperate advance.

He wanted to teach those dark, inquiring young eyes all that they asked to know, to set in them the light of knowledge, to make them a woman's eyes.

And that he could never do.

His whole body was throbbing with heat, and tingling with a desire of movement, of activity. The knowledge that all this beating energy was doomed to uselessness, was born to do nothing, tortured him.

He tried to think steadily of Hermione, but he found the effort a difficult one. She was remote from his body, and that physical remoteness seemed to set her far from his spirit, too. In him, though he did not know it, was awake to-night the fickleness of the south, of the southern spirit that forgets so quickly what is no longer near to the southern body. The sun makes bodily men, makes very strong the chariot of the flesh. Sight and touch are needful, the actions of the body, to keep the truly southern spirit true. Maurice could neither touch nor see Hermione. In her unselfishness she had committed the error of dividing herself from him. The natural consequences of that self-sacrifice were springing up now like the little yellow flowers in the grasses of the lemon groves. With all her keen intelligence she made the mistake of the enthusiast, that of reading into those whom she loved her own shining qualities, of seeing her own sincerities, her own faithfulness, her own strength, her own utter loyalty looking out on her from them. She would probably have denied that this was so, but so it was. At this very moment in Africa, while she watched at the bedside of Artois, she was thinking of her husband's love for her, loyalty to her, and silently blessing him for it; she was thanking God that she had drawn such a prize in the lottery of life. And had she been already separated from Maurice for six months she would never have dreamed of doubting his perfect loyalty now that he had once loved her and taken her to be his. The "all in all or not at all" nature had been given to Hermione. She must live, rejoice, suffer, die, according to that nature. She knew much, but she did not know how to hold herself back, how to be cautious where she loved, how to dissect the thing she delighted in. She would never know that, so she would never really know her husband, as Artois might learn to know him, even had already known him. She would never fully understand the tremendous barriers set up between people by the different strains of blood in them, the stern dividing lines that are drawn between the different races of the earth. Her nature told her that love can conquer all things. She was too enthusiastic to be always far-seeing.

So now, while Maurice lay beneath the tiny light in the house of the sirens and was shaken by the wildness of desire, and thought of a mountain pilgrimage far up towards the sun with Maddalena in his arms, she sat by Artois's bed and smiled to herself as she pictured the house of the priest, watched over by the stars of Sicily, and by her many prayers. Maurice was there, she knew, waiting for her return, longing for it as she longed for it. Artois turned on his pillow wearily, saw her, and smiled.

"You oughtn't to be here," he whispered. "But I am glad you are here."

"And I am glad, I am thankful I am here!" she said, truly.

"If there is a God," he said, "He will bless you for this!"

"Hush! You must try to sleep."

She laid her hand in his.

"God has blessed me," she thought, "for all my poor little attempts at goodness, how far, far more than I deserve!"

And the gratitude within her was almost like an ache, like a beautiful pain of the heart.

In the morning Maurice put to sea with Gaspare and Salvatore. He knew the silvery calm of dawn on a day of sirocco. Everything was very still, in a warm and heavy stillness of silver that made the sweat run down at the least movement or effort. Masses of white, feathery vapors floated low in the sky above the sea, concealing the flanks of the mountains, but leaving their summits clear. And these vapors, hanging like veils with tattered edges, created a strange privacy upon the sea, an atmosphere of eternal mysteries. As the boat went out from the shore, urged by the powerful arms of Salvatore, its occupants were silent. The merriment and the ardor of the night, the passion of cards and of desire, were gone, as if they had been sucked up into the smoky wonder of the clouds, or sucked down into the silver wonder of the sea.

Gaspare looked drowsy and less happy than usual. He had not yet recovered from his indignation at the success of Salvatore's cheating, and Maurice, who had not slept, felt the bounding life, the bounding fire of his youth held in check as by the action of a spell. The carelessness of excitement, of passion, was replaced by another carelessness—the carelessness of dream. It seemed to him now as if nothing mattered or ever could matter. On the calm silver of a hushed and breathless sea, beneath dense white vapors that hid the sky, he was going out slowly, almost noiselessly, to a fate of which he knew nothing, to a quiet emptiness, to a region which held no voices to call him this way or that, no hands to hold him, no eyes to regard him. His face was damp with sweat. He leaned over the gunwale and trailed his hand in the sea. It seemed to him unnaturally warm. He glanced up at the clouds. Heaven was blotted out. Was there a heaven? Last night he had thought there must be—but that was long ago. Was he sad? He scarcely knew. He was dull, as if the blood in him had run almost dry. He was like a sapless tree. Hermione and Maddalena—what were they? Shadows rather than women. He looked steadily at the sea. Was it the same element upon which he had been only a few hours ago under the stars with Maddalena? He could scarcely believe that it was the same. Sirocco had him fast, sirocco that leaves many Sicilians unchanged, unaffected, but that binds the stranger with cords of cotton wool which keep him like a net of steel.

Gaspare lay down in the bottom of the boat, buried his face in his arms, and gave himself again to sleep. Salvatore looked at him, and then at Maurice, and smiled with a fine irony.

"He thought he would win, signore."

"Cosa?" said Maurice, startled by the sound of a voice.

"He thought that he could play better than I, signore."

Salvatore closed one eye, and stuck his tongue a little out of the left side of his mouth, then drew it in with a clicking noise.

"No one gets the better of me," he said. "They may try. Many have tried, but in the end—"

He shook his head, took his right hand from the oar and flapped it up and down, then brought it downward with force, as if beating some one, or something, to his feet.

"I see," Maurice said, dully. "I see."

He thought to himself that he had been cleverer than Salvatore the preceding night, but he felt no sense of triumph. He had divined the fisherman's passion and turned it to his purpose. But what of that? Let the man rejoice, if he could, in this dream. Let all men do what they wished to do so long as he could be undisturbed. He looked again at the sea, dropped his hand into it once more.

"Shall I let down a line, signore?"

Salvatore's keen eyes were upon him. He shook his head.

"Not yet. I—" He hesitated.

The still silver of the sea drew him. He touched his forehead with his hand and felt the dampness on it.

"I'm going in," he said.

"Can you swim, signore?"

"Yes, like a fish. Don't follow me with the boat. Just let me swim out and come back. If I want you I'll call. But don't follow me."

Salvatore nodded appreciatively. He liked a good swimmer, a real man of the sea.

"And don't wake Gaspare, or he'll be after me."

"Va bene!"

Maurice stripped off his clothes, all the time looking at the sea. Then he sat down on the gunwale of the boat with his feet in the water. Salvatore had stopped rowing. Gaspare still slept.

It was curious to be going to give one's self to this silent silver thing that waited so calmly for the gift. He felt a sort of dull voluptuousness stealing over him as he stared at the water. He wanted to get away from his companions, from the boat, to be quite alone with sirocco.

"Addio Salvatore!" he said, in a low voice.

"A rivederci, signore."

He let himself down slowly into the water, feet foremost, and swam slowly away into the dream that lay before him.

Even now that he was in it the water felt strangely warm. He had not let his head go under, and the sweat was still on his face. The boat lay behind him. He did not think of it. He had forgotten it. He felt himself to be alone, utterly alone with the sea.

He had always loved the sea, but in a boyish, wholly natural way, as a delightful element, health-giving, pleasure-giving, associating it with holiday times, with bathing, fishing, boating, with sails on moonlight nights, with yacht-races about the Isle of Wight in the company of gay comrades. This sea of Sicily seemed different to him to-day from other seas, more mysterious and more fascinating, a sea of sirens about a Sirens' Isle. Mechanically he swam through it, scarcely moving his arms, with his chin low in the water—out towards the horizon-line.

He was swimming towards Africa.

Presently that thought came into his mind, that he was swimming towards Africa and Hermione, and away from Maddalena. It seemed to him, then, as if the two women on the opposite shores of this sea must know, Hermione that he was coming to her, Maddalena that he was abandoning her, and he began to think of them both as intent upon his journey, the one feeling him approach, the other feeling him recede. He swam more slowly. A curious melancholy had overtaken him, a deep depression of the spirit, such as often alternates in the Sicilian character with the lively gayety that is sent down upon its children by the sun. This lonely progress in the sea was prophetic. He must leave Maddalena. His friendship with her must come to an end, and soon. Hermione would return, and then, in no long time, they would leave the Casa del Prete and go back to England. They would settle down somewhere, probably in London, and he would take up his work with his father, and the Sicilian dream would be over.

The vapors that hid the sky seemed to drop a little lower down towards the sea, as if they were going to enclose him.

The Sicilian dream would be over. Was that possible? He felt as if the earth of Sicily would not let him go, as if, should the earth resign him, the sea of Sicily would keep him. He dwelt on this last fancy, this keeping of him by the sea. That would be strange, a quiet end to all things. Never before had he consciously contemplated his own death. The deep melancholy poured into him by sirocco caused him to do so now. Almost voluptuously he thought of death, a death in the sea of Sicily near the rocks of the isle of the sirens. The light would be kindled in the sirens' house and his eyes would not see it. They would be closed by the cold fingers of the sea. And Maddalena? The first time she had seen him she had seen him sinking in the sea. How strange if it should be so at the end, if the last time she saw him she saw him sinking in the sea. She had cried out. Would she cry out again or would she keep silence? He wondered. For a moment he felt as if it were ordained that thus he should die, and he let his body sink in the water, throwing up his hands. He went down, very far down, but he felt that Maddalena's eyes followed him and that in them he saw terrors enthroned.

Gaspare stirred in the boat, lifted his head from his arms and looked sleepily around him. He saw Salvatore lighting a pipe, bending forward over a spluttering match which he held in a cage made of his joined hands. He glanced away from him still sleepily, seeking the padrone, but he saw only the empty seats of the boat, the oars, the coiled-up nets, and lines for the fish.

"Dove—?" he began.

He sat up, stared wildly round.

"Dov'è il padrone?" he cried out, shrilly.

Salvatore started and dropped the match. Gaspare sprang at him.

"Dov'è il padrone? Dov'è il padrone?"

"Sangue di—" began Salvatore.

But the oath died upon his lips. His keen eyes had swept the sea and perceived that it was empty. From its silver the black dot which he had been admiringly watching had disappeared. Gaspare had waked, had asked his fierce question just as Maurice threw up his hands and sank down in his travesty of death.

"He was there! Madonna! He was there swimming a moment ago!" exclaimed Salvatore.

As he spoke he seized the oars, and with furious strokes propelled the boat in the direction Maurice had taken. But Gaspare would not wait. His instinct forbade him to remain inactive.

"May the Madonna turn her face from thee in the hour of thy death!" he yelled at Salvatore.

Then, with all his clothes on, he went over the side into the sea.

Maurice was an accomplished swimmer, and had ardently practised swimming under water when he was a boy. He could hold his breath for an exceptionally long time, and now he strove to beat all his previous records. With a few strokes he came up from the depths of the sea towards the surface, then began swimming under water, swimming vigorously, though in what direction he knew not. At last he felt the imperative need of air, and, coming up into the light again, he gasped, shook his head, lifted his eyelids that were heavy with the pressure of the water, heard a shrill cry, and felt a hand grasp him fiercely.

"Signorino! Signorino!"

"Gaspare!" he gulped.

He had not fully drawn breath yet.

"Madonna! Madonna!"

The hand still held him. The fingers were dug into his flesh. Then he heard a shout, and the boat came up with Salvatore leaning over its side, glaring down at him with fierce anxiety. He grasped the gunwale with both hands. Gaspare trod water, caught him by the legs, and violently assisted him upward. He tumbled over the side into the boat. Gaspare came after him, sank down in the bottom of the boat, caught him by the arms, stared into his face, saw him smiling.

"Sta bene Lei?" he cried. "Sta bene?"

"Benissimo."

The boy let go of him and, still staring at him, burst into a passion of tears that seemed almost angry.

"Gaspare! What is it? What's the matter?"

He put out his hand to touch the boy's dripping clothes.

"What has happened?"

"Niente! Niente!" said Gaspare, between violent sobs. "Mamma mia! Mamma mia!"

He threw himself down in the bottom of the boat and wept stormily, without shame, without any attempt to check or conceal his emotion. As in the tarantella he had given himself up utterly to joy, so now he gave himself up utterly to something that seemed like despair. He cried loudly. His whole body shook. The sea-water ran down from his matted hair and mingled with the tears that rushed over his brown cheeks.

"What is it?" Maurice asked of Salvatore.

"He thought the sea had taken you, signore."

"That was it? Gaspare—"

"Let him alone. Per Dio, signore, you gave me a fright, too."

"I was only swimming under water."

He looked at Gaspare. He longed to do something to comfort him, but he realized that such violence could not be checked by anything. It must wear itself out.

"And he thought I was dead!"

"Per Dio! And if you had been!"

He wrinkled up his face and spat.

"What do you mean?"

"Has he got a knife on him?"

He threw out his hand towards Gaspare.

"I don't know to-day. He generally has."

"I should have had it in me by now," said Salvatore.

And he smiled at the weeping boy almost sweetly, as if he could have found it in his heart to caress such a murderer.

"Row in to land," Maurice said.

He began to put on his clothes. Salvatore turned the boat round and they drew near to the rocks. The vapors were lifting now, gathering themselves up to reveal the blue of the sky, but the sea was still gray and mysterious, and the land looked like a land in a dream. Presently Gaspare put his fists to his eyes, lifted his head, and sat up. He looked at his master gloomily, as if in rebuke, and under this glance Maurice began to feel guilty, as if he had done something wrong in yielding to his strange impulses in the sea.

"I was only swimming under water, Gaspare," he said, apologetically.

The boy said nothing.

"I know now," continued Maurice, "that I shall never come to any harm with you to look after me."

Still Gaspare said nothing. He sat there on the floor of the boat with his dripping clothes clinging to his body, staring before him as if he were too deeply immersed in gloomy thoughts to hear what was being said to him.

"Gaspare!" Maurice exclaimed, moved by a sudden impulse. "Do you think you would be very unhappy away from your 'paese'?"

Gaspare shifted forward suddenly. A light gleamed in his eyes.

"D'you think you could be happy with me in England?"

He smiled.

"Si, signore!"

"When we have to go away from Sicily I shall ask the signora to let me take you with us."

Gaspare said nothing, but he looked at Salvatore, and his wet face was like a song of pride and triumph.

CHAPTER XIV

That day, ere he started with Gaspare for the house of the priest, Maurice made a promise to Maddalena. He pledged himself to go with her and her father to the great fair of San Felice, which takes place annually in the early days of June, when the throng of tourists has departed, and the long heats of the summer have not yet fully set in. He gave this promise in the presence of Salvatore and Gaspare, and while he did so he was making up his mind to something. That day at the fair should be the day of his farewell to Maddalena. Hermione must surely be coming back in June. It was impossible that she could remain in Kairouan later. The fury of the African summer would force her to leave the sacred city, her mission of salvation either accomplished or rendered forever futile by the death of her friend. And then, when Hermione came, within a short time no doubt they would start for England, taking Gaspare with them. For Maurice really meant to keep the boy in their service. After the strange scene of the morning he felt as if Gaspare were one of the family, a retainer with whose devoted protection he could never dispense. Hermione, he was sure, would not object.

Hermione would not object. As he thought that, Maurice was conscious of a feeling such as sometimes moves a child, upon whom a parent or guardian has laid a gently restraining hand, violently to shrug his shoulders and twist his body in the effort to get away and run wild in freedom. He knew how utterly unreasonable and contemptible his sensation was, yet he had it. The sun had bred in him not merely a passion for complete personal liberty, but for something more, for lawlessness. For a moment he envied Gaspare, the peasant boy, whose ardent youth was burdened with so few duties to society, with so few obligations.

What was expected of Gaspare? Only a willing service, well paid, which he could leave forever at any moment he pleased. To his family he must, no doubt, give some of his earnings, but in return he was looked up to by all, even by his father, as a little god. And in everything else was not he free, wonderfully free in this island of the south, able to be careless, unrestrained, wild as a young hawk, yet to remain uncondemned, unwondered at?

And he—Maurice?

He thought of Hermione's ardent and tenderly observant eyes with a sort of terror. If she could know or even suspect his feelings of the previous night, what a tragedy he would be at once involved in! The very splendor of Hermione's nature, the generous nobility of her character, would make that tragedy the more poignant. She felt with such intensity, she thought she had so much. Careless though his own nature was, doubly careless here in Sicily, Maurice almost sickened at the idea of her ever suspecting the truth, that he was capable of being strongly drawn towards a girl like Maddalena, that he could feel as if a peasant who could neither read nor write caught at something within him that was like the essence of his life, like the core of that by which he enjoyed, suffered, desired.

But, of course, she would never suspect. And he laughed at himself, and made the promise about the fair, and, having made it and his resolution in regard to it, almost violently resolved to take no thought for the morrow, but to live carelessly and with gayety the days that lay before him, the few more days of his utter freedom in Sicily.

After all, he was doing no wrong. He had lived and was going to live innocently. And now that he realized things, realized himself, he would be reasonable. He would be careless, gay—yes, but not reckless, not utterly reckless as he felt inclined to be.

"What day of June is the fair?" he asked, looking at Maddalena.

"The 11th of June, signore," said Salvatore. "There will be many donkeys there—good donkeys."

Gaspare began to look fierce.

"I think of buying a donkey," added Salvatore, carelessly, with his small, shrewd eyes fixed upon Maurice's face.

Gaspare muttered something unintelligible.

"How much do they cost?" said Maurice.

"For a hundred lire you can get a very good donkey. It would be useful to Maddalena. She could go to the village sometimes then—she could go to Marechiaro to gossip with the neighbors."

"Has Maddalena broken her legs—Madonna!" burst forth Gaspare.

"Come along, Gaspare!" said Maurice, hastily.

He bade good-bye to the fisherman and his daughter, and set off with Gaspare through the trees.

"Be nice to Salvatore," said Maurice, as they went down towards the rocky wall.

"But he wants to make you give him a donkey, signorino. You do not know him. When he is with you at the fair he will—"

"Never mind. I say, Gaspare, I want—I want that day at the fair to be a real festa. Don't let's have any row on that day."

Gaspare looked at him with surprised, inquiring eyes, as if struck by his serious voice, by the insisting pressure in it.

"Why that day specially, signorino?" he asked, after a pause.

"Oh, well—it will be my last day of—I mean that the signora will be coming back from Africa by then, and we shall—"

"Si, signore?"

"We sha'n't be able to run quite so wild as we do now, you see. And, besides, we shall be going to England very soon then."

Gaspare's face lighted up.

"Shall I see London, signorino?"

"Yes," said Maurice.

He felt a sickness at his heart.

"I should like to live in London always," said Gaspare, excitedly.

"In London! You don't know it. In London you will scarcely ever see the sun."

"Aren't there theatres in London, signorino?"

"Theatres? Yes, of course. But there is no sea, Gaspare, there are no mountains."

"Are there many soldiers? Are there beautiful women?"

"Oh, there are plenty of soldiers and women."

"I should like always to live in London," repeated Gaspare, firmly.

"Well—perhaps you will. But—remember—we are all to be happy at the fair of San Felice."

"Si, signore. But be careful, or Salvatore will make you buy him a donkey. He had a wine-shop once, long ago, in Marechiaro, and the wine—Per Dio, it was always vino battezzato!"

"What do you mean?"

"Salvatore always put water in it. He is cattivo—and when he is angry—"

"I know. You told me. But it doesn't matter. We shall soon be going away, and then we sha'n't see him any more."

"Signorino?"

"Well?"

"You—do you want to stay here always?"

"I like being here."

"Why do you want to stay?"

For once Maurice felt as if he could not meet the boy's great, steady eyes frankly. He looked away.

"I like the sun," he answered. "I love it! I should like to live in the sunshine forever."

"And I should like to live always in London," reiterated Gaspare. "You want to live here because you have always been in London, and I want to live in London because I have always been here. Ecco!"

Maurice tried to laugh.

"Perhaps that is it. We wish for what we can't have. Dio mio!"

He threw out his arms.

"But, anyhow, I've not done with Sicily yet! Come on, Gaspare! Now for the rocks! Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! Morettina bella ciao!"

He burst out into a song, but his voice hardly rang true, and Gaspare looked at him again with a keen inquiry.

Artois was not yet destined to die. He said that Hermione would not let him die, that with her by his side it was useless for Death to approach him, to desire him, to claim him. Perhaps her courage gave to him the will to struggle against his enemy. The French doctor, deeply, almost sentimentally interested in the ardent woman who spoke his language with perfection and carried out such instructions of his as she considered sensible, with delicate care and strong thoroughness, thought and said so.

"But for madame," he said to Artois, "you would have died, monsieur. And why? Because till she came you had not the will to live. And it is the will to live that assists the doctor."

"I cannot be so ungallant as to die now," Artois replied, with a feeble but not sad smile. "Were I to do so, madame would think me ungrateful. No, I shall live. I feel now that I am going to live."

And, in fact, from the night of Maurice's visit with Gaspare to the house of the sirens he began to get better. The inflammation abated, the temperature fell till it was normal, the agony died away gradually from the tormented body, and slowly, very slowly, the strength that had ebbed began to return. One day, when the doctor said that there was no more danger of any relapse, Artois called Hermione and told her that now she must think no more of him, but of herself; that she must pack up her trunk and go back to her husband.

"You have saved me, and I have killed your honeymoon," he said, rather sadly. "That will always be a regret in my life. But, now go, my dear friend, and try to assuage your husband's wrath against me. How he must hate me!"

"Why, Emile?"

"Are you really a woman? Yes, I know that. No man could have tended me as you have. Yet, being a woman, how can you ask that question?"

"Maurice understands. He is blessedly understanding."

"Don't try his blessed comprehension of you and of me too far. You must go, indeed."

"I will go."

A shadow that he tried to keep back flitted across Artois's pale face, over which the unkempt beard straggled in a way that would have appalled his Parisian barber. Hermione saw it.

"I will go," she repeated, quietly, "when I can take you with me."

"But—"

"Hush! You are not to argue. Haven't you an utter contempt for those who do things by halves? Well, I have. When you can travel we'll go together."

"Where?"

"To Sicily. It will be hot there, but after this it will seem cool as the Garden of Eden under those trees where—but you remember! And there is always the breeze from the sea. And then from there, very soon, you can get a ship from Messina and go back to France, to Marseilles. Don't talk, Emile. I am writing to-night to tell Maurice."

And she left the room with quick softness.

Artois did not protest. He told himself that he had not the strength to struggle against the tenderness that surrounded him, that made it sweet to return to life. But he wondered silently how Maurice would receive him, how the dancing faun was bearing, would bear, this interference with his new happiness.

"When I am in Sicily I shall see at once, I shall know," he thought. "But till then—"

And he gave up the faint attempt to analyze the possible feelings of another, and sank again into the curious peace of convalescence.

And Hermione wrote to her husband, telling him of her plan, calling upon him with the fearless enthusiasm that was characteristic of her to welcome it and to rejoice, with her, in Artois's returning health and speedy presence in Sicily.

Maurice read this letter on the terrace alone. Gaspare had gone down on the donkey to Marechiaro to buy a bottle of Marsala, which Lucrezia demanded for the making of a zampaglione, and Lucrezia was upon the mountain-side spreading linen to dry in the sun. It was nearly the end of May now, and the trees in the ravine were thick with all their leaves. The stream that ran down through the shadows towards the sea was a tiny trickle of water, and the long, black snakes were coming boldly forth from their winter hiding-places to sun themselves among the bowlders that skirted the mountain tracks.

"I can't tell for certain," Hermione wrote, "how soon we shall arrive, but Emile is picking up strength every day, and I think, I pray, it may not be long. I dare to hope that we shall be with you about the second week of June. Oh, Maurice, something in me is almost mad with joy, is like Gaspare dancing the tarantella, when I think of coming up the mountain-side again with you as I came that first day, that first day of my real life. Tell Sebastiano he must play the 'Pastorale' to welcome me. And you—but I seem to feel your dear welcome here, to feel your hands holding mine, to see your eyes looking at me like Sicily. Isn't it strange? I feel out here in Africa as if you were Sicily. But you are, indeed, for me. You are Sicily, you are the sun, you are everything that means joy to me, that means music, that means hope and peace. Buon riposo, my dearest one. Can you feel—can you—how happy I am to-night?"

The second week in June! Maurice stood holding the letter in his hand. The fair of San Felice would take place during the second week in June. That was what he was thinking, not of Artois's convalescence, not of his coming to Sicily. If Hermione arrived before June 11th, could he go to the fair with Maddalena? He might go, of course. He might tell Hermione. She would say "Go!" She believed in him and had never tried to curb his freedom. A less suspicious woman than she was had surely never lived. But if she were in Sicily, if he knew that she was there in the house of the priest, waiting to welcome him at night when he came back from the fair, it would—it would—He laid the letter down. There was a burning heat of impatience, of anxiety, within him. Now that he had received this letter he understood with what intensity he had been looking forward to this day at the fair, to this last festa of his Sicilian life.

"Perhaps they will not come so soon!" he said to him self. "Perhaps they will not be here."

And then he began to think of Artois, to realize the fact that he was coming with Hermione, that he would be part of the final remnant of these Sicilian days.

His feeling towards Artois in London had been sympathetic, even almost reverential. He had looked at him as if through Hermione's eyes, had regarded him with a sort of boyish reverence. Hermione had said that Artois was a great man, and Maurice had felt that he was a great man, had mentally sat at his feet. Perhaps in London he would be ready to sit at his feet again. But was he ready to sit at his feet here in Sicily? As he thought of Artois's penetrating eyes and cool, intellectual face, of his air of authority, of his close intimacy with Hermione, he felt almost afraid of him. He did not want Artois to come here to Sicily. He hated his coming. He almost dreaded it as the coming of a spy. The presence of Artois would surely take away all the savor of this wild, free life, would import into it an element of the library, of the shut room, of that intellectual existence which Maurice was learning to think of as almost hateful.

And Hermione called upon him to rejoice with her over the fact that Artois would be able to accompany her. How she misunderstood him! Good God! how she misunderstood him! It seemed really as if she believed that his mind was cast in precisely the same mould as her own, as if she thought that because she and he were married they must think and feel always alike. How absurd that was, and how impossible!

A sense of being near a prison door came upon him. He threw Hermione's letter onto the writing-table, and went out into the sun.

When Gaspare returned that evening Maurice told him the news from Africa. The boy's face lit up.

"Oh, then shall we go to London?" he said.

"Why not?" Maurice exclaimed, almost violently. "It will all be different! Yes, we had better go to London!"

"Signorino."

"Well, what is it, Gaspare?"

"You do not like that signore to come here."

"I—why not? Yes, I—"

"No, signorino. I can see in your face that you do not like it. Your face got quite black just now. But if you do not like it why do you let him come? You are the padrone here."

"You don't understand. The signore is a friend of mine."

"But you said he was the friend of the signora."

"So he is. He is the friend of both of us."

Gaspare said nothing for a moment. His mind was working busily. At last he said:

"Then Maddalena—when the signora comes will she be the friend of the signora, as well as your friend?"

"Maddalena—that has nothing to do with it."

"But Maddalena is your friend!"

"That's quite different."

"I do not understand how it is in England," Gaspare said, gravely. "But"—and he nodded his head wisely and spread out his hands—"I understand many things, signorino, perhaps more than you think. You do not want the signore to come. You are angry at his coming."

"He is a very kind signore," said Maurice, hastily. "And he can speak dialetto."

Gaspare smiled and shook his head again. But he did not say anything more. For a moment Maurice had an impulse to speak to him frankly, to admit him into the intimacy of a friend. He was a Sicilian, although he was only a boy. He was Sicilian and he would understand.

"Gaspare," he began.

"Si, signore."

"As you understand so much—"

"Si, signore?"

"Perhaps you—" He checked himself, realizing that he was on the edge of doing an outrageous thing. "You must know that the friends of the signora are my friends and that I am always glad to welcome them."

"Va bene, signorino! Va bene!"

The boy began to look glum, understanding at once that he was being played with.

"I must go to give Tito his food."

And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went away round the corner of the cottage, whistling the tune of the "Canzone di Marechiaro."

Maurice began to feel as if he were in the dark, but as if he were being watched there. He wondered how clearly Gaspare read him, how much he knew. And Artois? When he came, with his watchful eyes, there would be another observer of the Sicilian change. He did not much mind Gaspare, but he would hate Artois. He grew hot at the mere thought of Artois being there with him, observing, analyzing, playing the literary man's part in this out-door life of the mountains and of the sea.

"I'm not a specimen," he said to himself, "and I'm damned if I'll be treated as one!"

It did not occur to him that he was anticipating that which might never happen. He was as unreasonable as a boy who foresees possible interference with his pleasures.

This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily Artois, and its communication to Maurice, pushed him on to the recklessness which he had previously resolved to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to him alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless holiday time was coming to an end, but he must have felt, too, that only tenderness and strong affection were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains that already he had worn with happiness and peace. But the knowledge that with Hermione was coming Artois gave to him a definite vision of something that was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself, he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's coldness of feeling towards him. Had any one spoken of it to him he would probably have denied that this was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's vision of a cage was conjured up by Artois's mental attitude towards him in London, the attitude of the observer who might, in certain circumstances, be cruel, who was secretly ready to be cruel. And, anticipating the unpleasant probable, he threw himself with the greater violence into the enjoyment of his few more days of complete liberty.

He wrote to Hermione, expressing as naturally as he could his ready acquiescence in her project, and then gave himself up to the light-heartedness that came with the flying moments of these last days of emancipation in the sun. His mood was akin to the mood of the rich man, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The music, he knew, must presently fail. The tarantella must come to an end. Well, then he would dance with his whole soul. He would not husband his breath nor save his strength. He would be thoughtless because for a moment he had thought too much, too much for his nature of the dancing faun who had been given for a brief space of time his rightful heritage.

Each day now he went down to the sea.

"How hot it is!" he would say to Gaspare. "If I don't have a bath I shall be suffocated."

"Si, signore. At what time shall we go?"

"After the siesta. It will be glorious in the sea to-day."

"Si, signore, it is good to be in the sea."

The boy smiled, at last would sometimes laugh. He loved his padrona, but he was a male and a Sicilian. And the signora had gone across the sea to her friend. These visits to the sea seemed to him very natural. He would have done the same as his padrone in similar circumstances with a light heart, with no sense of doing wrong. Only sometimes he raised a warning voice.

"Signorino," he would say, "do not forget what I have told you."

"What, Gaspare?"

"Salvatore is birbante. You think he likes you."

"Why shouldn't he like me?"

"You are a forestiere. To him you are as nothing. But he likes your money."

"Well, then? I don't care whether he likes me or not. What does it matter?"

"Be careful, signorino. The Sicilian has a long hand. Every one knows that. Even the Napoletano knows that. I have a friend who was a soldier at Naples, and—"

"Come, now, Gaspare! What reason will there ever be for Salvatore to turn against me?"

"Va bene, signorino, va bene! But Salvatore is a bad man when he thinks any one has tried to do him a wrong. He has blood in his eyes then, and when we Sicilians see through blood we do not care what we do—no, not if all the world is looking at us."

"I shall do no wrong to Salvatore. What do you mean?"

"Niente, signorino, niente!"

"Stick the cloth on Tito, and put something in the pannier. Al mare! Al mare!"

The boy's warning rang in deaf ears. For Maurice really meant what he said. He was reckless, perhaps, but he was going to wrong no one, neither Salvatore, nor Hermione, nor Maddalena. The coming of Artois drove him into the arms of pleasure, but it would never drive him into the arms of sin. For it was surely no sin to make a little love in this land of the sun, to touch a girl's hand, to snatch a kiss sometimes from the soft lips of a girl, from whom he would never ask anything more, whatever leaping desire might prompt him.

And Salvatore was always at hand. He seldom put to sea in these days unless Maurice went with him in the boat. His greedy eyes shone with a light of satisfaction when he saw Tito coming along the dusty white road from Isola Bella, and at night, when he crossed himself superstitiously before Maria Addolorata, he murmured a prayer that more strangers might be wafted to his "Paese," many strangers with money in their pockets and folly in their hearts. Then let the sea be empty of fish and the wind of the storm break up his boat—it would not matter. He would still live well. He might even at the last have money in the bank at Marechiaro, houses in the village, a larger wine-shop than Oreste in the Corso.

But he kept his small eyes wide open and seldom let Maddalena be long alone with the forestiere, and this supervision began to irritate Maurice, to make him at last feel hostile to Salvatore. He remembered Gaspare's words about the fisherman—"To him you are as nothing. But he likes your money"—and a longing to trick this fox of the sea, who wanted to take all and make no return, came to him.

"Why can one never be free in this world?" he thought, almost angrily. "Why must there always be some one on the watch to see what one is doing, to interfere with one's pleasure?"

He began presently almost to hate Salvatore, who evidently thought that Maurice was ready to wrong him, and who, nevertheless, grasped greedily at every soldo that came from the stranger's pocket, and touted perpetually for more.

His attitude was hideous. Maurice pretended not to notice it, and was careful to keep on the most friendly possible terms with him. But, while they acted their parts, the secret sense of enmity grew steadily in the two men, as things grow in the sun. When Maurice saw the fisherman, with a smiling, bird's face, coming to meet him as he climbed up through the trees to the sirens' house, he sometimes longed to strike him. And when Maurice went away with Gaspare in the night towards the white road where Tito, tied to a stake, was waiting to carry the empty pannier that had contained a supper up the mountain to the house of the priest, Salvatore stood handling his money, and murmuring:

"Maledetto straniero! Madonna! Ma io sono più birbante di Lei, mille volte più birbante, Dio mio!"

And he laughed as he went towards the sirens' house. It amused him to think that a stranger, an "Inglese," fancied that he could play with a Sicilian, who had never been "worsted," even by one of his own countrymen.

CHAPTER XV

Maurice had begun to dread the arrival of the post. Artois was rapidly recovering his strength, and in each of her letters Hermione wrote with a more glowing certainty of her speedy return to Sicily, bringing the invalid with her. Would they come before June 11th, the day of the fair? That was the question which preoccupied Maurice, which began to haunt him, and set a light of anxiety in his eyes when he saw Antonino climbing up the mountain-side with the letter-bag slung over his shoulder. He felt as if he could not forego this last festa. When it was over, when the lights had gone out in the houses of San Felice, and the music was silent, and the last rocket had burst in the sky, showering down its sparks towards the gaping faces of the peasants, he would be ready to give up this free, unintellectual life, this life in which his youth ran wild. He would resign himself to the inevitable, return to the existence in which, till now, he had found happiness, and try to find it there once more, try to forget the strange voices that had called him, the strange impulses that had prompted him. He would go back to his old self, and seek pleasure in the old paths, where he walked with those whom society would call his "equals," and did not spend his days with men who wrung their scant livelihood from the breast of the earth and from the breast of the sea, with women whose eyes, perhaps, were full of flickering fires, but who had never turned the leaves of a printed book, or traced a word upon paper. He would sit again at the feet of people who were cleverer and more full of knowledge than himself, and look up to them with reverence.

But he must have his festa first. He counted upon that. He desired that so strongly, almost so fiercely, that he felt as if he could not bear to be thwarted, as if, should fate interfere between him and the fulfilment of this longing, he might do something almost desperate. He looked forward to the fair with something of the eagerness and the anticipation of a child expectant of strange marvels, of wonderful and mysterious happenings, and the name San Felice rang in his ears with a music that was magical, suggesting curious joys.

He often talked about the fair to Gaspare, asking him many questions which the boy was nothing loath to answer.

To Gaspare the fair of San Felice was the great event of the Sicilian year. He had only been to it twice; the first time when he was but ten years old, and was taken by an uncle who had gone to seek his fortune in South America, and had come back for a year to his native land to spend some of the money he had earned as a cook, and afterwards as a restaurant proprietor, in Buenos Ayres; the second time when he was sixteen, and had succeeded in saving up a little of the money given to him by travellers whom he had accompanied as a guide on their excursions. And these two days had been red-letter days in his life. His eyes shone with excitement when he spoke of the festivities at San Felice, of the bands of music—there were three "musics" in the village; of the village beauties who sauntered slowly up and down, dressed in brocades and adorned with jewels which had been hoarded in the family chests for generations, and were only taken out to be worn at the fair and at wedding-feasts; of the booths where all the desirable things of the world were exposed for sale—rings, watches, chains, looking-glasses, clocks that sang and chimed with bells like church towers, yellow shoes, and caps of all colors, handkerchiefs, and shawls with fringes that, when worn, drooped almost to the ground; ballads written by native poets, relating the life and the trial of Musolino, the famous brigand, his noble address to his captors, and his despair when he was condemned to eternal confinement; and the adventures of Giuseppe Moroni, called "Il Niccheri" (illetterato), composed in eight-lined verses, and full of the most startling and passionate occurrences. There were donkeys, too—donkeys from all parts of Sicily, mules from Girgenti, decorated with red-and-yellow harness, with pyramids of plumes and bells upon their heads, painted carts with pictures of the miracles of the saints and the conquests of the Saracens, turkeys and hens, and even cages containing yellow birds that came from islands far away and that sang with the sweetness of the angels. The ristoranti were crowded with people, playing cards and eating delicious food, and outside upon the pavements were dozens of little tables at which you could sit, drinking syrups of beautiful hues and watching at your ease the marvels of the show. Here came boys from Naples to sing and dance, peddlers with shining knives and elegant walking-sticks for sale, fortune-tellers with your fate already printed and neatly folded in an envelope, sometimes a pigeon-man with a high black hat, who made his doves hop from shoulder to shoulder along a row of school-children, or a man with a monkey that played antics to the sound of a grinding organ, and that was dressed up in a red worsted jacket and a pair of cloth trousers. And there were shooting-galleries and puppet-shows and dancing-rooms, and at night, when the darkness came, there were giuochi di fuoco which lit up the whole sky, till you could see Etna quite plainly.

"E' veramente un paradiso!" concluded Gaspare.

"A paradise!" echoed Maurice. "A paradise! I say, Gaspare, why can't we always live in paradise? Why can't life be one long festa?"

"Non lo so, signore. And the signora? Do you think she will be here for the fair?"

"I don't know. But if she is here, I am not sure that she will come to see it."

"Why not, signorino? Will she stay with the sick signore?"

"Perhaps. But I don't think she will be here. She does not say she will be here."

"Do you want her to be here, signorino?" Gaspare asked, abruptly.

"Why do you ask such a question? Of course I am happy, very happy, when the signora is here."

As he said the words Maurice remembered how happy he had been in the house of the priest alone with Hermione. Indeed, he had thought that he was perfectly happy, that he had nothing left to wish for. But that seemed long ago. He wondered if he could ever again feel that sense of perfect contentment. He could scarcely believe so. A certain feverishness had stolen into his Sicilian life. He felt often like a man in suspense, uncertain of the future, almost apprehensive. He no longer danced the tarantella with the careless abandon of a boy. And yet he sometimes had a strange consciousness that he was near to something that might bring to him a joy such as he had never yet experienced.

"I wish I knew what day Hermione is arriving," he thought, almost fretfully. "I wish she wouldn't keep me hung up in this condition of uncertainty. She seems to think that I have nothing to do but just wait here upon the pleasure of Artois."

With that last thought the old sense of injury rose in him again. This friend of Hermione's was spoiling everything, was being put before every one. It was really monstrous that even during their honeymoon this old friendship should intrude, should be allowed to govern their actions and disturb their serenity. Now that Artois was out of danger Maurice began to forget how ill he had been, began sometimes to doubt whether he had ever been so ill as Hermione supposed. Perhaps Artois was one of those men who liked to have a clever woman at his beck and call. These literary fellows were often terribly exigent, eaten up with the sense of their own importance. But he, Maurice, was not going to allow himself to be made a cat's-paw of. He would make Artois understand that he was not going to permit his life to be interfered with by any one.

"I'll let him see that when he comes," he said to himself. "I'll take a strong line. A man must be the master of his own life if he's worth anything. These Sicilians understand that."

He began secretly to admire what before he had thought almost hateful, the strong Arab characteristics that linger on in many Sicilians, to think almost weak and unmanly the Western attitude to woman.

"I will be master," he said to himself again. "All these Sicilians are wondering that I ever let Hermione go to Africa. Perhaps they think I'm a muff to have given in about it. And now, when Hermione comes back with a man, they'll suppose—God knows what they won't imagine!"

He had begun so to identify himself with the Sicilians about Marechiaro that he cared what they thought, was becoming sensitive to their opinion of him as if he had been one of themselves. One day Gaspare told him a story of a contadino who had bought a house in the village, but who, being unable to complete the payment, had been turned out into the street.

"And now, signorino," Gaspare concluded, "they are all laughing at him in Marechiaro. He dare not show himself any more in the Piazza. When a man cannot go any more into the Piazza—Madonna!"

He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands in a gesture of contemptuous pity.

"E' finito!" he exclaimed.

"Certo!" said Maurice.

He was resolved that he would never be in such a case. Hermione, he felt now, did not understand the Sicilians as he understood them. If she did she would not bring back Artois from Africa, she would not arrive openly with him. But surely she ought to understand that such an action would make people wonder, would be likely to make them think that Artois was something more than her friend. And then Maurice thought of the day of their arrival, of his own descent to the station, to wait upon the platform for the train. Artois was not going to stay in the house of the priest. That was impossible, as there was no guest-room. He would put up at the hotel in Marechiaro. But that would make little difference. He was to arrive with Hermione. Every one would know that she had spent all this time with him in Africa. Maurice grew hot as he thought of the smiles on the Sicilian faces, of the looks of astonishment at the strange doings of the forestieri. Hermione's enthusiastic kindness was bringing her husband almost to shame. It was a pity that people were sometimes thoughtless in their eager desire to be generous and sympathetic.

One day, when Maurice had been brooding over this matter of the Sicilian's view of Hermione's proceedings, the spirit moved him to go down on foot to Marechiaro to see if there were any letters for him at the post. It was now June 7th. In four days would come the fair. As the time for it drew near, his anxiety lest anything should interfere to prevent his going to it with Maddalena increased, and each day at post time he was filled with a fever of impatience to know whether there would be a letter from Africa or not. Antonino generally appeared about four o'clock, but the letters were in the village long before then, and this afternoon Maurice felt that he could not wait for the boy's coming. He had a conviction that there was a letter, a decisive letter from Hermione, fixing at last the date of her arrival with Artois. He must have it in his hands at the first possible moment. If he went himself to the post he would know the truth at least an hour and a half sooner than if he waited in the house of the priest. He resolved, therefore, to go, got his hat and stick, and set out, after telling Gaspare, who was watching for birds with his gun, that he was going for a stroll on the mountain-side and might be away for a couple of hours.

It was a brilliant afternoon. The landscape looked hard in the fiery sunshine, the shapes of the mountains fierce and relentless, the dry watercourses almost bitter in their barrenness. Already the devastation of the summer was beginning to be apparent. All tenderness had gone from the higher slopes of the mountains which, jocund in spring and in autumn with growing crops, were now bare and brown, and seamed like the hide of a tropical reptile gleaming with metallic hues. The lower slopes were still panoplied with the green of vines and of trees, but the ground beneath the trees was arid. The sun was coming into his dominion with pride and cruelty, like a conqueror who loots the land he takes to be his own.

But Maurice did not mind the change, which drove the tourists northward, and left Sicily to its own people. He even rejoiced in it. As each day the heat increased he was conscious of an increasing exultation, such as surely the snakes and the lizards feel as they come out of their hiding-places into the golden light. He was filled with a glorious sense of expansion, as if his capabilities grew larger, as if they were developed by heat like certain plants. None of the miseries that afflict many people in the violent summers which govern southern lands were his. His skin did not peel, his eyes did not become inflamed, nor did his head ache under the action of the burning rays. They came to him like brothers and he rejoiced in their company. To-day, as he descended to Marechiaro, he revelled in the sun. Its ruthlessness made him feel ruthless. He was conscious of that. At this moment he was in absolutely perfect physical health. His body was lithe and supple, yet his legs and arms were hard with springing muscle. His warm blood sang through his veins like music through the pipes of an organ. His eyes shone with the superb animation of youth that is radiantly sound. For, despite his anxiety, his sometimes almost fretful irritation when he thought about the coming of Artois and the passing of his own freedom, there were moments when he felt as if he could leap with the sheer joy of life, as if he could lift up his arms and burst forth into a wild song of praise to his divinity, the sun. And this grand condition of health made him feel ruthless, as the man who conquers and enters a city in triumph feels ruthless. As he trod down towards Marechiaro to-day, thinking of the letter that perhaps awaited him, it seemed to him that it would be monstrous if anything, if any one, were to interfere with his day of joy, the day he was looking forward to with such eager anticipation. He felt inclined to trample over opposition. Yet what could he do if, by some evil chance, Hermione and Artois arrived the day before the fair, or on the very day of the fair? He hurried his steps. He wanted to be in the village, to know whether there was a letter for him from Africa.

When he came into the village it was about half-past two o'clock, and the long, narrow main street was deserted. The owners of some of the antiquity shops had already put up their shutters for the summer. Other shops, still open, showed gaping doorways, through which no travellers passed. Inside, the proprietors were dozing among their red brocades, their pottery, their Sicilian jewelry and obscure pictures thick with dust, guarded by squadrons of large, black flies, which droned on walls and ceilings, crept over the tiled floors, and clung to the draperies and laces which lay upon the cabinets. In the shady little rooms of the barbers small boys in linen jackets kept a drowsy vigil for the proprietors, who were sleeping in some dark corner of bedchamber or wine-shop. But no customer came to send them flying. The sun made the beards push on the brown Sicilian faces, but no one wanted to be shaved before the evening fell. Two or three lads lounged by on their way to the sea with towels and bathing-drawers over their arms. A few women were spinning flax on the door-lintels, or filling buckets of water from the fountain. A few children were trying to play mysterious games in the narrow alleys that led downward to the sea and upward to the mountains on the left and right of the street. A donkey brayed under an archway as if to summon its master from his siesta. A cat stole along the gutter, and vanished into a hole beneath a shut door. But the village was almost like a dead village, slain by the sun in his carelessness of pride.

On his way to the post Maurice passed through the Piazza that was the glory of Marechiaro and the place of assemblage for its people. Here the music sounded on festa days before the stone steps that led up to the church of San Giuseppe. Here was the principal caffè, the Caffè Nuovo, where granite and ices were to be had, delicious yellow cakes, and chocolate made up into shapes of crowing cocks, of pigs, of little men with hats, and of saints with flowing robes. Here, too, was the club, with chairs and sofas now covered with white, and long tables adorned with illustrated journals and the papers of Catania, of Messina, and Palermo. But at this hour the caffè was closed and the club was empty. For the sun beat down with fury upon the open space with its tiled pavement, and the seats let into the wall that sheltered the Piazza from the precipice that frowned above the sea were untenanted by loungers. As Maurice went by he thought of Gaspare's words, "When a man cannot go any more into the Piazza—Madonna, it is finished!" This was the place where the public opinion of Marechiaro was formed, where fame was made and characters were taken away. He paused for an instant by the church, then went on under the clock tower and came to the post.

"Any letters for me, Don Paolo?" he asked of the postmaster.

The old man saluted him languidly through the peep-hole.

"Si, signore, ce ne sono."

He turned to seek for them while Maurice waited. He heard the flies buzzing. Their noise was loud in his ears. His heart beat strongly and he was gnawed by suspense. Never before had he felt so anxious, so impatient to know anything as he was now to know if among the letters there was one from Hermione.

"Ecco, signore!"

"Grazie!"

Maurice took the packet.

"A rivederci!"

"A rivederlo, signore."

He went away down the street. But now he had his letters he did not look at them immediately. Something held him back from looking at them until he had come again into the Piazza. It was still deserted. He went over to the seat by the wall, and sat down sideways, so that he could look over the wall to the sea immediately below him. Then, very slowly, he drew out his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, lit it, and began to smoke like a man who was at ease and idle. He glanced over the wall. At the foot of the precipice by the sea was the station of Cattaro, at which Hermione and Artois would arrive when they came. He could see the platform, some trucks of merchandise standing on the rails, the white road winding by towards San Felice and Etna. After a long look down he turned at last to the packet from the post which he had laid upon the hot stone at his side. The Times, the "Pink 'un," the Illustrated London News, and three letters. The first was obviously a bill forwarded from London. The second was also from England. He recognized the handwriting of his mother. The third? He turned it over. Yes, it was from Hermione. His instinct had not deceived him. He was certain, too, that it did not deceive him now. He was certain that this was the letter that fixed the date of her coming with Artois. He opened the two other letters and glanced over them, and then at last he tore the covering from Hermione's. A swift, searching look was enough. The letter dropped from his hand to the seat. He had seen these words:

"Isn't it splendid? Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat till the tenth. We shall take that, and be at Cattaro on the eleventh at five o'clock in the afternoon…"

"Isn't it splendid?"

For a moment he sat quite still in the glare of the sun, mentally repeating to himself these words of his wife. So the inevitable had happened. For he felt it was inevitable. Fate was against him. He was not to have his pleasure.

"Signorino! Come sta lei? Lei sta bene?"

He started and looked up. He had heard no footstep. Salvatore stood by him, smiling at him, Salvatore with bare feet, and a fish-basket slung over his arm.

"Buon giorno, Salvatore!" he answered, with an effort.

Salvatore looked at Maurice's cigarette, put down the basket, and sat down on the seat by Maurice's side.

"I haven't smoked to-day, signore," he began. "Dio mio! But it must be good to have plenty of soldi!"

"Ecco!"

Maurice held out his cigarette-case.

"Take two—three!"

"Grazie, signore, mille grazie!"

He took them greedily.

"And the fair, signorino—only four days now to the fair! I have been to order the donkeys for me and Maddalena."

"Davvero?" Maurice said, mechanically.

"Si, signore. From Angelo of the mill. He wanted fifteen lire, but I laughed at him. I was with him a good hour and I got them for nine. Per Dio! Fifteen lire and to a Siciliano! For he didn't know you were coming. I took care not to tell him that."

"Oh, you took care not to tell him that I was coming!"

Maurice was looking over the wall at the platform of the station far down below. He seemed to see himself upon it, waiting for the train to glide in on the day of the fair, waiting among the smiling Sicilian facchini.

"Si, signore. Was not I right?"

"Quite right."

"Per Dio, signore, these are good cigarettes. Where do they come from?"

"From Cairo, in Egypt."

"Egitto! They must cost a lot."

He edged nearer to Maurice.

"You must be very happy, signorino."

"I!" Maurice laughed. "Madonna! Why?"

"Because you are so rich!"

There was a fawning sound in the fisherman's voice, a fawning look in his small, screwed-up eyes.

"To you it would be nothing to buy all the donkeys at the fair of San Felice."

Maurice moved ever so little away from him.

"Ah, signorino, if I had been born you how happy I should be!"

And he heaved a great sigh and puffed at the cigarette voluptuously.

Maurice said nothing. He was still looking at the railway platform. And now he seemed to see the train gliding in on the day of the fair of San Felice.

"Signorino! Signorino!"

"Well, what is it, Salvatore?"

"I have ordered the donkeys for ten o'clock. Then we can go quietly. They will be at Isola Bella at ten o'clock. I shall bring Maddalena round in the boat."

"Oh!"

Salvatore chuckled.

"She has got a surprise for you, signore."

"A surprise?"

"Per Dio!"

"What is it?"

His voice was listless, but now he looked at Salvatore.

"I ought not to tell you, signore. But—if I do—you won't ever tell her?"

"No."

"A new gown, signorino, a beautiful new gown, made by Maria Compagni here in the Corso. Will you be at Isola Bella with Gaspare by ten o'clock on the day, signorino?"

"Yes, Salvatore!" Maurice said, in a loud, firm, almost angry voice. "I will be there. Don't doubt it. Addio Salvatore!"

He got up.

"A rivederci, signore. Ma—"

He got up, too, and bent to pick up his fish-basket.

"No, don't come with me. I'm going up now, straight up by the Castello."

"In all this heat? But it's steep there, signore, and the path is all covered with stones. You'll never—"

"That doesn't matter. I like the sun. Addio!"

"And this evening, signorino? You are coming to bathe this evening?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Don't wait for me. Go to sea if you want to!"

"Birbanti!" muttered the fisherman, as he watched Maurice stride away across the Piazza, and strike up the mountain-side by the tiny path that led to the Castello. "You want to get me out of the way, do you? Birbanti! Ah, you fine strangers from England! You think to come here and find men that are babies, do you? men that—"

He went off noiselessly on his bare feet, muttering to himself with the half-smoked cigarette in his lean, brown hand.

Meanwhile, Maurice climbed rapidly up the steep track over the stones in the eye of the sun. He had not lied to Salvatore. While the fisherman had been speaking to him he had come to a decision. A disgraceful decision he knew it to be, but he would keep to it. Nothing should prevent him from keeping to it. He would be at Isola Bella on the day of the fair. He would go to San Felice. He would stay there till the last rocket burst in the sky over Etna, till the last song had been sung, the last toast shouted, the last tarantella danced, the last—kiss given—the last, the very last. He would ignore this message from Africa. He would pretend he had never received it. He would lie about it. Yes, he would lie—but he would have his pleasure. He was determined upon that, and nothing should shake him, no qualms of conscience, no voices within him, no memories of past days, no promptings of duty.

He hurried up the stony path. He did not feel the sun upon him. The sweat poured down over his face, his body. He did not know it. His heart was set hard, and he felt villanous, but he felt quite sure what he was going to do, quite sure that he was going to the fair despite that letter.

When he reached the priest's house he felt exhausted. Without knowing it he had come up the mountain at a racing pace. But he was not tired merely because of that. He sank down in a chair in the sitting-room. Lucrezia came and peeped at him.

"Where is Gaspare?" he asked, putting his hand instinctively over the pocket in which were the letters.

"He is still out after the birds, signore. He has shot five already."

"Poor little wretches! And he's still out?"

"Si, signore. He has gone on to Don Peppino's terreno now. There are many birds there. How hot you are, signorino! Shall I—"

"No, no. Nothing, Lucrezia! Leave me alone!"

She disappeared.

Then Maurice drew the letters from his pocket and slowly spread out Hermione's in his lap. He had not read it through yet. He had only glanced at it and seen what he had feared to see. Now he read it word by word, very slowly and carefully. When he had come to the end he kept it on his knee and sat for some time quite still.

In the letter Hermione asked him to go to the Hôtel Regina Margherita at Marechiaro, and engage two good rooms facing the sea for Artois, a bedroom and a sitting-room. They were to be ready for the eleventh. She wrote with her usual splendid frankness. Her soul was made of sincerity as a sovereign is made of gold.

"I know"—these were her words—"I know you will try and make Emile's coming to Sicily a little festa. Don't think I imagine you are personally delighted at his coming, though I am sure you are delighted at his recovery. He is my old friend, not yours, and I am not such a fool as to suppose that you can care for him at all as I do, who have known him intimately and proved his loyalty and his nobility of nature. But I think, I am certain, Maurice, that you will make his coming a festa for my sake. He has suffered very much. He is as weak almost as a child still. There's something tremendously pathetic in the weakness of body of a man so brilliant in mind, so powerful of soul. It goes right to my heart as I think it would go to yours. Let us make his return to life beautiful and blessed. Sha'n't we? Put flowers in the rooms for me, won't you? Make them look homey. Put some books about. But I needn't tell you. We are one, you and I, and I needn't tell you any more. It would be like telling things to myself—as unnecessary as teaching an organ-grinder how to turn the handle of his organ! Oh, Maurice, I can laugh to-day! I could almost—I—get up and dance the tarantella all alone here in my little, bare room with no books and scarcely any flowers. And at the station show Emile he is welcome. He is a little diffident at coming. He fancies perhaps he will be in the way. But one look of yours, one grasp of your hand will drive it all out of him! God bless you, my dearest. How he has blessed me in giving you to me!"

As Maurice sat there, under his skin, burned deep brown by the sun, there rose a hot flush of red! Yes, he reddened at the thought of what he was going to do, but still he meant to do it. He could not forego his pleasure. He could not. There was something wild and imperious within him that defied his better self at this moment. But the better self was not dead. It was even startlingly alive, enough alive to stand almost aghast at that which was going, it knew, to dominate it—to dominate it for a time, but only for a time. On that he was resolved, as he was resolved to have this one pleasure to which he had looked forward, to which he was looking forward now. Men often mentally put a period to their sinning. Maurice put a period to his sinning as he sat staring at the letter on his knees. And the period which he put was the day of the fair at San Felice. After that day this book of his wild youth was to be closed forever.

After the day of the fair he would live rightly, sincerely, meeting as it deserved to be met the utter sincerity of his wife. He would be, after that date, entirely straight with her. He loved her. As he looked at her letter he felt that he did love, must love, such love as hers. He was not a bad man, but he was a wilful man. The wild heart of youth in him was wilful. Well, after San Felice, he would control that wilfulness of his heart, he would discipline it. He would do more, he would forget that it existed. After San Felice!

With a sigh, like that of a burdened man, he got up, took the letter in his hand, and went out up the mountain-side. There he tore the letter and its envelope into fragments, and hid the fragments in a heap of stones hot with the sun.

When Gaspare came in that evening with a string of little birds in his hand and asked Maurice if there were any letter from Africa to say when the signora would arrive, Maurice answered "No."

"Then the signora will not be here for the fair, signorino?" said the boy.

"I don't suppose—no, Gaspare, she will not be here for the fair."

"She would have written by now if she were coming.

"Yes, if she were coming she would certainly have written by now."

CHAPTER XVI

"Signorino! Signorino! Are you ready?"

It was Gaspare's voice shouting vivaciously from the sunny terrace, where Tito and another donkey, gayly caparisoned and decorated with flowers and little streamers of colored ribbon, were waiting before the steps.

"Si, si! I'm coming in a moment!" replied Maurice's voice from the bedroom.

Lucrezia stood by the wall looking very dismal. She longed to go to the fair, and that made her sad. But there was also another reason for her depression. Sebastiano was still away, and for many days he had not written to her. This was bad enough. But there was something worse. News had come to Marechiaro from a sailor of Messina, a friend of Sebastiano's, that Sebastiano was lingering in the Lipari Isles because he had found a girl there, a pretty girl called Teodora Amalfi, to whom he was paying attentions. And although Lucrezia laughed at the story, and pretended to disbelieve it, her heart was rent by jealousy and despair, and a longing to travel away, to cross the sea, to tear her lover from temptation, to—to speak for a few moments quietly—oh, very quietly—with this Teodora. Even now, while she stared at the donkeys, and at Gaspare in his festa suit, with two large, pink roses above his ears, she put up her hands instinctively to her own ears, as if to pluck the ear-rings out of them, as the Sicilian women of the lower classes do, deliberately, sternly, before they begin to fight their rivals, women who have taken their lovers or their husbands from them.

Ah, if she were only in the Lipari Isles she would speak with Teodora Amalfi, speak with her till the blood flowed! She set her teeth, and her face looked almost old in the sunshine.

"Coraggio, Lucrezia!" laughed Gaspare. "He will come back some day when—when he has sold enough to the people of the isles! But where is the padrone, Dio mio? Signorino! Signorino!"

Maurice appeared at the sitting-room door and came slowly down the steps.

Gaspare stared. "Eccomi!"

"Why, signorino, what is the matter? What has happened?"

"Happened? Nothing!"

"Then why do you look so black?"

"I! It's the shadow of the awning on my face."

He smiled. He kept on smiling.

"I say, Gasparino, how splendid the donkeys are! And you, too!"

He took hold of the boy by the shoulders and turned him round.

"Per Bacco! We shall make a fine show at the fair! I've got money, lot's of money, to spend!"

He showed his portfolio, full of dirty notes. Gaspare's eyes began to sparkle.

"Wait, signorino!"

He lifted his hands to Maurice's striped flannel jacket and thrust two large bunches of flowers and ferns into the two button-holes, to right and left.

"Bravo! Now, then."

"No, no, signorino! Wait!"

"More flowers! But where—what, over my ears, too!"

He began to laugh.

"But—"

"Si, signore, si! To-day you must be a real Siciliano!"

"Va bene!"

He bent down his head to be decorated.

"Pouf! They tickle! There, then! Now let's be off!"

He leaped onto Tito's back. Gaspare sprang up on the other donkey.

"Addio, Lucrezia!"

Maurice turned to her.

"Don't leave the house to-day."

"No, signore," said poor Lucrezia, in a deplorable voice.

"Mind, now! Don't go down to Marechiaro this afternoon."

There was an odd sound, almost of pleading, in his voice.

"No, signore."

"I trust you to be here—remember."

"Va bene, signorino!"

"Ah—a—a—ah!" shouted Gaspare.

They were off.

"Signorino," said Gaspare, presently, when they were in the shadow of the ravine, "why did you say all that to Lucrezia?"

"All what?"

"All that about not leaving the house to-day?"

"Oh—why—it's better to have some one there."

"Si, signore. But why to-day specially?"

"I don't know. There's no particular reason."

"I thought there was."

"No, of course not. How could there be?"

"Non lo so."

"If Lucrezia goes down to the village they'll be filling her ears with that stupid gossip about Sebastiano and that girl—Teodora."

"It was for Lucrezia then, signorino?"

"Yes, for Lucrezia. She's miserable enough already. I don't want her to be a spectacle when—when the signora returns."

"I wonder when she is coming? I wonder why she has not written all these days?"

"Oh, she'll soon come. We shall—we shall very soon have her here with us."

He tried to speak naturally, but found the effort difficult, knowing what he knew, that in the evening of that day Hermione would arrive at the house of the priest and find no preparations made for her return, no one to welcome her but Lucrezia—if, indeed, Lucrezia obeyed his orders and refrained from descending to the village on the chance of hearing some fresh news of her fickle lover. And Artois! There were no rooms engaged for him at the Hôtel Regina Margherita. There were no flowers, no books. Maurice tingled—his whole body tingled for a moment—and he felt like a man guilty of some mean crime and arraigned before all the world. Then he struck Tito with his switch, and began to gallop down the steep path at a breakneck pace, sticking his feet far out upon either side. He would forget. He would put away these thoughts that were tormenting him. He would enjoy this day of pleasure for which he had sacrificed so much, for which he had trampled down his self-respect in the dust.

When they reached the road by Isola Bella, Salvatore's boat was just coming round the point, vigorously propelled by the fisherman's strong arms over the radiant sea. It was a magnificent day, very hot but not sultry, free from sirocco. The sky was deep blue, a passionate, exciting blue that seemed vocal, as if it were saying thrilling things to the world that lay beneath it. The waveless sea was purple, a sea, indeed, of legend, a wine-dark, lustrous, silken sea. Into it, just here along this magic coast, was surely gathered all the wonder of color of all the southern seas. They must be blanched to make this marvel of glory, this immense jewel of God. And the lemon groves were thick along the sea. And the orange-trees stood in their decorative squadrons drinking in the rays of the sun with an ecstatic submission. And Etna, snowless Etna, rose to heaven out of this morning world, with its base in the purple glory and its feather of smoke in the calling blue, child of the sea-god and of the god that looks down from the height, majestically calm in the riot of splendor that set the feet of June dancing in a great tarantella.

As Maurice saw the wonder of sea and sky, the boat coming in over the sea, with Maddalena in the stern holding a bouquet of flowers, his heart leaped up and he forgot for a moment the shadow in himself, the shadow of his own unworthiness. He sprang off the donkey.

"I'll go down to meet them!" he cried. "Catch hold of Tito, Gaspare!"

The railway line ran along the sea, between road and beach. He had to cross it. In doing so one of his feet struck the metal rail, which gave out a dry sound. He looked down, suddenly recalled to a reality other than the splendor of the morning, the rapture of this careless festa day. And again he was conscious of the shadow. Along this line, in a few hours, would come the train bearing Hermione and Artois. Hermione would be at the window, eagerly looking out, full of happy anticipation, leaning to catch the first sight of his face, to receive and return his smile of welcome. What would her face be like when—? But Salvatore was hailing him from the sea. Maddalena was waving her hand. The thing was done. The die was cast. He had chosen his lot. Fiercely he put away from him the thought of Hermione, lifted his voice in an answering hail, his hand in a salutation which he tried to make carelessly joyous. The boat glided in between the flat rocks. And then—then he was able to forget. For Maddalena's long eyes were looking into his, with the joyousness of a child's, and yet with something of the expectation of a woman's, too. And her brown face was alive with a new and delicious self-consciousness, asking him to praise her for the surprise she had prepared, in his honor surely, specially for him, and not for her comrades and the public of the fair.

"Maddalena!" he exclaimed.

He put out his hands to help her out. She stood on the gunwale of the boat and jumped lightly down, with a little laugh, onto the beach.

"Maddalena! Per Dio! Ma che bellezza!"

She laughed again, and stood there on the stones before him smiling and watching him, with her head a little on one side, and the hand that held the tight bouquet of roses and ferns, round as a ring and red as dawn, up to her lips, as if a sudden impulse prompted her now to conceal something of her pleasure.

"Le piace?"

It came to him softly over the roses.

Maurice said nothing, but took her hand and looked at her. Salvatore was fastening up the boat and putting the oars into their places, and getting his jacket and hat.

What a transformation it was, making an almost new Maddalena! This festival dress was really quite wonderful. He felt inclined to touch it here and there, to turn Maddalena round for new aspects, as a child turns round a marvellous doll.

Maddalena wore a tudischina, a bodice of blue cotton velvet, ornamented with yellow silken fringes, and opening over the breast to show a section of snowy white edged with little buttons of sparkling steel. Her petticoat—the sinava—was of pea-green silk and thread, and was partially covered by an apron, a real coquette of an apron, white and green, with little pockets and puckers, and a green rosette where the strings met round the supple waist. Her sleeves were of white muslin, bound with yellow silk ribbons, and her stockings were blue, the color of the bodice. On her feet were shining shoes of black leather, neatly tied with small, black ribbons, and over her shoulders was a lovely shawl of blue and white with a pattern of flowers. She wore nothing on her head, but in her ears were heavy ear-rings, and round her neck was a thin silver chain with bright-blue stones threaded on it here and there.

"Maddalena!" Maurice said, at last. "You are a queen to-day!"

He stopped, then he added:

"No, you are a siren to-day, the siren I once fancied you might be."

"A siren, signorino? What is that?"

"An enchantress of the sea with a voice that makes men—that makes men feel they cannot go, they cannot leave it."

Maddalena lifted the roses a little higher to hide her face, but Maurice saw that her eyes were still smiling, and it seemed to him that she looked even more radiantly happy than when she had taken his hands to spring down to the beach.

Now Salvatore came up in his glory of a dark-blue suit, with a gay shirt of pink-and-white striped cotton, fastened at the throat with long, pink strings that had tasselled ends, a scarlet bow-tie with a brass anchor and the Italian flag thrust through it, yellow shoes, and a black hat, placed well over the left ear. Upon the forefinger of his left hand he displayed a thick snake-ring of tarnished metal, and he had a large, overblown rose in his button-hole. His mustaches had been carefully waxed, his hair cropped, and his hawklike, subtle, and yet violent face well washed for the great occasion. With bold familiarity he seized Maurice's hand.

"Buon giorno, signore. Come sta lei?"

"Benissimo."

"And Maddalena, signore? What do you think of Maddalena?"

He looked at his girl with a certain pride, and then back at Maurice searchingly.

"Maddalena is beautiful to-day," Maurice answered, quickly. He did not want to discuss her with her father, whom he longed to be rid of, whom he meant to get rid of if possible at the fair. Surely it would be easy to give him the slip there. He would be drinking with his companions, other fishermen and contadini, or playing cards, or—yes, that was an idea!

"Salvatore!" Maurice exclaimed, catching hold of the fisherman's arm.

"Signore?"

"There'll be donkeys at the fair, eh?"

"Donkeys—per Dio! Why, last year there were over sixty, and—"

"And isn't there a donkey auction sometimes, towards the end of the day, when they go cheap?"

"Si, signore! Si, signore!"

The fisherman's greedy little eyes were fixed on Maurice with keen interrogation.

"Don't let us forget that," Maurice said, returning his gaze. "You're a good judge of a donkey?"

Salvatore laughed.

"Per Bacco! There won't be a man at San Felice that can beat me at that!"

"Then perhaps you can do something for me. Perhaps you can buy me a donkey. Didn't I speak of it before?"

"Si, signore. For the signora to ride when she comes back from Africa?"

He smiled.

"For a lady to ride," Maurice answered, looking at Maddalena.

Salvatore made a clicking noise with his tongue, a noise that suggested eating. Then he spat vigorously and took from his jacket-pocket a long, black cigar. This was evidently going to be a great day for him.

"Avanti, signorino! Avanti!"

Gaspare was shouting and waving his hat frantically from the road.

"Come along, Maddalena!"

They left the beach and climbed the bank, Maddalena walking carefully in the shining shoes, and holding her green skirt well away from the bushes with both hands. Maurice hurried across the railway line without looking at it. He wanted to forget it. He was determined to forget it, and what it was bringing to Cattaro that afternoon. They reached the group of four donkeys which were standing patiently in the dusty white road.

"Mamma mia!" ejaculated Gaspare, as Maddalena came full into his sight. "Madre mia! But you are like a burgisa dressed for the wedding-day, Donna Maddalena!"

He wagged his head at her till the big roses above his ears shook like flowers in a wind.

"Ora basta, ch' è tardu: jamu ad accumpagnari li Zitti!" he continued, pronouncing the time-honored sentence which, at a rustic wedding, gives the signal to the musicians to stop their playing, and to the assembled company the hint that the moment has come to escort the bride to the new home which her bridegroom has prepared for her.

Maddalena laughed and blushed all over her face, and Salvatore shouted out a verse of a marriage song in high favor at Sicilian weddings:

"E cu saluti a li Zituzzi novi!

Chi bellu 'nguaggiamentu furtunatu!

Firma la menti, custanti lu cori,

E si cci arriva a lu jornu biatu—"

Meanwhile, Maurice helped Maddalena onto her donkey, and paid and dismissed the boy who had brought it and Salvatore's beast from Marechiaro. Then he took out his watch.

"A quarter-past ten," he said. "Off we go! Now, Gaspare—uno! due! tre!"

They leaped simultaneously onto their donkeys, Salvatore clambered up on his, and the little cavalcade started off on the long, white road that ran close along the sea, Maddalena and Maurice in the van, Salvatore and Gaspare behind. Just at first they all kept close together, but Sicilians are very careful of their festa clothes, and soon Salvatore and Gaspare dropped farther behind to avoid the clouds of dust stirred up by the tripping feet of the donkeys in front. Their chattering voices died away, and when Maurice looked back he saw them at a distance which rendered his privacy with Maddalena more complete than anything he had dared to hope for so early in the day. Yet now that they were thus alone he felt as if he had nothing to say to her. He did not feel exactly constrained, but it seemed to him that, to-day, he could not talk the familiar commonplaces to her, or pay her obvious compliments. They might, they would please her, but something in himself would resent them. This was to be such a great day. He had wanted it with such ardor, he had been so afraid of missing it, he had gained it at the cost of so much self-respect, that it ought to be extraordinary from dawn to dark, and he and Maddalena to be unusual, intense—something, at least, more eager, more happy, more intimate than usual in it.

And then, too, as he looked at her riding along by the sea, with her young head held rather high and a smile of innocent pride in her eyes, he remembered that this day was their good-bye. Maddalena did not know that. Probably she did not think about the future. But he knew it. They might meet again. They would doubtless meet again. But it would all be different. He would be a serious married man, who could no longer frolic as if he were still a boy like Gaspare. This was the last day of his intimate friendship with Maddalena.

That seemed to him very strange. He had become accustomed to her society, to her naïve curiosity, her girlish, simple gayety, so accustomed to it all that he could not imagine life without it, could scarcely realize what life had been before he knew Maddalena. It seemed to him that he must have always known Maddalena. And she—what did she feel about that?

"Maddalena!" he said.

"Si, signore."

She turned her head and glanced at him, smiling, as if she were sure of hearing something pleasant. To-day, in her pretty festa dress, she looked intended for happiness. Everything about her conveyed the suggestion that she was expectant of joy. The expression in her eyes was a summons to the world to be very kind and good to her, to give her only pleasant things, things that could not harm her.

"Maddalena, do you feel as if you had known me long?"

She nodded her head.

"Si, signore."

"How long?"

She spread out one hand with the fingers held apart.

"Oh, signore—but always! I feel as if I had known you always."

"And yet it's only a few days."

"Si, signore."

She acquiesced calmly. The problem did not seem to puzzle her, the problem of this feeling so ill-founded. It was so. Very well, then—so it was.

"And," he went on, "do you feel as if you would always know me?"

"Si, signore. Of course."

"But I shall go away, I am going away."

For a moment her face clouded. But the influence of joy was very strong upon her to-day, and the cloud passed.

"But you will come back, signorino. You will always come back."

"How do you know that?"

A pretty slyness crept into her face, showed in the curve of the young lips, in the expression of the young eyes.

"Because you like to be here, because you like the Siciliani. Isn't it true?"

"Yes," he said, almost passionately. "It's true! Ah, Maddalena—"

But at this moment a group of people from Marechiaro suddenly appeared upon the road beside them, having descended from the village by a mountain-path. There were exclamations, salutations. Maddalena's gown was carefully examined by the women of the party. The men exchanged compliments with Maurice. Then Salvatore and Gaspare, seeing friends, came galloping up, shouting, in a cloud of dust. A cavalcade was formed, and henceforth Maurice was unable to exchange any more confidences with Maddalena. He felt vexed at first, but the boisterous merriment of all these people, their glowing anticipation of pleasure, soon infected him. His heart was lightened of its burden and the spirit of the careless boy awoke in him. He would take no thought for the morrow, he would be able to take no thought so long as he was in this jocund company. As they trotted forward in a white mist along the shining sea Maurice was one of the gayest among them. No laugh rang out more frequently than his, no voice chatted more vivaciously. The conscious effort which at first he had to make seemed to give him an impetus, to send him onward with a rush so that he outdistanced his companions. Had any one observed him closely during that ride to the fair he might well have thought that here was a nature given over to happiness, a nature that was utterly sunny in the sun.

They passed through the town of Cattaro, where was the station for Marechiaro. For a moment Maurice felt a pang of self-contempt, and of something more, of something that was tender, pitiful even, as he thought of Hermione's expectation disappointed. But it died away, or he thrust it away. The long street was full of people, either preparing to start for the fair themselves or standing at their doors to watch their friends start. Donkeys were being saddled and decorated with flowers. Tall, painted carts were being harnessed to mules. Visions of men being lathered and shaved, of women having their hair dressed or their hair searched, Sicilian fashion, of youths trying to curl upward scarcely born mustaches, of children being hastily attired in clothes which made them wriggle and squint, came to the eyes from houses in which privacy was not so much scorned as unthought of, utterly unknown. Turkeys strolled in and out among the toilet-makers. Pigs accompanied their mistresses from doorway to doorway as dogs accompany the women of other countries. And the cavalcade of the people of Marechiaro was hailed from all sides with pleasantries and promises to meet at the fair, with broad jokes or respectful salutations. Many a "Benedicite!" or "C'ci basu li mano!" greeted Maurice. Many a berretto was lifted from heads that he had never seen to his knowledge before. He was made to feel by all that he was among friends, and as he returned the smiles and salutations he remembered the saying Hermione had repeated: "Every Sicilian, even if he wears a long cap and sleeps in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman," and he thought it very true.

It seemed as if they would never get away from the street. At every moment they halted. One man begged them to wait a moment till his donkey was saddled, so that he might join them. Another, a wine-shop keeper, insisted on Maurice's testing his moscato, and thereupon Maurice felt obliged to order glasses all round, to the great delight of Gaspare, who always felt himself to be glorified by the generosity of his padrone, and who promptly took the proceedings in charge, measured out the wine in appropriate quantities, handed it about, and constituted himself master of the ceremony. Already, at eleven o'clock, brindisi were invented, and Maurice was called upon to "drop into poetry." Then Maddalena caught sight of some girl friends, and must needs show them all her finery. For this purpose she solemnly dismounted from her donkey to be closely examined on the pavement, turned about, shook forth her pea-green skirt, took off her chain for more minute inspection, and measured the silken fringes of her shawl in order to compare them with other shawls which were hastily brought out from a house near-by.

But Gaspare, always a little ruthless with women, soon tired of such vanities.

"Avanti! Avanti!" he shouted. "Dio mio! Le donne sono pazze! Andiamo! Andiamo!"

He hustled Maddalena, who yielded, blushing and laughing, to his importunities, and at last they were really off again, and drowned in a sea of odor as they passed some buildings where lemons were being packed to be shipped away from Sicily. This smell seemed to Maurice to be the very breath of the island. He drank it in eagerly. Lemons, lemons, and the sun! Oranges, lemons, yellow flowers under the lemons, and the sun! Always yellow, pale yellow, gold yellow, red-gold yellow, and white, and silver-white, the white of the roads, the silver-white of dusty olive leaves, and green, the dark, lustrous, polished green of orange leaves, and purple and blue, the purple of sea, the blue of sky. What a riot of talk it was, and what a riot of color! It made Maurice feel almost drunk. It was heady, this island of the south—heady in the summer-time. It had a powerful influence, an influence that was surely an excuse for much. Ah, the stay-at-homes, who condemned the far-off passions and violences of men! What did they know of the various truths of the world? How should one in Clapham judge one at the fair of San Felice? Avanti! Avanti! Avanti along the blinding white road by the sea, to the village on which great Etna looked down, not harshly for all its majesty. Nature understood. And God, who made Nature, who was behind Nature—did not He understand? There is forgiveness surely in great hearts, though the small hearts have no space to hold it.

Something like this Maurice thought for a moment, ere a large thoughtlessness swept over him, bred of the sun and the odors, the movement, the cries and laughter of his companions, the gay gown and the happy glances of Maddalena, even of the white dust that whirled up from the feet of the cantering donkeys.

And so, ever laughing, ever joking, gayly, almost tumultuously, they rushed upon the fair.

San Felice is a large village in the plain at the foot of Etna. It lies near the sea between Catania and Messina, but beyond the black and forbidding lava land. Its patron saint, Protettore di San Felice, is Sant' Onofrio, and this was his festival. In the large, old church in the square, which was the centre of the life of the fiera, his image, smothered in paint, sumptuously decorated with red and gold and bunches of artificial flowers, was exposed under a canopy with pillars; and thin squares of paper reproducing its formal charms—the oval face with large eyes and small, straight nose, the ample forehead, crowned with hair that was brought down to a point in the centre, the undulating, divided beard descending upon the breast, one hand holding a book, the other upraised in a blessing—were sold for a soldo to all who would buy them.

The first thing the party from Isola Bella and from Marechiaro did, when they had stabled their donkeys at Don Leontini's, in the Via Bocca di Leone, was to pay the visit of etiquette to Sant' Onofrio. Their laughter was stilled at the church doorway, through which women and men draped in shawls, lads and little children, were coming and going. Their faces assumed expressions of superstitious reverence and devotion. And, going up one by one to the large image of the saint, they contemplated it with awe, touched its hand or the hem of its robe, made the sign of the cross, and retreated, feeling that they were blessed for the day.

Maddalena approached the saint with Maurice and Gaspare. She and Gaspare touched the hand that held the book, made the sign of the cross, then stared at Maurice to see why he did nothing. He quickly followed their example. Maddalena, who was pulling some of the roses from her tight bouquet, whispered to him:

"Sant' Onofrio will bring us good-fortune."

"Davvero?" he whispered back.

"Si! Si!" said Gaspare, nodding his head.

While Maddalena laid her flowers upon the lap of the saint, Gaspare bought from a boy three sheets of paper containing Sant' Onofrio's reproduction, and three more showing the effigies of San Filadelfo, Sant' Alfio, and San Cirino.

"Ecco, Donna Maddalena! Ecco, signorino!"

He distributed his purchases, keeping two for himself. These last he very carefully and solemnly folded up and bestowed in the inner pocket of his jacket, which contained a leather portfolio, given to him by Maurice to carry his money in.

"Ecco!" he said, once more, as he buttoned the flap of the pocket as a precaution against thieves.

And with that final exclamation he dismissed all serious thoughts.

"Mangiamo, signorino!" he said. "Ora basta!"

And they went forth into the sunshine. Salvatore was talking to some fishermen from Catania upon the steps. They cast curious glances at Maurice as he came out with Maddalena, and, when Salvatore went off with his daughter and the forestiere, they laughed among themselves and exchanged some remarks that were evidently merry. But Maurice did not heed them. He was not a self-conscious man. And Maddalena was far too happy to suppose that any one could be saying nasty things about her.

"Where are we going to eat?" asked Maurice.

"This way, this way, signorino!" replied Gaspare, elbowing a passage through the crowd. "You must follow me. I know where to go. I have many friends here."

The truth of this statement was speedily made manifest. Almost every third person they met saluted Gaspare, some kissing him upon both cheeks, others grasping his hand, others taking him familiarly by the arm. Among the last was a tall boy with jet-black, curly hair and a long, pale face, whom Gaspare promptly presented to his padrone, by the name of Amedeo Buccini.

"Amedeo is a parrucchiere, signorino," he said, "and my compare, and the best dancer in San Felice. May he eat with us?"

"Of course."

Gaspare informed Amedeo, who took off his hat, held it in his hand, and smiled all over his face with pleasure.

"Yes, Gaspare is my compare, signore," he affirmed. "Compare, compare, compareddu"—he glanced at Gaspare, who joined in with him:

"Compare, compare, compareddu,

Io ti voglio molto bene,

Mangiamo sempre insieme—

Mangiamo carne e riso

E andiamo in Paradiso!"

"Carne e riso—si!" cried Maurice, laughing. "But Paradise! Must you go to Paradise directly afterwards, before the dancing and before the procession and before the fireworks?"

"No, signore," said Gaspare. "When we are very old, when we cannot dance any more—non è vero, Amedeo?—then we will go to Paradiso."

"Yes," agreed the tall boy, quite seriously, "then we will go to Paradiso."

"And I, too," said Maurice; "and Maddalena, but not till then."

What a long time away that would be!

"Here is the ristorante!"

They had reached a long room with doors open onto the square, opposite to the rows of booths which were set up under the shadow of the church. Outside of it were many small tables and numbers of chairs on which people were sitting, contemplating the movement of the crowd of buyers and sellers, smoking, drinking syrups, gazzosa, and eating ices and flat biscuits.

Gaspare guided them through the throng to a long table set on a sanded floor.

"Ecco, signorino!"

He installed Maurice at the top of the table.

"And you sit here, Donna Maddalena."

He placed her at Maurice's right hand, and was going to sit down himself on the left, when Salvatore roughly pushed in before him, seized the chair, sat in it, and leaned his arms on the table with a loud laugh that sounded defiant. An ugly look came into Gaspare's face.

"Macchè—" he began, angrily.

But Maurice silenced him with a quick look.

"Gaspare, you come here, by Maddalena!"

"Ma—"

"Come along, Gasparino, and tell us what we are to have. You must order everything. Where's the cameriere? Cameriere! Cameriere!"

He struck on his glass with a fork. A waiter came running.

"Don Gaspare will order for us all," said Maurice to him, pointing to Gaspare.

His diplomacy was successful. Gaspare's face cleared, and in a moment he was immersed in an eager colloquy with the waiter, another friend of his from Marechiaro. Amedeo Buccini took a place by Gaspare, and all those from Marechiaro, who evidently considered that they belonged to the Inglese's party for the day, arranged themselves as they pleased and waited anxiously for the coming of the macaroni.

A certain formality now reigned over the assembly. The movement of the road in the outside world by the sea had stirred the blood, had loosened tongues and quickened spirits. But a meal in a restaurant, with a rich English signore presiding at the head of the table, was an unaccustomed ceremony. Dark faces that had been lit up with laughter now looked almost ludicrously discreet. Brown hands which had been in constant activity, talking as plainly, and more expressively, than voices, now lay limply upon the white cloth or were placed upon knees motionless as the knees of statues. And all eyes were turned towards the giver of the feast, mutely demanding of him a signal of conduct to guide his inquiring guests. But Maurice, too, felt for the moment tongue-tied. He was very sensitive to influences, and his present position, between Maddalena and her father, created within him a certain confusion of feelings, an odd sensation of being between two conflicting elements. He was conscious of affection and of enmity, both close to him, both strong, the one ready to show itself, the other determined to remain in hiding. He glanced at Salvatore, and met the fisherman's keen gaze. Behind the instant smile in the glittering eyes he divined, rather than saw, the shadow of his hatred. And for a moment he wondered. Why should Salvatore hate him? It was reasonable to hate a man for a wrong done, even for a wrong deliberately contemplated with intention—the intention of committing it. But he had done no real wrong to Salvatore. Nor had he any evil intention with regard to him or his. So far he had only brought pleasure into their lives, his life and Maddalena's—pleasure and money. If there had been any secret pain engendered by their mutual intercourse it was his. And this day was the last of their intimacy, though Salvatore and Maddalena did not know it. Suddenly a desire, an almost weak desire, came to him to banish Salvatore's distrust of him, a distrust which he was more conscious of at this moment than ever before.

He did not know of the muttered comments of the fishermen from Catania as he and Maddalena passed down the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio. But Salvatore's sharp ears had caught them and the laughter that followed them, and his hot blood was on fire. The words, the laughter had touched his sensitive Sicilian pride—the pride of the man who means never to be banished from the Piazza—as a knife touches a raw wound. And as Maurice had set a limit to his sinning—his insincerity to Hermione, his betrayal of her complete trust in him, nothing more—so Salvatore now, while he sat at meat with the Inglese, mentally put a limit to his own complaisance, a complaisance which had been born of his intense avarice. To-day he would get all he could out of the Inglese—money, food, wine, a donkey—who knew what? And then—good-bye to soft speeches. Those fishermen, his friends, his comrades, his world, in fact, should have their mouths shut once for all. He knew how to look after his girl, and they should know that he knew, they and all Marechiaro, and all San Felice, and all Cattaro. His limit, like Maurice's, was that day of the fair, and it was nearly reached. For the hours were hurrying towards the night and farewells.

Moved by his abrupt desire to stand well with everybody during this last festa, Maurice began to speak to Salvatore of the donkey auction. When would it begin?

"Chi lo sa?"

No one knew. In Sicily all feasts are movable. Even mass may begin an hour too late or an hour too early. One thought the donkey auction would start at fourteen, another at sixteen o'clock. Gaspare was imperiously certain, over the macaroni, which had now made its appearance, that the hour was seventeen. There were to be other auctions, auctions of wonderful things. A clock that played music—the "Marcia Reale" and the "Tre Colori"—was to be put up; suits of clothes, too; boots, hats, a chair that rocked like a boat on the sea, a revolver ornamented with ivory. Already—no one knew when, for no one had missed him—he had been to view these treasures. As he spoke of them tongues were loosed and eyes shone with excitement. Money was in the air. Prices were passionately discussed, values debated. All down the table went the words "soldi," "lire," "lire sterline," "biglietti da cinque," "biglietti da dieci." Salvatore's hatred died away, suffocated for the moment under the weight of his avarice. A donkey—yes, he meant to get a donkey with the stranger's money. But why stop there? Why not have the clock and the rocking-chair and the revolver? His sharpness of the Sicilian, a sharpness almost as keen and sure as that of the Arab, divined the intensity, the recklessness alive in the Englishman to-day, bred of that limit, "my last day of the careless life," to which his own limit was twin-brother, but of which he knew nothing. And as Maurice was intense to-day, because there were so few hours left to him for intensity, so was Salvatore intense in a different way, but for a similar reason. They were walking in step without being aware of it. Or were they not rather racing neck to neck, like passionate opponents?

There was little time. Then they must use what there was to the full. They must not let one single moment find them lazy, indifferent.

Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned to Maddalena. She was taking no part in it, but was eating her macaroni gently, as if it were a new and wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her. To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to him in Maddalena, a softness, an innocent refinement that made him imagine her in another life than hers, and with other companions, in a life as free but less hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to women.

"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to buy things at the auction."

"Si, signore."

"And you?"

"I, signorino?"

"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"

He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at him above her fork, from which the macaroni streamed down.

"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.

"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer than that?" He measured imaginary ear-rings in the air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"

She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not forgotten. All the day since she rose at dawn she had been thinking of Maurice's old promise. But she did not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance of it came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his head down nearer to her.

"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy the blue dress and the ear-rings," he almost whispered. "We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"

"Si, signore."

Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held their flush. She glanced, with eyes that were unusually conscious, to right and left of her, to see if the neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look of consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that this limit which he had put to his sinning—so he had called it with a sort of angry mental sincerity, summoned, perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of his wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day—his sinning against Hermione was also a limit to something else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena, sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving himself up to gloom, to absurd self-torture. Where was his natural careless temperament? To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the soul of a man going to meet a doom.

"Where's the wine?" he called to Gaspare. "Wine, cameriere, wine!"

"You must not drink wine with the pasta, signorino!" cried Gaspare. "Only afterwards, with the vitello."

"Have you ordered vitello? Capital! But I've finished my pasta and I'm thirsty. Well, what do you want to buy at the auction, Gaspare, and you, Amedeo, and you Salvatore?"

He plunged into the talk and made Salvatore show his keen desires, encouraging and playing with his avarice, now holding it off for a moment, then coaxing it as one coaxes an animal, stroking it, tempting it to a forward movement. The wine went round now, for the vitello was on the table, and the talk grew more noisy, the laughter louder. Outside, too, the movement and the tumult of the fair were increasing. Cries of men selling their wares rose up, the hard melodies of a piano-organ, and a strange and ecclesiastical chant sung by three voices that, repeated again and again, at last attracted Maurice's attention.

"What's that?" he asked of Gaspare. "Are those priests chanting?"

"Priests! No, signore. Those are the Romani."

"Romans here! What are they doing?"

"They have a cart decorated with flags, signorino, and they are selling lemon-water and ices. All the people say that they are Romans and that is how they sing in Rome."

The long and lugubrious chant of the ice-venders rose up again, strident and melancholy as a song chanted over a corpse.

"It's funny to sing like that to sell ices," Maurice said. "It sounds like men at a funeral."

"Oh, they are very good ices, signorino. The Romans make splendid ices."

Turkey followed the vitello.

Maurice's guests were now completely at ease and perfectly happy. The consciousness that all this was going to be paid for, that they would not have to put their hands in their pockets for a soldo, warmed their hearts as the wine warmed their bodies. Amedeo's long, white face was becoming radiant, and even Salvatore softened towards the Inglese. A sort of respect, almost furtive, came to him for the wealth that could carelessly entertain this crowd of people, that could buy clocks, chairs, donkeys at pleasure, and scarcely know that soldi were gone, scarcely miss them. As he attacked his share of the turkey vigorously, picking up the bones with his fingers and tearing the flesh away with his white teeth, he tried to realize what such wealth must mean to the possessor of it, an effort continually made by the sharp-witted, very poor man. And this wealth—for the moment some of it was at his command! To ask to-day would be to have. Instinctively he knew that, and felt like one with money in the bank. If only it might be so to-morrow and for many days! He began to regret the limit, almost to forget the sound of the laughter of the Catania fishermen upon the steps of the church of Sant' Onofrio. His pride was going to sleep, and his avarice was opening its eyes wider.

When the meal was over they went out onto the pavement to take coffee in the open air. The throng was much greater than it had been when they entered, for people were continually arriving from the more distant villages, and two trains had come in from Messina and Catania. It was difficult to find a table. Indeed, it might have been impossible had not Gaspare ruthlessly dislodged a party of acquaintances who were comfortably established around one in a prominent position.

"I must have a table for my padrone," he said. "Go along with you!"

And they meekly went, smiling, and without ill-will—indeed, almost as if they had received a compliment.

"But, Gaspare," began Maurice, "I can't—"

"Here is a chair for you, signorino. Take it quickly."

"At any rate, let us offer them something."

"Much better spare your soldi now, signorino, and buy something at the auction. That clock plays the 'Tre Colori' just like a band."

"Buy it. Here is some money."

He thrust some notes into the boy's ready hand.

"Grazie, signorino. Ecco la musica!"

In the distance there rose the blare of a processional march from "Aïda," and round the corner of the Via di Polifemo came a throng of men and boys in dark uniforms, with epaulets and cocked hats with flying plumes, blowing with all their might into wind instruments of enormous size.

"That is the musica of the città, signore," explained Amedeo. "Afterwards there will be the Musica Mascagni and the Musica Leoncavallo."

"Mamma mia! And will they all play together?"

"No, signore. They have quarrelled. At Pasqua we had no music, and the archpriest was hooted by all in the Piazza."

"Why?"

"Non lo so. I think he had forbidden the Musica Mascagni to play at Madre Lucia's funeral, and the Musica Mascagni went to fight with the Musica della città. To-day they will all play, because it is the festa of the Santo Patrono, but even for him they will not play together."

The bandsmen had now taken their places upon a wooden dais exactly opposite to the restaurant, and were indulging in a military rendering of "Celeste Aïda," which struck most of the Sicilians at the small tables to a reverent silence. Maddalena's eyes had become almost round with pleasure, Gaspare was singing the air frankly with Amedeo, and even Salvatore seemed soothed and humanized, as he sipped his coffee, puffed at a thin cigar, and eyed the women who were slowly sauntering up and down to show their finery. At the windows of most of the neighboring houses appeared parties of dignified gazers, important personages of the town, who owned small balconies commanding the piazza, and who now stepped forth upon these coigns of vantage, and leaned upon the rails that they might see and be seen by the less favored ones below. Amedeo and Gaspare began to name these potentates. The stout man with a gray mustache, white trousers, and a plaid shawl over his shoulders was Signor Torloni, the syndic of San Felice. The tall, angry-looking gentleman, with bulging, black eyes and wrinkled cheeks, was Signor Carata, the avvocato; and the lady in black and a yellow shawl was his wife, who was the daughter of the syndic. Close by was Signorina Maria Sacchetti, the beauty of San Felice, already more than plump, but with a good complexion, and hair so thick that it stood out from her satisfied face as if it were trained over a trellis. She wore white, and long, thread gloves which went above her elbows. Maddalena regarded her with awe when Amedeo mentioned a rumor that she was going to be "promised" to Dr. Marinelli, who was to be seen at her side, wearing a Gibus hat and curling a pair of gigantic black mustaches.

Maurice listened to the music and the chatter which, silenced by the arrival of the music, had now burst forth again, with rather indifferent ears. He wanted to get away somewhere and to be alone with Maddalena. The day was passing on. Soon night would be falling. The fair would be at an end. Then would come the ride back, and then——But he did not care to look forward into that future. He had not done so yet. He would not do so now. It would be better, when the time came, to rush upon it blindly. Preparation, forethought, would only render him unnatural. And he must seem natural, utterly natural, in his insincere surprise, in his insincere regret.

"Pay for the coffee, Gaspare," he said, giving the boy some money. "Now I want to walk about and see everything. Where are the donkeys?"

He glanced at Salvatore.

"Oh, signore," said Gaspare, "they are outside the town in the watercourse that runs under the bridge—you know, that broke down this spring where the line is? They have only just finished mending it."

"I remember your telling me."

"And you were so glad the signora was travelling the other way."

"Yes, yes."

He spoke hastily. Salvatore was on his feet.

"What hour have we?"

Maurice looked at his watch.

"Half-past two already! I say, Salvatore, you mustn't forget the donkeys."

Salvatore came close up to him.

"Signore," he began, in a low voice, "what do you wish me to do?"

"Bid for a good donkey."

"Si, signore."

"For the best donkey they put up for sale."

Salvatore began to look passionately eager.

"Si, signore. And if I get it?"

"Come to me and I will give you the money to pay."

"Si, signore. How high shall I go?"

Gaspare was listening intently, with a hard face and sullen eyes. His whole body seemed to be disapproving what Maurice was doing. But he said nothing. Perhaps he felt that to-day it would be useless to try to govern the actions of his padrone.

"How high? Well"—Maurice felt that, before Gaspare, he must put a limit to his price, though he did not care what it was—"say a hundred. Here, I'll give it you now."

He put his hand into his pocket and drew out his portfolio.

"There's the hundred."

Salvatore took it eagerly, spread it over his hand, stared at it, then folded it with fingers that seemed for the moment almost delicate, and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He meant to go presently and show it to the fishermen of Catania, who had laughed upon the steps of the church, and explain matters to them a little. They thought him a fool. Well, he would soon make them understand who was the fool.

"Grazie, signore!"

He said it through his teeth. Maurice turned to Gaspare. He felt the boy's stern disapproval of what he had done, and wanted, if possible, to make amends.

"Gaspare," he said, "here is a hundred lire for you. I want you to go to the auction and to bid for anything you think worth having. Buy something for your mother and father, for the house, some nice things!"

"Grazie, signore."

He took the note, but without alacrity, and his face was still lowering.

"And you, signore?" he asked.

"I?"

"Yes. Are you not coming with me to the auction? It will be better for you to be there to choose the things."

For an instant Maurice felt irritated. Was he never to be allowed a moment alone with Maddalena?

"Oh, but I'm no good at——" he began.

Then he stopped. To-day he must be birbante—on his guard. Once the auction was in full swing—so he thought—Salvatore and Gaspare would be as they were when they gambled beside the sea. They would forget everything. It would be easy to escape. But till that moment came he must be cautious.

"Of course I'll come," he exclaimed, heartily. "But you must do the bidding, Gaspare."

The boy looked less sullen.

"Va bene, signorino. I shall know best what the things are worth. And Salvatore"—he glanced viciously at the fisherman—"can go to the donkeys. I have seen them. They are poor donkeys this year."

Salvatore returned his vicious glance and said something in dialect which Maurice did not understand. Gaspare's face flushed, and he was about to burst into an angry reply when Maurice touched his arm.

"Come along, Gaspare!"

As they got up, he whispered:

"Remember what I said about to-day!"

"Macchè——"

Maurice closed his fingers tightly on Gaspare's arm.

"Gaspare, you must remember! Afterwards what you like, but not to-day. Andiamo!"

They all got up. The Musica della città was now playing a violent jig, undoubtedly composed by Bellini, who was considered almost as a child of San Felice, having been born close by at Catania.

"Where are the women in the wonderful blue dresses?" Maurice asked, as they stepped into the road; "and the ear-rings? I haven't seen them yet."

"They will come towards evening, signorino," replied Gaspare, "when it gets cool. They do not care to be in the sun dressed like that. It might spoil their things."

Evidently the promenade of these proud beauties was an important function.

"We must not miss them," Maurice said to Maddalena.

She looked conscious.

"No, signore."

"They will all be here this evening, signore," said Amedeo, "for the giuochi di fuoco."

"The giuochi di fuoco—they will be at the end?"

"Si, signore. After the giuochi di fuoco it is all finished."

Maurice stifled a sigh. "It is all finished," Amedeo had said. But for him? For him there would be the ride home up the mountain, the arrival upon the terrace before the house of the priest. At what hour would he be there? It would be very late, perhaps nearly at dawn, in the cold, still, sad hour when vitality is at its lowest. And Hermione? Would she be sleeping? How would they meet? How would he——?

"Andiamo! Andiamo!"

He cried out almost angrily.

"Which is the way?"

"All the auctions are held outside the town, signore," said Amedeo. "Follow me."

Proudly he took the lead, glad to be useful and important after the benefits that had been bestowed upon him, and hoping secretly that perhaps the rich Inglese would give him something to spend, too, since money was so plentiful for donkeys and clocks.

"They are in the fiume, near the sea and the railway line."

The railway line! When he heard that Maurice had a moment's absurd sensation of reluctance, a desire to hold back, such as comes to a man who is unexpectedly asked to confront some danger. It seemed to him that if he went to the watercourse he might be seen by Hermione and Artois as they passed by on their way to Marechiaro. But of course they were coming from Messina! What a fool he was to-day! His recklessness seemed to have deserted him just when he wanted it most. To-day he was not himself. He was a coward. What it was that made him a coward he did not tell himself.

"Then we can all go together," he said. "Salvatore and all."

"Si, signore."

Salvatore's voice was close at his ear, and he knew by the sound of it that the fisherman was smiling.

"We can all keep together, signore; then we shall be more gay."

They threaded their way through the throng. The violent jig of Bellini died away gradually, till it was faint in the distance. At the end of the narrow street Maurice saw the large bulk of Etna. On this clear afternoon it looked quite close, almost as if, when they got out of the street, they would be at its very foot, and would have to begin to climb. Maurice remembered his wild longing to carry Maddalena off upon the sea, or to some eyrie in the mountains, to be alone with her in some savage place. Why not give all these people the slip now—somehow—when the fun of the fair was at its height, mount the donkeys and ride straight for the huge mountain? There were caverns there and desolate lava wastes; there were almost impenetrable beech forests. Sebastiano had told him tales of them, those mighty forests that climbed up to green lawns looking down upon the Lipari Isles. He thought of their silence and their shadows, their beds made of the drifted leaves of the autumn. There, would be no disturbance, no clashing of wills and of interests, but calm and silence and the time to love. He glanced at Maddalena. He could hardly help imagining that she knew what he was thinking of. Salvatore had dropped behind for a moment. Maurice did not know it, but the fisherman had caught sight of his comrades of Catania drinking in a roadside wine-shop, and had stopped to show them the note for a hundred francs, and to make them understand the position of affairs between him and the forestiere. Gaspare was talking eagerly to Amedeo about the things that were likely to be put up for sale at the auction.

"Maddalena," Maurice said to the girl, in a low voice, "can you guess what I am thinking about?"

She shook her head.

"No, signore."

"You see the mountain!"

He pointed to the end of the little street.

"Si, signore."

"I am thinking that I should like to go there now with you."

"Ma, signorino—the fiera!"

Her voice sounded plaintive with surprise and she glanced at her pea-green skirt.

"And this, signorino!"—she touched it carefully with her slim fingers. "How could I go in this?"

"When the fair is over, then, and you are in your every-day gown, Maddalena, I should like to carry you off to Etna."

"They say there are briganti there."

"Brigands—would you be afraid of them with me?"

"I don't know, signore. But what should we do there on Etna far away from the sea and from Marechiaro?"

"We should"—he whispered in her ear, seizing this chance almost angrily, almost defiantly, with the thought of Salvatore in his mind—"we should love each other, Maddalena. It is quiet in the beech forests on Etna. No one would come to disturb us, and——"

A chuckle close to his ear made him start. Salvatore's hand was on his arm, and Salvatore's face, looking wily and triumphant, was close to his.

"Gaspare was wrong, there are splendid donkeys here. I have been talking to some friends who have seen them."

There was a tramp of heavy boots on the stones behind them. The fishermen from Catania were coming to see the fun. Salvatore was in glory. To get all and give nothing was, in his opinion, to accomplish the legitimate aim of a man's life. And his friends, those who had dared to sneer and to whisper, and to imagine that he was selling his daughter for money, now knew the truth and were here to witness his ingenuity. Intoxicated by his triumph, he began to show off his power over the Inglese for the benefit of the tramplers behind. He talked to Maurice with a loud familiarity, kept laying his hand on Maurice's arm as they walked, and even called him, with a half-jocose intonation, "compare." Maurice sickened at his impertinence, but was obliged to endure it with patience, and this act of patience brought to the birth within him a sudden, fierce longing for revenge, a longing to pay Salvatore out for his grossness, his greed, his sly and leering affectation of playing the slave when he was really indicating to his compatriots that he considered himself the master. Again Maurice heard the call of the Sicilian blood within him, but this time it did not call him to the tarantella or to love. It called him to strike a blow. But this blow could only be struck through Maddalena, could only be struck if he were traitor to Hermione. For a moment he saw everything red. Again Salvatore called him "compare." Suddenly Maurice could not bear it.

"Don't say that!" he said. "Don't call me that!"

He had almost hissed the words out. Salvatore started, and for an instant, as they walked side by side, the two men looked at each other with eyes that told the truth. Then Salvatore, without asking for any explanation of Maurice's sudden outburst, said:

"Va bene, signore, va bene! I thought for to-day we were all compares. Scusi, scusi."

There was a bitterness of irony in his voice. As he finished he swept off his soft hat and then replaced it more over his left ear than ever. Maurice knew at once that he had done the unforgivable thing, that he had stabbed a Sicilian's amour propre in the presence of witnesses of his own blood. The fishermen from Catania had heard. He knew it from Salvatore's manner, and an odd sensation came to him that Salvatore had passed sentence upon him. In silence, and mechanically, he walked on to the end of the street. He felt like one who, having done something swiftly, thoughtlessly, is suddenly confronted with the irreparable, abruptly sees the future spread out before him bathed in a flash of crude light, the future transformed in a second by that act of his as a landscape is transformed by an earthquake or a calm sea by a hurricane.

And when the watercourse came in sight, with its crowd, its voices, and its multitude of beasts, he looked at it dully for a moment, hardly realizing it.

In Sicily the animal fairs are often held in the great watercourses that stretch down from the foot of the mountains to the sea, and that resemble huge highroads in the making, roads upon which the stones have been dumped ready for the steam-roller. In winter there is sometimes a torrent of water rushing through them, but in summer they are dry, and look like wounds gashed in the thickly growing lemon and orange groves. The trampling feet of beasts can do no harm to the stones, and these watercourses in the summer season are of no use to anybody. They are, therefore, often utilized at fair time. Cattle, donkeys, mules are driven down to them in squadrons. Painted Sicilian carts are ranged upon their banks, with sets of harness, and the auctioneers, whose business it is to sell miscellaneous articles, household furniture, stuffs, clocks, ornaments, frequently descend into them, and mount a heap of stones to gain command of their gaping audience of contadini and the shrewder buyers from the towns.

The watercourse of San Felice was traversed at its mouth by the railway line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said, had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the town of San Felice, was a series of dense lemon groves, gained by a sloping bank of bare, crumbling earth, on the top of which, close to the line and exactly where it came to the bridge, was a group of four old olive-trees with gnarled, twisted trunks. These trees cast a patch of pleasant shade, from which all the bustle of the fair was visible, but at a distance, and as Maurice and his party came out of the village on the opposite bank, he whispered to Maddalena:

"Maddalena!"

"Si, signore?"

"Let's get away presently, you and I; let's go and sit under those trees. I want to talk to you quietly."

"Si, signore?"

Her voice was lower even than his own.

"Ecco, signore! Ecco!"

Salvatore was pointing to a crowd of donkeys.

"Signorino! Signorino!"

"What is it, Gaspare?"

"That is the man who is going to sell the clock!"

The boy's face was intent. His eyes were shining, and his glum manner had vanished, under the influence of a keen excitement. Maurice realized that very soon he would be free. Once his friends were in the crowd of buyers and sellers everything but the chance of a bargain would be forgotten. His own blood quickened but for a different reason.

"What beautiful carts!" he said. "We have no such carts in England!"

"If you would like to buy a cart, signore——" began Salvatore.

But Gaspare interrupted with violence.

"Macchè! What is the use of a cart to the signorino? He is going away to England. How can he take a cart with him in the train?"

"He can leave the cart with me," said Salvatore, with open impudence. "I can take care of it for the signore as well as the donkey."

"Macchè!" cried Gaspare, furiously.

Maurice took him by the arm.

"Help me down the bank! Come on!"

He began to run, pulling Gaspare with him. When they got to the bottom, he said:

"It's all right, Gaspare. I'm not going to be such a fool as to buy a cart. Now, then, which way are we going?"

"Signore, do you want to buy a very good donkey, a very strong donkey, strong enough to carry three Germans to the top of Etna? Come and see my donkey. He is very cheap. I make a special price because the signore is simpatico. All the English are simpatici. Come this way, signore! Gaspare knows me. Gaspare knows that I am not birbante."

"Signorino! Signorino! Look at this clock! It plays the 'Tre Colori.' It is worth twenty-five lire, but I will make a special price for you because you love Sicily and are like a Siciliano. Gaspare will tell you——"

But Gaspare elbowed away his acquaintances roughly.

"Let my padrone alone. He is not here to buy. He is only here to see the fair. Come on, signorino! Do not answer them. Do not take any notice. You must not buy anything or you will be cheated. Let me make the prices."

"Yes, you make the prices. Per Bacco, how hot it is!"

Maurice pulled his hat down over his eyes.

"Maddalena, you'll get a sunstroke!" he said.

"Oh no, signore. I am accustomed to the sun."

"But to-day it's terrific!"

Indeed, the masses of stones in the watercourse seemed to draw and to concentrate the sun-rays. The air was alive with minute and dancing specks of light, and in the distance, seen under the railway bridge, the sea looked hot, a fiery blue that was surely sweating in the glare of the afternoon. The crowd of donkeys, of cattle, of pigs—there were many pigs on sale—looked both dull and angry in the heat, and the swarms of Sicilians who moved slowly about among them, examining them critically, appraising their qualities and noting their defects, perspired in their festa clothes, which were mostly heavy and ill-adapted to summer-time. A small boy passed by, bearing in his arms a struggling turkey. He caught his foot in some stones, fell, bruised his forehead, and burst out crying, while the indignant and terrified bird broke away, leaving some feathers, and made off violently towards Etna. There was a roar of laughter from the people near. Some ran to catch the turkey, others picked up the boy. Salvatore had stopped to see this adventure, and was now at a little distance surrounded by the Catanesi, who were evidently determined to assist at his bidding for a donkey. The sight of the note for a hundred lire had greatly increased their respect for Salvatore, and with the Sicilian instinct to go, and to stay, where money is, they now kept close to their comrade, eying him almost with awe as one in possession of a fortune. Maurice saw them presently examining a group of donkeys. Salvatore, with an autocratic air, and the wild gestures peculiar to him, was evidently laying down the law as to what each animal was worth. The fishermen stood by, listening attentively. The fact of Salvatore's purchasing power gave him the right to pronounce an opinion. He was in glory. Maurice thanked Heaven for that. The man in glory is often the forgetful man. Salvatore, he thought, would not bother about his daughter and his banker for a little while. But how to get rid of Gaspare and Amedeo! It seemed to him that they would never leave his side.

There were many wooden stands covered with goods for sale in the watercourse, with bales of stuff for suits and dresses, with hats and caps, shirts, cravats, boots and shoes, walking-sticks, shawls, household utensils, crockery, everything the contadino needs and loves. Gaspare, having money to lay out, considered it his serious duty to examine everything that was to be bought with slow minuteness. It did not matter whether the goods were suited to a masculine taste or not. He went into the mysteries of feminine attire with almost as much assiduity as a mother displays when buying a daughter's trousseau, and insisted upon Maurice sharing his interest and caution. All sense of humor, all boyish sprightliness vanished from him in this important epoch of his life. The suspicion, the intensity of the bargaining contadino came to the surface. His usually bright face was quite altered. He looked elderly, subtle, and almost Jewish as he slowly passed from stall to stall, testing, weighing, measuring, appraising.

It seemed to Maurice that this progress would never end. Presently they reached a stand covered with women's shawls and with aprons.

"Shall I buy an apron for my mother, signorino?" asked Gaspare.

"Yes, certainly."

Maurice did not know what else to say. The result of his consent was terrible. For a full half-hour they stood in the glaring sun, while Gaspare and Amedeo solemnly tried on aprons over their suits in the midst of a concourse of attentive contadini. In vain did Maurice say: "That's a pretty one. I should take that one." Some defect was always discoverable. The distant mother's taste was evidently peculiar and not to be easily suited, and Maurice, not being familiar with it, was unable to combat such assertions of Gaspare as that she objected to pink spots, or that she could never be expected to put on an apron before the neighbors if the stripes upon it were of different colors and there was no stitching round the hem. For the first time since he was in Sicily the heat began to affect him unpleasantly. His head felt as if it were compressed in an iron band, and the vision of Gaspare, eagerly bargaining, looking Jewish, and revolving slowly in aprons of different colors, shapes, and sizes, began to dance before his eyes. He felt desperate, and suddenly resolved to be frank.

"Macchè!" Gaspare was exclaiming, with indignant gestures of protest to the elderly couple who were in charge of the aprons; "it is not worth two soldi! It is not fit to be thrown to the pigs, and you ask me——"

"Gaspare!"

"Two lire—Madonna! Sangue di San Pancrazio, they ask me two lire! Macchè!" (He flung down the apron passionately upon the stall.) "Go and find Lipari people to buy your dirt; don't come to one from Marechiaro."

He took up another apron.

"Gaspare!"

"One lira fifty? Madre mia, do you think I was born in a grotto on Etna and have never——"

"Gaspare, listen to me!"

"Scusi, signorino! I——"

"I'm going over there to sit down in the shade for a minute. After that wine I drank at dinner I'm a bit sleepy."

"Si, signore. Shall I come with you?"

For once there was reluctance in his voice, and he looked down at the blue-and-white apron he had on with wistful eyes. It was a new joy to him to be bargaining in the midst of an attentive throng of his compatriots.

"No, no. You stay here and spend the money. Bid for the clock when the auction comes on."

"Oh, signore, but you must be here, too, then."

"All right. Come and fetch me if you like. I shall be over there under the trees."

He waved his hand vaguely towards the lemon groves.

"Now, choose a good apron. Don't let them cheat you."

"Macchè!"

The boy laughed loudly, and turned eagerly to the stall again.

"Come, Maddalena!"

Maurice drew her quickly, anxiously, out of the crowd, and they began to walk across the watercourse towards the farther bank and the group of olive-trees. Salvatore had forgotten them. So had Gaspare. Both father and servant were taken by the fascination of the fair. At last! But how late it must be! How many hours had already fled away! Maurice scarcely dared to look at his watch. He feared to see the time. While they walked he said nothing to Maddalena, but when they reached the bank he took her arm and helped her up it, and when they were at the top he drew a long breath.

"Are you tired, signorino?"

"Tired—yes, of all those people. Come and sit down, Maddalena, under the olive-trees."

He took her by the hand. Her hand was warm and dry, pleasant to touch, to hold. As he felt it in his the desire to strike at Salvatore revived within him. Salvatore was laughing at him, was triumphing over him, triumphing in the get-all and give-nothing policy which he thought he was pursuing with such complete success. Would it be very difficult to turn that success into failure? Maurice wondered for a moment, then ceased to wonder. Something in the touch of Maddalena's hand told him that, if he chose, he could have his revenge upon Salvatore, and he was assailed by a double temptation. Both anger and love tempted him. If he stooped to do evil he could gratify two of the strongest desires in humanity, the desire to conquer in love and the desire to triumph in hate. Salvatore thought him such a fool, held him in such contempt! Something within him was burning to-day as a cheek burns with shame, something within him that was like the kernel of him, like the soul of his manhood, which the fisherman was sneering at. He did not say to himself strongly that he did not care what such men thought of him. He could not, for his nature was both reckless and sensitive. He did care, as if he had been a Sicilian half doubtful whether he dared to show his face in the piazza. And he had another feeling, too, which had come to him when Salvatore had answered his exclamation of irresistible anger at being called "compare," the feeling that, whether he sinned against the fisherman or not, the fisherman meant to do him harm. The sensation might be absurd, would have seemed to him probably absurd in England. Here, in Sicily, it sprang up and he had just to accept it, as a man accepts an instinct which guides him, prompts him.

Salvatore had turned down his thumb that day.

Maurice was not afraid of him. Physically, he was quite fearless. But this sensation of having been secretly condemned made him feel hard, cruel, ready, perhaps, to do a thing not natural to him, to sacrifice another who had never done him wrong. At that moment it seemed to him that it would be more manly to triumph over Salvatore by a double betrayal than to "run straight," conquer himself and let men not of his code think of him as they would.

Not of his code! But what was his code? Was it that of England or that of Sicily? Which strain of blood was governing him to-day? Which strain would govern him finally? Artois would have had an interesting specimen under his observant eyes had he been at the fair of San Felice.

Maddalena willingly obeyed Maurice's suggestion.

"Get well into the shade," he said. "There's just enough to hold us, if we sit close together. You don't mind that, do you?"

"No, signore."

"Put your back against the trunk—there."

He kept his hat off. Over the railway line from the hot-looking sea there came a little breeze that just moved his short hair and the feathers of gold about Maddalena's brow. In the watercourse, but at some distance, they saw the black crowd of men and women and beasts swarming over the hot stones.

"How can they?" Maurice muttered, as he looked down.

"Cosa?"

He laughed.

"I was thinking out loud. I meant how can they bargain and bother hour after hour in all that sun!"

"But, signorino, you would not have them pay too much!" she said, very seriously. "It is dreadful to waste soldi."

"I suppose—yes, of course it is. Oh, but there are so many things worth more than soldi. Dio mio! Let's forget all that!"

He waved his hand towards the crowd, but he saw that Maddalena was preoccupied. She glanced towards the watercourse rather wistfully.

"What is it, Maddalena? Ah, I know! The blue dress and the ear-rings! Per Bacco!"

"No, signore—no, signore!"

She disclaimed quickly, reddening.

"Yes, it is. I had forgotten. But we can't go now. Maddalena, we will buy them this evening. Directly it gets cool we'll go, directly we've rested a little. But don't think of them now. I've promised, and I always keep a promise. Now, don't think of that any more!"

He spoke with a sort of desperation. The fair seemed to be his enemy, and he had thought that it would be his friend. It was like a personage with a stronger influence than his, an influence that could take away that which he wished to retain, to fix upon himself.

"No, signore," Maddalena said, meekly, but still wistfully.

"Do you care for a blue dress and a pair of ear-rings more than you do for me?" cried Maurice, with sudden roughness. "Are you like your father? Do you only care for me for what you can get out of me? I believe you do!"

Maddalena looked startled, almost terrified, by his outburst. Her lips trembled, but she gazed at him steadily.

"Non è vero."

The words sounded almost stern.

"I do—" he said. "I do want to be cared for a little—just for myself."

At that moment he had a sensation of loneliness like that of an utterly unloved man. And yet at that moment a great love was travelling to him—a love that was complete and flawless. But he did not think of it. He only thought that perhaps all this time he had been deceived, that Maddalena, like her father, was merely pleased to see him because he had money and could spend it. He sickened.

"Non è vero!" Maddalena repeated.

Her lips still trembled. Maurice looked at her doubtfully, yet with a sudden tenderness. Always when she looked troubled, even for an instant, there came to him the swift desire to protect her, to shield her.

"But why should you care for me?" he said. "It is better not. For I am going away, and probably you will never see me again."

Tears came into Maddalena's eyes. He did not know whether they were summoned by his previous roughness or his present pathos. He wanted to know.

"Probably I shall never come back to Sicily again," he said, with pressure.

She said nothing.

"It will be better not," he added. "Much better."

Now he was speaking for himself.

"There's something here, something that I love and that's bad for me. I'm quite changed here. I'm like another man."

He saw a sort of childish surprise creeping into her face.

"Why, signorino?" she murmured.

He kept his hand on hers and held it on the warm ground.

"Perhaps it is the sun," he said. "I lose my head here, and I—lose my heart!"

She still looked rather surprised, and again her ignorance fascinated him. He thought that it was far more attractive than any knowledge could have been.

"I'm horribly happy here, but I oughtn't to be happy."

"Why, signorino? It is better to be happy."

"Per Dio!" he exclaimed.

Now a deep desire to have his revenge upon Salvatore came to him, but not at all because it would hurt Salvatore. The cruelty had gone out of him. Maddalena's eyes of a child had driven it away. He wanted his revenge only because it would be an intense happiness to him to have it. He wanted it because it would satisfy an imperious desire of tender passion, not because it would infuriate a man who hated him. He forgot the father in the daughter.

"Suppose I were quite poor, Maddalena!" he said.

"But you are very rich, signorino."

"But suppose I were poor, like Gaspare, for instance. Suppose I were as I am, just the same, only a contadino, or a fisherman, as your father is. And suppose—suppose"—he hesitated—"suppose that I were not married!"

She said nothing. She was listening with deep but still surprised attention.

"Then I could—I could go to your father and ask him——"

He stopped.

"What could you ask him, signorino?"

"Can't you guess?"

"No, signore."

"I might ask him to let me marry you. I should—if it were like that—I should ask him to let me marry you."

"Davvero?"

An expression of intense pleasure, and of something more—of pride—had come into her face. She could not divest herself imaginatively of her conception of him as a rich forestiere, and she saw herself placed high above "the other girls," turned into a lady.

"Magari!" she murmured, drawing in her breath, then breathing out.

"You would be happy if I did that?"

"Magari!" she said again.

He did not know what the word meant, but he thought it sounded like the most complete expression of satisfaction he had ever heard.

"I wish," he said, pressing her hand—"I wish I were a Sicilian of Marechiaro."

At this moment, while he was speaking, he heard in the distance the shrill whistle of an engine. It ceased. Then it rose again, piercing, prolonged, fierce surely with inquiry. He put his hands to his ears.

"How beastly that is!" he exclaimed.

He hated it, not only for itself, but for the knowledge it sharply recalled to his mind, the knowledge of exactly what he was doing, and of the facts of his life, the facts that the very near future held.

"Why do they do that?" he added, with intense irritation.

"Because of the bridge, signorino. They want to know if they can come upon the bridge. Look! There is the man waving a flag. Now they can come. It is the train from Palermo."

"Palermo!" he said, sharply.

"Si, signore."

"But the train from Palermo comes the other way, by Messina!"

"Si, signore. But there are two, one by Messina and one by Catania. Ecco!"

From the lemon groves came the rattle of the approaching train.

"But—but——"

He caught at his watch, pulled it out.

Five o'clock!

He had taken his hand from Maddalena's, and now he made a movement as if to get up. But he did not get up. Instead, he pressed back against the olive-tree, upon whose trunk he was leaning, as if he wished to force himself into the gnarled wood of it. He had an instinct to hide. The train came on very slowly. During the two or three minutes that elapsed before it was in his view Maurice lived very rapidly. He felt sure that Hermione and Artois were in the train. Hermione had said that they would arrive at Cattaro at five-thirty. She had not said which way they were coming. Maurice had assumed that they would come from Messina because Hermione had gone away by that route. It was a natural error. But now? If they were at the carriage window! If they saw him! And surely they must see him. The olive-trees were close to the line and on a level with it. He could not get away. If he got up he would be more easily seen. Hermione would call out to him. If he pretended not to hear she might, she probably would, get out of the train at the San Felice station and come into the fair. She was impulsive. It was just the sort of thing she might do. She would do it. He was sure she would do it. He looked at the watercourse hard. The crowd of people was not very far off. He thought he detected the form of Gaspare. Yes, it was Gaspare. He and Amedeo were on the outskirts of the crowd near the railway bridge. As he gazed, the train whistled once more, and he saw Gaspare turn round and look towards the sea. He held his breath.

"Ecco, signorino. Viene!"

Maddalena touched his arm, kept her hand upon it. She was deeply interested in this event, the traversing by the train of the unfinished bridge. Maurice was thankful for that. At least she did not notice his violent perturbation.

"Look, signorino! Look!"

In despite of himself, Maurice obeyed her. He wanted not to look, but he could not help looking. The engine, still whistling, crept out from the embrace of the lemon-trees, with the dingy line of carriages behind it. At most of the windows there were heads of people looking out. Third class—he saw soldiers, contadini. Second class—no one. Now the first-class carriages were coming. They were close to him.

"Ah!"

He had seen Hermione. She was standing up, with her two hands resting on the door-frame and her head and shoulders outside of the carriage. Maurice sat absolutely still and stared at her, stared at her almost as if she were a stranger passing by. She was looking at the watercourse, at the crowd, eagerly. Her face, much browner than when she had left Sicily, was alight with excitement, with happiness. She was radiant. Yet he thought she looked old, older at least than he had remembered. Suddenly, as the train came very slowly upon the bridge, she drew in to speak to some one behind her, and he saw vaguely Artois, pale, with a long beard. He was seated, and he, too, was gazing out at the fair. He looked ill, but he, too, looked happy, much happier than he had in London. He put up a thin hand and stroked his beard, and Maurice saw wrinkles coming round his eyes as he smiled at something Hermione said to him. The train came to the middle of the bridge and stopped.

"Ecco!" murmured Maddalena. "The man at the other end has signalled!"

Maurice looked again at the watercourse. Gaspare was beyond the crowd now, and was staring at the train with interest, like Maddalena. Would it never go on? Maurice set his teeth and cursed it silently. And his soul said; "Go on! Go on!" again and again. "Go on! Go on!" Now Hermione was once more leaning out. Surely she must see Gaspare. A man waved a flag. The train jerked back, jangled, crept forward once more, this time a little faster. In a moment they would begone. Thank God! But what was Hermione doing? She started. She leaned further forward, staring into the watercourse. Maurice saw her face changing. A look of intense surprise, of intense inquiry, came into it. She took one hand swiftly from the door, put it behind her—ah, she had a pair of opera-glasses at her eyes now! The train went on faster. It was nearly off the bridge. But she was waving her hand. She was calling. She had seen Gaspare. And he? Maurice saw him start forward as if to run to the bridge. But the train was gone. The boy stopped, hesitated, then dashed away across the stones.

"Signorino! Signorino!"

Maurice said nothing.

"Signorino!" repeated Maddalena. "Look at Gaspare! Is he mad? Look! How he is running!"

Gaspare reached the bank, darted up it, and disappeared into the village.

"Signorino, what is the matter?"

Maddalena pulled his sleeve. She was looking almost alarmed.

"Matter? Nothing."

Maurice got up. He could not remain still. It was all over now. The fair was at an end for him. Gaspare would reach the station before the train went on, would explain matters. Hermione would get out. Already Maurice seemed to see her coming down to the watercourse, walking with her characteristic slow vigor. It did not occur to him at first that Hermione might refuse to leave Artois. Something in him knew that she was coming. Fate had interfered now imperiously. Once he had cheated fate. That was when he came to the fair despite Hermione's letter. Now fate was going to have her revenge upon him. He looked at Maddalena. Was fate working for her, to protect her? Would his loss be her gain? He did not know, for he did not know what would have been the course of his own conduct if fate had not interfered. He had been trifling, letting the current take him. It might have taken him far, but—now Hermione was coming. It was all over and the sun was still up, still shining upon the sea.

"Let us go into the fair. It is cooler now."

He tried to speak lightly.

"Si, signore."

Maddalena shook out her skirt and began to smile. She was thinking of the blue dress and the ear-rings. They went down into the watercourse.

"Signorino, what can have been the matter with Gaspare?"

"I don't know."

"He was looking at the train."

"Was he? Perhaps he saw a friend in it. Yes, that must have been it. He saw a friend in the train."

He stared across the watercourse towards the village, seeking two figures, and he was conscious now of two feelings that fought within him, of two desires: a desire that Hermione should not come, and a desire that she should come. He wanted, he even longed, to have his evening with Maddalena. Yet he wanted Hermione to get out of the train when Gaspare told her that he—Maurice—was at San Felice. If she did not get out she would be putting Artois before him. The pale face at the window, the eyes that smiled when Hermione turned familiarly round to speak, had stirred within him the jealousy of which he had already been conscious more than once. But now actual vision had made it fiercer. The woman who had leaned out looking at the fair belonged to him. He felt intensely that she was his property. Maddalena spoke to him again, two or three times. He did not hear her. He was seeing the wrinkles that came round the eyes of Artois when he smiled.

"Where are we going, signorino? Are we going back to the town?"

Instinctively, Maurice was following in the direction taken by Gaspare. He wanted to meet fate half-way, to still, by action, the tumult of feeling within him.

"Aren't the best things to be bought there?" he replied. "By the church where all those booths are? I think so."

Maddalena began to walk a little faster. The moment had come. Already she felt the blue dress rustling about her limbs, the ear-rings swinging in her ears.

Maurice did not try to hold her back. Nor did it occur to him that it would be wise to meet Hermione without Maddalena. He had done no actual wrong, and the pale face of Artois had made him defiant. Hermione came to him with her friend. He would come to her with his. He did not think of Maddalena as a weapon exactly, but he did feel as if, without her, he would be at a disadvantage when he and Hermione met.

They were in the first street now. People were beginning to flow back from the watercourse towards the centre of the fair. They walked in a crowd and could not see far before them. But Maurice thought he would know when Hermione was near him, that he would feel her approach. The crowd went on slowly, retarding them, but at last they were near to the church of Sant' Onofrio and could hear the sound of music. The "Intermezzo" from "Cavalleria Rusticana" was being played by the Musica Mascagni. Suddenly, Maurice started. He had felt a pull at his arm.

"Signorino! Signorino!"

Gaspare was by his side, streaming with perspiration and looking violently excited.

"Gaspare!"

He stopped, cast a swift look round. Gaspare was alone.

"Signorino"—the boy was breathing hard—"the signora"—he gulped—"the signora has come back."

The time had come for acting. Maurice feigned surprise.

"The signora! What are you saying? The signora is in Africa."

"No, signore! She is here!"

"Here in San Felice!"

"No, signore! But she was in the train. I saw her at the window. She waved her hand to me and called out—when the train was on the bridge. I ran to the station; I ran fast, but when I got there the train had just gone. The signora has come back, and we are not there to meet her!"

His eyes were tragic. Evidently he felt that their absence was a matter of immense importance, was a catastrophe.

"The signora here!" Maurice repeated, trying to make his voice amazed. "But why did she not tell us? Why did not she say that she was coming?"

He looked at Gaspare, but only for an instant. He felt afraid to meet his great, searching eyes.

"Non lo so."

Maddalena stood by in silence. The bright look of anticipation had gone out of her face, and was replaced by a confused and slightly anxious expression.

"I can't understand it," Maurice said, heavily. "I can't—was the signora alone, or did you see some one with her?"

"The sick signore? I did not see him. I saw only the signora standing at the window, waving her hand—così!"

He waved his hand.

"Madonna!" Maurice said, mechanically.

"What are we to do, signorino?"

"Do! What can we do? The train has gone!"

"Si, signore. But shall I fetch the donkeys?"

Maurice stole a glance at Maddalena. She was looking frankly piteous.

"Have you got the clock yet?" he asked Gaspare.

"No, signore."

Gaspare began to look rather miserable, too.

"It has not been put up. Perhaps they are putting it up now."

"Gaspare," Maurice said, hastily, "we can't be back to meet the signora now. Even if we went at once we should be hours late—and the donkeys are tired, perhaps. They will go slowly unless they have a proper rest. It is a dreadful pity, but I think if the signora knew she would wish us to stay now till the fair is over. She would not wish to spoil your pleasure. Do you think she would?"

"No, signore. The signora always wishes people to be happy."

"Even if we went at once it would be night before we got back."

"Si, signore."

"I think we had better stay—at any rate till the auction is finished and we have had something to eat. Then we will go."

"Va bene."

The boy sounded doubtful.

"La povera signora!" he said. "How disappointed she will be! She did want to speak to me. Her face was all red; she was so excited when she saw me, and her mouth was wide open like that!"

He made a grimace, with earnest, heart-felt sincerity.

"It cannot be helped. To-night we will explain everything and make the signora quite happy. Look here! Buy something for her. Buy her a present at the auction!"

"Signorino!" Gaspare cried. "I will give her the clock that plays the 'Tre Colori'! Then she will be happy again. Shall I?"

"Si, si. And meet me in the market-place. Then we will eat something and we will start for home."

The boy darted away towards the watercourse. His heart was light again. He had something to do for the signora, something that would make her very happy. Ah, when she heard the clock playing the "Tre Colori"! Mamma mia!

He tore towards the watercourse in an agony lest he should be too late.

Night was falling over the fair. The blue dress and the ear-rings had been chosen and paid for. The promenade of the beauties in the famous inherited brocades had taken place with éclat before the church of Sant' Onofrio. Salvatore had acquired a donkey of strange beauty and wondrous strength, and Gaspare had reappeared in the piazza accompanied by Amedeo, both laden with purchases and shining with excitement and happiness. Gaspare's pockets were bulging, and he walked carefully, carrying in his hands a tortured-looking parcel.

"Dov'è il mio padrone?" he asked, as he and Amedeo pushed through the dense throng. "Dov'è il mio padrone?"

He spied Maurice and Maddalena sitting before the ristorante listening to the performance of a small Neapolitan boy with a cropped head, who was singing street songs in a powerful bass voice, and occasionally doing a few steps of a melancholy dance upon the pavement. The crowd billowed round them. A little way off the "Musica della città," surrounded by a circle of colored lamps, was playing a selection from the "Puritani." The strange ecclesiastical chant of the Roman ice venders rose up against the music as if in protest. And these three definite and fighting melodies—of the Neapolitan, the band, and the ice venders—detached themselves from a foundation of ceaseless sound, contributed by the hundreds of Sicilians who swarmed about the ancient church, infested the narrow side streets of the village, looked down from the small balconies and the windows of the houses, and gathered in mobs in the wine-shops and the trattorie.

"Signorino! Signorino! Look!"

Gaspare had reached Maurice, and now stood by the little table at which his padrone and Maddalena were sitting, and placed the tortured parcel tenderly upon it.

"Is that the clock?"

Gaspare did not reply in words, but his brown fingers deftly removed the string and paper and undressed his treasure.

"Ecco!" he exclaimed.

The clock was revealed, a great circle of blue and white standing upon short, brass legs, and ticking loudly,

"Speranza mia, non piangere,

E il marinar fedele,

Vedrai tornar dall' Africa

Tra un anno queste vele——"

bawled the little boy from Naples. Gaspare seized the clock, turned a handle, lifted his hand in a reverent gesture bespeaking attention; there was a faint whirr, and then, sure enough, the tune of the "Tre Colori" was tinkled blithely forth.

"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare, triumphantly.

"Mamma mia!" murmured Maddalena, almost exhausted with the magic of the fair.

"It's wonderful!" said Maurice.

He, too, was a little tired, but not in body.

Gaspare wound the clock again, and again the tune was trilled forth, competing sturdily with the giant noises of the fair, a little voice that made itself audible by its clearness and precision.

"Ecco!" repeated Gaspare. "Will not the signora be happy when she sees what I have brought her from the fair?"

He sighed from sheer delight in his possession and the thought of his padrona's joy and wonder in it.

"Mangiamo?" he added, descending from heavenly delights to earthly necessities.

"Yes, it is getting late," said Maurice. "The fireworks will soon be beginning, I suppose."

"Not till ten, signorino. I have asked. There will be dancing first. But—are we going to stay?"

Maurice hesitated, but only for a second.

"Yes," he said. "Even if we went now the signora would be in bed and asleep long before we got home. We will stay to the end, the very end."

"Then we can say 'Good-morning' to the signora when we get home," said Gaspare.

He was quite happy now that he had this marvellous present to take back with him. He felt that it would make all things right, would sweep away all lingering disappointment at their absence and the want of welcome.

Salvatore did not appear at the meal. He had gone off to stable his new purchase with the other donkeys, and now, having got a further sum of money out of the Inglese, was drinking and playing cards with the fishermen of Catania. But he knew where his girl and Maurice were, and that Gaspare and Amedeo were with them. And he knew, too, that the Inglese's signora had come back. He told the news to the fishermen.

"To-night, when he gets home, his 'cristiana' will be waiting for him. Per Dio! it is over for him now. We shall see little more of him."

"And get little more from him!" said one of the fishermen, who was jealous of Salvatore's good-fortune.

Salvatore laughed loudly. He had drunk a good deal of wine and he had had a great deal of money given to him.

"I shall find another English fool, perhaps!" he said. "Chi lo sa?"

"And his cristiana?" asked another fisherman. "What is she like?"

"Like!" cried Salvatore, pouring out another glass of wine and spitting on the discolored floor, over which hens were running; "what is any cristiana like?"

And he repeated the contadino's proverb:

"'La mugghieri è comu la gatta: si l'accarizzi, idda ti gratta!'"

"Perhaps the Inglese will get scratched to-night," said the first fisherman.

"I don't mind," rejoined Salvatore. "Get us a fresh pack of cards, Fortunato. I'll pay for 'em."

And he flung down a lira on the wine-stained table.

Gaspare, now quite relieved in his mind, gave himself up with all his heart to the enjoyment of the last hours of the fair, and was unwearied in calling on his padrone to do the same. When the evening meal was over he led the party forth into the crowd that was gathered about the music; he took them to the shooting-tent, and made them try their luck at the little figures which calmly presented grotesquely painted profiles to the eager aim of the contadini; he made them eat ices which they bought at the beflagged cart of the ecclesiastical Romans, whose eternally chanting voices made upon Maurice a sinister impression, suggesting to his mind—he knew not why—the thought of death. Finally, prompted by Amedeo, he drew Maurice into a room where there was dancing.

It was crowded with men and women, was rather dark and very hot. In a corner there was a grinding organ, whose handle was turned by a perspiring man in a long, woollen cap. Beside him, hunched up on a window-sill, was a shepherd boy who accompanied the organ upon a flute of reed. Round the walls stood a throng of gazers, and in the middle of the floor the dancers performed vigorously, dancing now a polka, now a waltz, now a mazurka, now an elaborate country dance in which sixteen or twenty people took part, now a tarantella, called by many of the contadini "La Fasola." No sooner had they entered the room than Gaspare gently but firmly placed his arm round his padrone's waist, took his left hand and began to turn him about in a slow waltz, while Amedeo followed the example given with Maddalena. Round and round they went among the other couples. The organ in the corner ground out a wheezy tune. The reed-flute of the shepherd boy twittered, as perhaps, long ago, on the great mountain that looked down in the night above the village, a similar flute twittered from the woods to Empedocles climbing upward for the last time towards the plume of smoke that floated from the volcano. And then Amedeo and Gaspare danced together and Maurice's arm was about the waist of Maddalena.

It was the first time that he had danced with her, and the mutual act seemed to him to increase their intimacy, to carry them a step forward in this short and curious friendship which was now, surely, very close to its end. They did not speak as they danced. Maddalena's face was very solemn, like the face of one taking part in an important ceremonial. And Maurice, too, felt serious, even sad. The darkness and heat of the room, the melancholy with which all the tunes of a grinding organ seem impregnated, the complicated sounds from the fair outside, from which now and again the voices of the Roman ice-venders detached themselves, even the tapping of the heavy boots of the dancers upon the floor of brick—all things in this hour moved him to a certain dreariness of the spirit which was touched with sentimentality. This fair day was coming to an end. He felt as if everything were coming to an end.

Every dog has his day. The old saying came to his mind. "Every dog has his day—and mine is over."

He saw in the dimness of the room the face of Hermione at the railway carriage window. It was the face of one on the edge of some great beginning. But she did not know. Hermione did not know.

The dance was over. Another was formed, a country dance. Again Maurice was Maddalena's partner. Then came "La Fasola," in which Amedeo proudly showed forth his well-known genius and Gaspare rivalled him. But Maurice thought it was not like the tarantella upon the terrace before the house of the priest. The brilliancy, the gayety of that rapture in the sun were not present here among farewells. A longing to be in the open air under the stars came to him, and when at last the grinding organ stopped he said to Gaspare:

"I'm going outside. You'll find me there when you've finished dancing."

"Va bene, signorino. In a quarter of an hour the fireworks will be beginning."

"And then we must start off at once."

"Si, signore."

The organ struck up again and Amedeo took hold of Gaspare by the waist.

"Maddalena, come out with me."

She followed him. She was tired. Festivals were few in her life, and the many excitements of this long day had told upon her, but her fatigue was the fatigue of happiness. They sat down on a wooden bench set against the outer wall of the house. No one else was sitting there, but many people were passing to and fro, and they could see the lamps round the "Musica Leoncavallo," and hear it fighting and conquering the twitter of the shepherd boy's flute and the weary wheezing of the organ within the house. A great, looming darkness rising towards the stars dominated the humming village. Etna was watching over the last glories of the fair.

"Have you been happy to-day, Maddalena?" Maurice asked.

"Si, signore, very happy. And you?"

He did not answer.

"It will all be very different to-morrow," he said.

He was trying to realize to-morrow, but he could not.

"We need not think of to-morrow," Maddalena said.

She arranged her skirt with her hands, and crossed one foot over the other.

"Do you always live for the day?" Maurice asked her.

She did not understand him.

"I do not want to think of to-morrow," she said. "There will be no fair then."

"And you would like always to be at the fair?"

"Si, signore, always."

There was a great conviction in her simple statement.

"And you, signorino?"

She was curious about him to-night.

"I don't know what I should like," he said.

He looked up at the great darkness of Etna, and again a longing came to him to climb up, far up, into those beech forests that looked towards the Isles of Lipari. He wanted greater freedom. Even the fair was prison.

"But I think," he said, after a pause—"I think I should like to carry you off, Maddalena, up there, far up on Etna."

He remembered his feeling when he had put his arms round her in the dance. It had been like putting his arms round ignorance that wanted to be knowledge. Who would be Maddalena's teacher? Not he. And yet he had almost intended to have his revenge upon Salvatore.

"Shall we go now?" he said. "Shall we go off to Etna, Maddalena?"

"Signorino!"

She gave a little laugh.

"We must go home after the fireworks."

"Why should we? Why should we not take the donkeys now? Gaspare is dancing. Your father is playing cards. No one would notice. Shall we? Shall we go now and get the donkeys, Maddalena?"

But she replied:

"A girl can only go like that with a man when she is married."

"That's not true," he said. "She can go like that with a man she loves."

"But then she is wicked, and the Madonna will not hear her when she prays, signorino."

"Wouldn't you do anything for a man you really loved? Wouldn't you forget everything? Wouldn't you forget even the Madonna?"

She looked at him.

"Non lo so."

It seemed to him that he was answered.

"Wouldn't you forget the Madonna for me?" he whispered, leaning towards her.

There was a loud report close to them, a whizzing noise, a deep murmur from the crowd, and in the clear sky above Etna the first rocket burst, showering down a cataract of golden stars, which streamed towards the earth, leaving trails of fire behind them.

The sound of the grinding organ and of the shepherd boy's flute ceased in the dancing-room, and the crowd within rushed out into the market-place.

"Signorino! Signorino! Come with me! We cannot see properly here! I know where to go. There will be wheels of fire, and masses of flowers, and a picture of the Regina Margherita. Presto! Presto!"

Gaspare had hold of Maurice by the arm.

"E' finito!" Maurice murmured.

It seemed to him that the last day of his wild youth was at an end.

"E' finito!" he repeated.

But there was still an hour.

And who can tell what an hour will bring forth?

CHAPTER XVII

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Maurice and Gaspare said good-bye to Maddalena and her father on the road by Isola Bella. Salvatore had left the three donkeys at Cattaro, and had come the rest of the way on foot, while Maddalena rode Gaspare's beast.

"The donkey you bought is for Maddalena," Maurice had said to him.

And the fisherman had burst into effusive thanks. But already he had his eye on a possible customer in Cattaro. As soon as the Inglese had gone back to his own country the donkey would be resold at a good price. What did a fisherman want with donkeys, and how was an animal to be stabled on the Sirens' Isle? As soon as the Inglese was gone, Salvatore meant to put a fine sum of money into his pocket.

"Addio, signorino!" he said, sweeping off his hat with the wild, half-impudent gesture that was peculiar to him. "I kiss your hand and I kiss the hand of your signora."

He bent down his head as if he were going to translate the formal phrase into an action, but Maurice drew back.

"Addio, Salvatore," he said.

His voice was low.

"Addio, Maddalena!" he added.

She murmured something in reply. Salvatore looked keenly from one to the other.

"Are you tired, Maddalena?" he asked, with a sort of rough suspicion.

"Si," she answered.

She followed him slowly across the railway line towards the sea, while Maurice and Gaspare turned their donkeys' heads towards the mountain.

They rode upward in silence. Gaspare was sleepy. His head nodded loosely as he rode, but his hands never let go their careful hold of the clock. Round about him his many purchases were carefully disposed, fastened elaborately to the big saddle. The roses, faded now, were still above his ears. Maurice rode behind. He was not sleepy. He felt as if he would never sleep again.

As they drew nearer to the house of the priest, Gaspare pulled himself together with an effort, half-turned on his donkey, and looked round at his padrone.

"Signorino!"

"Si."

"Do you think the signora will be asleep?"

"I don't know. I suppose so."

The boy looked wise.

"I do not think so," he said, firmly.

"What—at three o'clock in the morning!"

"I think the signora will be on the terrace watching for us."

Maurice's lips twitched.

"Chi lo sa?" he replied.

He tried to speak carelessly, but where was his habitual carelessness of spirit, his carelessness of a boy now? He felt that he had lost it forever, lost it in that last hour of the fair.

"Signorino!"

"Well?"

"Where were you and Maddalena when I was helping with the fireworks?"

"Close by."

"Did you see them all? Did you see the Regina Margherita?"

"Si."

"I looked round for you, but I could not see you."

"There was such a crowd and it was dark."

"Yes. Then you were there, where I left you?"

"We may have moved a little, but we were not far off."

"I cannot think why I could not find you when the fireworks were over."

"It was the crowd. I thought it best to go to the stable without searching for you. I knew you and Salvatore would be there."

The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said:

"Salvatore was very angry when he saw me come into the stable without you."

"Why?"

"He said I ought not to have left my padrone."

"And what did you say?"

"I told him I would not be spoken to by him. If you had not come in just then I think there would have been a baruffa. Salvatore is a bad man, and always ready with his knife. And he had been drinking."

"He was quiet enough coming home."

"I do not like his being so quiet."

"What does it matter?"

Again there was a pause. Then Gaspare said:

"Now that the signora has come back we shall not go any more to the Casa delle Sirene, shall we?"

"No, I don't suppose we shall go any more."

"It is better like that, signorino. It is much better that we do not go."

Maurice said nothing.

"We have been there too often," added Gaspare. "I am glad the signora has come back. I am sorry she ever went away."

"It was not our fault that she went," Maurice said, in a hard voice like that of a man trying to justify something, to defend himself against some accusation. "We did not want the signora to go."

"No, signore."

Gaspare's voice sounded almost apologetic. He was a little startled by his padrone's tone.

"It was a pity she went," he continued. "The poor signora——"

"Why is it such a pity?" Maurice interrupted, almost roughly, almost suspiciously. "Why do you say 'the poor signora'?"

Gaspare stared at him with open surprise.

"I only meant——"

"The signora wished to go to Africa. She decided for herself. There is no reason to call her the poor signora."

"No, signore."

The boy's voice recalled Maurice to prudence.

"It was very good of her to go," he said, more quietly. "Perhaps she has saved the life of the sick signore by going."

"Si, signore."

Gaspare said no more, but as they rode up, drawing ever nearer to the bare mountain-side and the house of the priest, Maurice's heart reiterated the thought of the boy. Why had Hermione ever gone? What a madness it had all been, her going, his staying! He knew it now for a madness, a madness of the summer, of the hot, the burning south. In this terrible quiet of the mountains, without the sun, without the laughter and the voices and the movement of men, he understood that he had been mad, that there had been something in him, not all himself, which had run wild, despising restraint. And he had known that it was running wild, and he had thought to let it go just so far and no farther. He had set a limit of time to his wildness and its deeds. And he had set another limit. Surely he had. He had not ever meant to go too far. And then, just when he had said to himself "E' finito!" the irrevocable was at hand, the moment of delirium in which all things that should have been remembered were forgotten. What had led him? What spirit of evil? Or had he been led at all? Had not he rather deliberately forced his way to the tragic goal whither, through all these sunlit days, these starry nights, his feet had been tending?

He looked upon himself as a man looks upon a stranger whom he has seen commit a crime which he could never have committed. Mentally he took himself into custody, he tried, he condemned himself. In this hour of acute reaction the cool justice of the Englishman judged the passionate impulse of the Sicilian, even marvelled at it, and the heart of the dancing Faun cried: "What am I—what am I really?" and did not find the answer.

"Signorino?"

"Yes, Gaspare."

"When we get to that rock we shall see the house."

"I know."

How eagerly he had looked upward to the little white house on the mountain on that first day in Sicily, with what joy of anticipation, with what an exquisite sense of liberty and of peace! The drowsy wail of the "Pastorale" had come floating down to him over the olive-trees almost like a melody that stole from paradise. But now he dreaded the turn of the path. He dreaded to see the terrace wall, the snowy building it protected. And he felt as if he were drawing near to a terror, and as if he could not face it, did not know how to face it.

"Signorino, there is no light! Look!"

"The signora and Lucrezia must be asleep at this hour."

"If they are, what are we to do? Shall we wake them?"

"No, no."

He spoke quickly, in hope of a respite.

"We will wait—we will not disturb them."

Gaspare looked down at the parcel he was holding with such anxious care.

"I would like to play the 'Tre Colori,'" he said. "I would like the first thing the signora hears when she wakes to be the 'Tre Colori.'"

"Hush! We must be very quiet."

The noise made on the path by the tripping feet of the donkeys was almost intolerable to him. It must surely wake the deepest sleeper. They were now on the last ascent where the mountain-side was bare. Some stones rattled downward, causing a sharp, continuous sound. It was answered by another sound, which made both Gaspare and Maurice draw rein and pull up.

As on that first day in Sicily Maurice had been welcomed by the "Pastorale," so he was welcomed by it now. What an irony that was to him! For an instant his lips curved in a bitter smile. But the smile died away as he realized things, and a strange sadness took hold of his heart. For it was not the ceramella that he heard in this still hour, but a piano played softly, monotonously, with a dreamy tenderness that made it surely one with the tenderness of the deep night. And he knew that Hermione had been watching, that she had heard him coming, that this was her welcome, a welcome from the depths of her pure, true heart. How much the music told him! How clearly it spoke to him! And how its caress flagellated his bare soul! Hermione had returned expectant of welcome and had found nothing, and instead of coming out upon the terrace, instead of showing surprise, vexation, jealous curiosity, of assuming the injured air that even a good woman can scarcely resist displaying in a moment of acute disappointment, she sent forth this delicate salutation to him from afar, the sweetest that she knew, the one she herself loved best.

Tears came into his eyes as he listened. Then he shut his eyes and said to himself, shuddering:

"Oh, you beast! You beast!"

"It is the signora!" said Gaspare, turning round on his donkey. "She does not know we are here, and she is playing to keep herself awake."

He looked down at his clock, and his eyes began to shine.

"I am glad the signora is awake!" he said. "Signorino, let us get off the donkeys and leave them at the arch, and let us go in without any noise."

"But perhaps the signora knows that we are here," Maurice said.

Directly he had heard the music he had known that Hermione was aware of their approach.

"No, no, signore. I am sure she does not, or she would have come out to meet us. Let us leave the donkeys!"

He sprang off softly. Mechanically, Maurice followed his example.

"Now, signore!"

The boy took him by the hand and led him on tiptoe to the terrace, making him crouch down close to the open French window. The "Pastorale" was louder here. It never ceased, but returned again and again with the delicious monotony that made it memorable and wove a spell round those who loved it. As he listened to it, Maurice fancied he could hear the breathing of the player, and he felt that she was listening, too, listening tensely for footsteps on the terrace.

Gaspare looked up at him with bright eyes. The boy's whole face was alive with a gay and mischievous happiness, as he turned the handle at the back of his clock slowly, slowly, till at last it would turn no more. Then there tinkled forth to join the "Pastorale" the clear, trilling melody of the "Tre Colori."

The music in the room ceased abruptly. There was a rustling sound as the player moved. Then Hermione's voice, with something trembling through it that was half a sob, half a little burst of happy laughter, called out:

"Gaspare, how dare you interrupt my concert?"

"Signora! Signora!" cried Gaspare, and, springing up, he darted into the sitting-room.

But Maurice, though he lifted himself up quickly, stood where he was with his hand set hard against the wall of the house. He heard Gaspare kiss Hermione's hand. Then he heard her say:

"But, but, Gaspare——"

He took his hand from the wall with an effort. His feet seemed glued to the ground, but at last he was in the room.

"Hermione!" he said.

"Maurice!"

He felt her strong hands, strong and yet soft like all the woman, on his.

"Cento di questi giorni!" she said. "Ah, but it is better than all the birthdays in the world!"

He wanted to kiss her—not to please her, but for himself he wanted to kiss her—but he dared not. He felt that if his lips were to touch hers—she must know. To excuse his avoidance of the natural greeting he looked at Gaspare.

"I know!" she whispered. "You haven't forgotten!"

She was alluding to that morning on the terrace when he came up from the fishing. They loosed their hands. Gaspare set the clock playing again.

"What a beauty!" Hermione said, glad to hide her emotion for a moment till she and Maurice could be alone. "What a marvel! Where did you find it, Gaspare—at the fair?"

"Si, signora!"

Solemnly he handed it, still playing brightly, to his padrona, just a little reluctantly, perhaps, but very gallantly.

"It is for you, signora."

"A present—oh, Gaspare!"

Again her voice was veiled. She put out her hand and touched the boy's hand.

"Grazie! How sweetly it plays! You thought of me!"

There was a silence till the tune was finished. Then Maurice said:

"Hermione, I don't know what to say. That we should be at the fair the day you arrived! Why—why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you write?"

"You didn't know, then!"

The words came very quickly, very eagerly.

"Know! Didn't Lucrezia tell you that we had no idea?"

"Poor Lucrezia! She's in a dreadful condition. I found her in the village."

"No!" Maurice cried, thankful to turn the conversation from himself, though only for an instant. "I specially told her to stay here. I specially——"

"Well, but, poor thing, as you weren't expecting me! But I wrote, Maurice, I wrote a letter telling you everything, the hour we were coming—"

"It's Don Paolo!" exclaimed Gaspare, angrily. "He hides away the letters. He lets them lie sometimes in his office for months. To-morrow I will go and tell him what I think; I will turn out every drawer."

"It is too bad!" Maurice said.

"Then you never had it?"

"Hermione"—he stared at the open door—"you think we should have gone to the fair if——"

"No, no, I never thought so. I only wondered. It all seemed so strange."

"It is too horrible!" Maurice said, with heavy emphasis. "And Artois—no rooms ready for him! What can he have thought?"

"As I did, that there had been a mistake. What does it matter now? Just at the moment I was dreadfully—oh, dreadfully disappointed. I saw Gaspare at the fair. And you saw me, Gaspare?"

"Si, signora. I ran all the way to the station, but the train had gone."

"But I didn't see you, Maurice. Where were you?"

Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but Maurice did not give him time.

"I was there, too, in the fair."

"But of course you weren't looking at the train?"

"Of course not. And when Gaspare told me, it was too late to do anything. We couldn't get back in time, and the donkeys were tired, and so——"

"Oh, I'm glad you didn't hurry back. What good would it have done then?"

There was a touch of constraint in her voice.

"You must have thought I should be in bed."

"Yes, we did."

"And so I ought to be now. I believe I am tremendously tired, but—but I'm so tremendously something else that I hardly know."

The constraint had gone.

"The signora is happy because she is back in my country," Gaspare remarked, with pride and an air of shrewdness.

He nodded his head. The faded roses shook above his ears. Hermione smiled at him.

"He knows all about it," she said. "Well, if we are ever to go to bed——"

Gaspare looked from her to his padrone.

"Buona notte, signora," he said, gravely. "Buona notte, signorino. Buon riposo!"

"Buon riposo!" echoed Hermione. "It is blessed to hear that again. I do love the clock, Gaspare."

The boy beamed at her and went reluctantly away to find the donkeys. At that moment Maurice would have given almost anything to keep him. He dreaded unspeakably to be alone with Hermione. But it had to be. He must face it. He must seem natural, happy.

"Shall I put the clock down?" he asked.

He went to her, took the clock, carried it to the writing-table, and put it down.

"Gaspare was so happy to bring it to you."

He turned. He felt desperate. He came to Hermione and put out his hands.

"I feel so bad that we weren't here," he said.

"That is it!"

There was a sound of deep relief in her voice. Then she had been puzzled by his demeanor! He must be natural; but how? It seemed to him as if never in all his life could he have felt innocent, careless, brave. Now he was made of cowardice. He was like a dog that crawls with its belly to the floor. He got hold of Hermione's hands.

"I feel—I feel horribly, horribly bad!"

Speaking the absolute truth, his voice was absolutely sincere, and he deceived her utterly.

"Maurice," she said, "I believe it's upset you so much that—that you are shy of me."

She laughed happily.

"Shy—of me!"

He tried to laugh, too, and kissed her abruptly, awkwardly. All his natural grace was gone from him. But when he kissed her she did not know it; her lips clung to his with a tender passion, a fealty that terrified him.

"She must know!" he thought. "She must feel the truth. My lips must tell it to her."

And when at last they drew away from each other his eyes asked her furiously a question, asked it of her eyes.

"What is it, Maurice?"

He said nothing. She dropped her eyes and reddened slowly, till she looked much younger than usual, strangely like a girl.

"You haven't—you haven't——"

There was a sound of reserve in her voice, and yet a sound of triumph, too. She looked up at him again.

"Do you guess that I have something to tell you?" she said, slowly.

"Something to tell me?" he repeated, dully.

He was so intent on himself, on his own evil-doing, that it seemed to him as if everything must have some connection with it.

"Ah," she said, quickly; "no, I see you weren't."

"What is it?" he asked, but without real interest.

"I can't tell you now," she said.

Gaspare went by the window leading the donkeys.

"Buona notte, signora!"

It was a very happy voice.

"Buona notte, Gaspare. Sleep well."

Maurice caught at the last words.

"We must sleep," he said. "To-morrow we'll—we'll——"

"Tell each other everything. Yes, to-morrow!"

She put her arm through his.

"Maurice, if you knew how I feel!"

"Yes?" he said, trying to make his voice eager, buoyant. "Yes?"

"If you knew how I've been longing to be back! And so often I've thought that I never should be here with you again, just in the way we were!"

He cleared his throat.

"Why?"

"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness, I think. But we will, we are repeating it, aren't we?"

"Yes."

"When I got to the station to-day, and—and you weren't there, I had a dreadful foreboding. It was foolish. The explanation of your not being there was so simple. Of course I might have guessed it."

"Of course."

"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there because I had lost you forever, because you had been taken away from me forever. It was such an intense feeling that it frightened me—it frightened me horribly. Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what an idiot I have been!"

He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt as if his arm must tell her what she had not learned from his lips. And she thought that now he must know the truth she had not told him.

"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.

"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you. To me you always mean the sun, light, and life, and all that is brave and beautiful!"

He took his arm away from her.

"Come, we must sleep, Hermione!" he said. "It's nearly dawn. I can almost see the smoke on Etna."

He shut the French window and drew the bolt.

She had gone into the bedroom and was standing by the dressing-table. She did not know why, but a great shyness had come upon her. It was like a cloud enveloping her. Never before had she felt like this with Maurice, not even when they were first married. She had loved him too utterly to be shy with him. Maurice was still in the sitting-room, fastening the shutters of the window. She heard the creak of wood, the clatter of the iron bar falling into the fastener. Now he would come.

But he did not come. He was moving about in the room. She heard papers rustling, then the lid of the piano shut down. He was putting everything in order.

This orderliness was so unusual in Maurice that it made a disagreeable impression upon her. She began to feel as if he did not want to come into the bedroom, as if he were trying to put off the moment of coming. She remembered that he had seemed shy of her. What had come to them both to-night? Her instinct moved her to break through this painful, this absurd constraint.

"Maurice!" she called.

"Yes."

His voice sounded odd to her, almost like the voice of some other man, some stranger.

"Aren't you coming?"

"Yes. Hermione."

But still he did not come. After a moment, he said:

"It's awfully hot to-night!"

"After Africa it seems quite cool to me."

"Does it? I've been—since you've been away I've been sleeping nearly always out-of-doors on the terrace."

Now he came to the doorway and stood there. He looked at the white room, at Hermione. She had on a white tea-gown. It seemed to him that everything here was white, everything but his soul. He felt as if he could not come into this room, could not sleep here to-night, as if it would be a desecration. When he stood in the doorway the painful shyness returned to her.

"Have you?" she said.

"Yes."

"Do you—would you rather sleep there to-night?"

She did not mean to say it. It was the last thing she wished to say. Yet she said it. It seemed to her that she was forced to say it.

"Well, it's much cooler there."

She was silent.

"I could just put one or two rugs and cushions on the seat by the wall," he said. "I shall sleep like a top. I'm awfully tired!"

"But—but the sun will soon be up, won't it?"

"Oh—then I can come in."

"All right."

"I'll take the rugs from the sitting-room. I say—how's Artois?"

"Much better, but he's still weak."

"Poor chap!"

"He'll ride up to-morrow on a donkey."

"Good! I'm—I'm most awfully sorry about his rooms."

"What does it matter? I've made them quite nice already. He's perfectly comfortable."

"I'm glad. It's all—it's all been such a pity—about to-day, I mean."

"Don't let's think of it! Don't let's think of it any more."

A passionate sound had stolen into her voice. She moved a step towards him. A sudden idea had come to her, an idea that stirred within her a great happiness, that made a flame of joy spring up in her heart.

"Maurice, you—you——"

"What is it?" he asked.

"You aren't vexed at my staying away so long? You aren't vexed at my bringing Emile back with me?"

"No, of course not," he said. "But—but I wish you hadn't gone away."

And then he disappeared into the sitting-room, collected the rugs and cushions, opened the French window, and went out upon the terrace. Presently he called out:

"I shall sleep as I am, Hermione, without undressing. I'm awfully done. Good-night."

"Good-night!" she called.

There was a quiver in her voice. And yet that flame of happiness had not quite died down. She said to herself:

"He doesn't want me to know. He's too proud. But he has been a little jealous, perhaps." She remembered how Sicilian he was.

"But I'll make him forget it all," she thought, eagerly. "To-morrow—to-morrow it will be all right. He's missed me, he's missed me!"

That thought was very sweet to her. It seemed to explain all things; this constraint of her husband, which had reacted upon her, this action of his in preferring to sleep outside—everything. He had always been like a boy. He was like a boy now. He could not conceal his feelings. He did not doubt her. She knew that. But he had been a little jealous about her friendship for Emile.

She undressed. When she was ready for bed she hesitated a moment. Then she put a white shawl round her shoulders and stole quickly out of the room. She came upon the terrace. The stars were waning. The gray of the dawn was in the sky towards the east. Maurice, stretched upon the rugs, with his face turned towards the terrace wall, was lying still. She went to him, bent down, and kissed him.

"I love you," she whispered—"oh, so much!"

She did not wait, but went away at once. When she was gone he put up his hand to his face. On his cheek there was a tear.

"God forgive me!" he said to himself. "God forgive me!"

His body was shaken by a sob.

CHAPTER XVIII

When the sun came up over the rim of the sea Maurice ceased from his pretence of sleep, raised himself on his elbow, then sat upright and looked over the ravine to the rocks of the Sirens' Isle. The name seemed to him now a fatal name, and everything connected with his sojourn in Sicily fatal. Surely there had been a malign spirit at work. In this early morning hour his brain, though unrefreshed by sleep, was almost unnaturally clear, feverishly busy. Something had met him when he first set foot in Sicily—so he thought now—had met him with a fixed and evil purpose. And that purpose had never been abandoned.

Old superstitions, inherited perhaps from a long chain of credulous Sicilian ancestors, were stirring in him. He did not laugh at his idea, as a pure-blooded Englishman would have laughed. He pondered it. He cherished it.

On his very first evening in Sicily the spirit had led him to the wall, had directed his gaze to the far-off light in the house of the sirens. He remembered how strangely the little light had fascinated his eyes, and his mind through his eyes, how he had asked what it was, how, when Hermione had called him to come in to sleep, he had turned upon the steps to gaze down on it once more. Then he had not known why he gazed. Now he knew. The spirit that had met him by the sea in Sicily had whispered to him to look, and he had obeyed because he could not do otherwise.

He dwelt upon that thought, that he had obeyed because he had been obliged to obey. It was a palliative to his mental misery and his hatred of himself. The fatalism that is linked with superstition got hold upon him and comforted him a little. He had not been a free agent. He had had to do as he had done. Everything had been arranged so that he might sin. The night of the fishing had prepared the way for the night of the fair. If Hermione had stayed—but of course she had not stayed. The spirit that had kept him in Sicily had sent her across the sea to Africa. In the full flush of his hot-blooded youth, intoxicated by his first knowledge of the sun and of love, he had been left quite alone. Newly married, he had been abandoned by his wife for a good, even perhaps a noble, reason. Still, he had been abandoned—to himself and the keeping of that spirit. Was it any wonder that he had fallen? He strove to think that it was not. In the night he had cowered before Hermione and had been cruel with himself. Now, in the sunshine, he showed fight. He strove to find excuses for himself. If he did not find excuses he felt that he could not face the day, face Hermione in sunlight.

And now that the spirit had led him thus far, surely its work was done, surely it would leave him alone. He tried to believe that.

Then he thought of Maddalena.

She was there, down there where the rising sun glittered on the sea. She surely was awake, as he was awake. She was thinking, wondering—perhaps weeping.

He got up. He could not look at the sea any more. The name "House of the Sirens" suddenly seemed to him a terrible misnomer, now that he thought of Maddalena perhaps weeping by the sea.

He had his revenge upon Salvatore, but at what a cost!

Salvatore! The fisherman's face rose up before him. If he ever knew! Maurice remembered his sensation that already, before he had done the fisherman any wrong, the fisherman had condemned him. Now there was a reason for condemnation. He had no physical fear of Salvatore. He was not a man to be physically afraid of another man. But if Salvatore ever knew he might tell. He might tell Hermione. That thought brought with it to Maurice a cold as of winter. The malign spirit might still have a purpose in connection with him, might still be near him full of intention. He felt afraid of the Sicily he had loved. He longed to leave it. He thought of it as an isle of fear, where terrors walked in the midst of the glory of the sunshine, where fatality lurked beside the purple sea.

"Maurice!"

He started. Hermione was on the steps of the sitting-room.

"You're not sleeping!" he said.

He felt as if she had been there reading all his thoughts.

"And you!" she answered.

"The sun woke me."

He lied instinctively. All his life with her would be a lie now, could never be anything else—unless——

He looked at her hard and long in the eyes for the first time since they had met after her return. Suppose he were to tell her, now, at once, in the stillness, the wonderful innocence and clearness of the dawn! For a moment he felt that it would be an exquisite relief, a casting down of an intolerable burden. She had such a splendid nature. She loved sincerity as she loved God. To her it was the one great essential quality, whose presence or absence made or marred the beauty of a human soul. He knew that.

"Why do you look at me like that?" she said, coming down to him with the look of slow strength that was always characteristic of her.

He dropped his eyes.

"I don't know. How do you mean?"

"As if you had something to tell me."

"Perhaps—perhaps I have," he answered.

He was on the verge, the very verge of confession. She put her arm through his. When she touched him the impulse waned, but it did not die utterly away.

"Tell it me," she said. "I love to hear everything you tell me. I don't think you could ever tell me anything that I should not understand."

"Are you—are you sure?"

"I think so."

"But"—he suddenly remembered some words of hers that, till then, he had forgotten—"but you had something to tell me."

"Yes."

"I want to hear it."

He could not speak yet. Perhaps presently he would be able to.

"Let us go up to the top of the mountain," she answered. "I feel as if we could see the whole island from there. And up there we shall get all the wind of the morning."

They turned towards the steep, bare slope and climbed it, while the sun rose higher, as if attending them. At the summit there was a heap of stones.

"Let us sit here," Hermione said. "We can see everything from here, all the glories of the dawn."

"Yes."

He was so intensely preoccupied by the debate within him that he did not remember that it was here, among these stones where they were sitting, that he had hidden the fragments of Hermione's letter from Africa telling him of her return on the day of the fair.

They sat down with their faces towards the sea. The air up here was exquisitely cool. In the pellucid clearness of dawn the coast-line looked enchanted, fairy-like and full of delicate mystery. And its fading, in the far distance, was like a calling voice. Behind them the ranges of mountains held a few filmy white clouds, like laces, about their rugged peaks. The sea was a pale blue stillness, shot with soft grays and mauves and pinks, and dotted here and there with black specks that were the boats of fishermen.

Hermione sat with her hands clasped round her knees. Her face, browned by the African sun, was intense with feeling.

"Yes," she said, at last, "I can tell you here."

She looked at the sea, the coast-line, then turned her head and gazed at the mountains.

"We looked at them together," she continued—"that last evening before I went away. Do you remember, Maurice?"

"Yes."

"From the arch. It is better up here. Always, when I am very happy or very sad, my instinct would be to seek a mountain-top. The sight of great spaces seen from a height teaches one, I think."

"What?"

"Not to be an egoist in one's joy; not to be a craven in one's sorrow. You see, a great view suggests the world, the vastness of things, the multiplicity of life. I think that must be it. And of course it reminds one, too, that one will soon be going away."

"Going away?"

"Yes. 'The mountains will endure'—but we—!"

"Oh, you mean death."

"Yes. What is it makes one think most of death when—when life, new life, is very near?"

She had been gazing at the mountains and the sea, but now she turned and looked into his face.

"Don't you understand what I have to tell you?" she asked.

He shook his head. He was still wondering whether he would dare to tell her of his sin. And he did not know. At one moment he thought that he could do it, at another that he would rather throw himself over the precipice of the mountain than do it.

"I don't understand it at all."

There was a lack of interest in his voice, but she did not notice it. She was full of the wonder of the morning, the wonder of being again with him, and the wonder of what she had to tell him.

"Maurice"—she put her hand on his—"the night I was crossing the sea to Africa I knew. All these days I have kept this secret from you because I could not write it. It seemed to me too sacred. I felt I must be with you when I told it. That night upon the sea I was very sad. I could not sleep. I was on deck looking always back, towards Sicily and you. And just when the dawn was coming I—I knew that a child was coming, too, a child of mine and yours."

She was silent. Her hand pressed his, and now she was again looking towards the sea. And it seemed to him that her face was new, that it was already the face of a mother.

He said nothing and he did not move. He looked down at the heap of stones by which they were sitting, and his eyes rested on a piece of paper covered with writing. It was a fragment of Hermione's letter to him. As he saw it something sharp and cold like a weapon made of ice, seemed to be plunged into him. He got up, pulling hard at her hand. She obeyed his hand.

"What is it?" she said, as they stood together. "You look——"

He had become pale. He knew it.

"Hermione!" he said.

He was actually panting as if he had been running. He moved a few steps towards the edge of the summit. She followed him.

"You are angry that I didn't tell you! But—I wanted to say it. I wanted to—to——"

She lifted his hands to her lips.

"Thank you for giving me a child," she said.

Then tears came into his eyes and ran down over his cheeks. That he should be thanked by her—that scourged the genuine good in him till surely blood started under the strokes.

"Don't thank me!" he said. "Don't do that! I won't have it!"

His voice sounded angry.

"I won't ever let you thank me for anything," he went on. "You must understand that."

He was on the edge of some violent, some almost hysterical outburst. He thought of Gaspare casting himself down in the boat that morning when he had feared that his padrone was drowned. So he longed to cast himself down and cry. But he had the strength to check his impulse. Only, the checking of it seemed to turn him for a moment into something made not of flesh and blood but of iron. And this thing of iron was voiceless.

She knew that he was feeling intensely and respected his silence. But at last it began almost to frighten her. The boyish look she loved had gone out of his face. A stern man stood beside her, a man she had never seen before.

"Maurice," she said, at length. "What is it? I think you are suffering."

"Yes," he said.

"But—but aren't you glad? Surely you are glad?"

To her the word seemed mean, poverty-stricken. She changed it.

"Surely you are thankful?"

"I don't know," he answered, at last. "I am thinking that I don't know that I am worthy to be a father."

He himself had fixed a limit. Now, God was putting a period to his wild youth. And the heart—was that changed within him?

Too much was happening. The cup was being filled too full. A great longing came to him to get away, far away, and be alone. If it had been any other day he would have gone off into the mountains, by himself, have stayed out till night came, have walked, climbed, till he was exhausted. But to-day he could not do that. And soon Artois would be coming. He felt as if something must snap in brain or heart.

And he had not slept. How he wished that he could sleep for a little while and forget everything. In sleep one knows nothing. He longed to be able to sleep.

"I understand that," she said. "But you are worthy, my dear one."

When she said that he knew that he could never tell her.

"I must try," he muttered. "I'll try—from to-day."

She did not talk to him any more. Her instinct told her not to. Almost directly they were walking down to the priest's house. She did not know which of them had moved first.

When they got there they found Lucrezia up. Her eyes were red, but she smiled at Hermione. Then she looked at the padrone with alarm. She expected him to blame her for having disobeyed his orders of the day before. But he had forgotten all about that.

"Get breakfast, Lucrezia," Hermione said. "We'll have it on the terrace. And presently we must have a talk. The sick signore is coming up to-day for collazione. We must have a very nice collazione, but something wholesome."

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia went away to the kitchen thankfully. She had heard bad news of Sebastiano yesterday in the village. He was openly in love with the girl in the Lipari Isles. Her heart was almost breaking, but the return of the padrona comforted her a little. Now she had some one to whom she could tell her trouble, some one who would sympathize.

"I'll go and take a bath, Hermione," Maurice said.

And he, too, disappeared.

Hermione went to talk to Gaspare and tell him what to get in Marechiaro.

When breakfast was ready Maurice came back looking less pale, but still unboyish. All the bright sparkle to which Hermione was accustomed had gone out of him. She wondered why. She had expected the change in him to be a passing thing, but it persisted.

At breakfast it was obviously difficult for him to talk. She sought a reason for his strangeness. Presently she thought again of Artois. Could he be the reason? Or was Maurice now merely preoccupied by that great, new knowledge that there would soon be a third life mingled with theirs? She wondered exactly what he felt about that. He was really such a boy at heart despite his set face of to-day. Perhaps he dreaded the idea of responsibility. His agitation upon the mountain-top had been intense. Perhaps he was rendered unhappy by the thought of fatherhood. Or was it Emile?

When breakfast was over, and he was smoking, she said to him:

"Maurice, I want to ask you something."

A startled look came into his eyes.

"What?" he said, quickly.

He threw his cigarette away and turned towards her, with a sort of tenseness that suggested to her a man bracing himself for some ordeal.

"Only about Emile."

"Oh!" he said.

He took another cigarette, and his attitude at once looked easier. She wondered why.

"You don't mind about Emile being here, do you?"

Maurice was nearly answering quickly that he was delighted to welcome him. But a suddenly born shrewdness prevented him. To-day, like a guilty man, he was painfully conscious, painfully alert. He knew that Hermione was wondering about him, and realized that her question afforded him an opportunity to be deceptive and yet to seem quite natural and truthful. He could not be as he had been, to-day. The effort was far too difficult for him. Hermione's question showed him a plausible excuse for his peculiarity of demeanor and conduct. He seized it.

"I think it was very natural for you to bring him," he answered.

He lit the cigarette. His hand was trembling slightly.

"But—but you had rather I hadn't brought him?"

As Maurice began to act a part an old feeling returned to him, and almost turned his lie into truth.

"You could hardly expect me to wish to have Artois with us here, could you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.

She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or pleased. She was pained that anything she had done had clouded his happiness, but she was intensely glad to think he loved to be quite alone with her.

"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel to stop short, unworthy in us."

"In us?"

"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have asked me, you might even have told me, not to go. I did not think of it at the time. Everything went so quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing that, realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a great part, in Emile's rescue. For I do believe, Maurice, that if I had not gone he would have died."

"Then I am glad you went."

He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione felt chilled.

"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good work, it would be finer, stronger, to carry it quite through, to put aside our own desires and think of another who had passed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong, Maurice? Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought I to have said, 'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll leave you at once.' Wouldn't it have been rather selfish, even rather brutal?"

His reply startled her.

"Have you—have you ever thought of where we are?" he said.

"Where we are!"

"Of the people we are living among?"

"I don't think I understand."

He cleared his throat.

"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the English do," he said.

There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over her, over all her body and face. She did not speak, because, if she had, she might have said something vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said, surely never would say, to Maurice.

"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.

"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't tell me."

The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control it.

"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out here think of an utterly innocent action!" she said, at last, very quietly.

But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian blood in him.

"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind now."

And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she might have felt over a child. In his face she could not see the boy to-day, but his words set the boy, the inmost nature of the boy that he still surely was, before her.

The sense of humor in her seemed to be laughing and wiping away a tear at the same time.

She moved her chair close to his.

"Maurice," she said. "Do you know that sometimes you make me feel horribly old and motherly?"

"Do I?" he said.

"You do to-day, and yet—do you know that I have been thinking since I came back that you are looking older, much older than when I went away?"

"Is that Artois?" he said, looking over the wall to the mountain-side beyond the ravine.

Hermione got up, leaned upon the wall, and followed his eyes.

"I think it must be. I told Gaspare to go to the hotel when he fetched the provisions in Marechiaro and tell Emile it would be best to come up in the cool. Yes, it is he, and Gaspare is with him! Maurice, you don't mind so very much?"

She put her arm through his.

"These people can't talk when they see how ill he looks. And if they do—oh, Maurice, what does it matter? Surely there's only one thing in the world that matters, and that is whether one can look one's own conscience in the face and say, 'I've nothing to be ashamed of!'"

Maurice longed to get away from the touch of her arm. He remembered the fragment of paper he had seen among the stones on the mountain-side. He must go up there alone directly he had a moment of freedom. But now—Artois! He stared at the distant donkeys. His brain felt dry and shrivelled, his body both feverish and tired. How could he support this long day's necessities? It seemed to him that he had not the strength and resolution to endure them. And Artois was so brilliant! Maurice thought of him at that moment as a sort of monster of intellectuality, terrifying and repellent.

"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.

"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose—very few of us can do that. We can't expect to be perfect, and other people oughtn't to expect it of us."

His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost an accusing voice and insincere. Now it was surely a voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely sincere. Hermione remembered how in London long ago the humility of Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from the mass of conceited men because of his beauty and his simple readiness to sit at the feet of others. And surely the simplicity, the humility, still persisted beautifully in him.

"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you that you wouldn't give me," she said to him. "Anything of loyalty, of straightness, or of manhood. Often you seem to me a boy, and yet, I know, if a danger came to me, or a trouble, I could lean on you and you would never fail me. That's what a woman loves to feel when she has given herself to a man, that he knows how to take care of her, and that he cares to take care of her."

Her body was touching his. He felt himself stiffen. The mental pain he suffered under the lash of her words affected his body, and his knowledge of the necessity to hide all that was in his mind caused his body to long for isolation, to shrink from any contact with another.

"I hope," he said, trying to make his voice natural and simple——"I hope you'll never be in trouble or in danger, Hermione."

"I don't think I could mind very much if you were there, if I could just touch your hand."

"Here they come!" he said. "I hope Artois isn't very tired with the ride. We ought to have had Sebastiano here to play the 'Pastorale' for him."

"Ah! Sebastiano!" said Hermione. "He's playing it for some one else in the Lipari Islands. Poor Lucrezia! Maurice, I love Sicily and all things Sicilian. You know how much! But—but I'm glad you've got some drops of English blood in your veins. I'm glad you aren't all Sicilian."

"Come," he said. "Let us go to the arch and meet him."

CHAPTER XIX

"So this is your Garden of Paradise?" Artois said.

He got off his donkey slowly at the archway, and stood for a moment, after shaking them both by the hand, looking at the narrow terrace, bathed in sunshine despite the shelter of the awning, at the columns, at the towering rocks which dominated the grove of oak-trees, and at the low, white-walled cottage.

"The garden from which you came to save my life," he added.

He turned to Maurice.

"I am grateful and I am ashamed," he said. "I was not your friend, monsieur, but you have treated me with more than friendship. I thank you in words now, but my hope is that some day I shall be given the opportunity to thank you with an act."

He held out his hand again to Maurice. There had been a certain formality in his speech, but there was a warmth in his manner that was not formal. As Maurice held his hand the eyes of the two men met, and each took swift note of the change in the other.

Artois's appearance was softened by his illness. In health he looked authoritative, leonine, very sure of himself, piercingly observant, sometimes melancholy, but not anxious. His manner, never blustering or offensive, was usually dominating, the manner of one who had the right to rule in the things of the intellect. Now he seemed much gentler, less intellectual, more emotional. One received, at a first meeting with him, the sensation rather of coming into contact with a man of heart than with a man of brains. Maurice felt the change at once, and was surprised by it. Outwardly the novelist was greatly altered. His tall frame was shrunken and slightly bent. The face was pale and drawn, the eyes were sunken, the large-boned body was frightfully thin and looked uncertain when it moved. As Maurice gazed he realized that this man had been to the door of death, almost over the threshold of the door.

And Artois? He saw a change in the Mercury whom he had last seen at the door of the London restaurant, a change that startled him.

"Come into our Garden of Paradise and rest," said Hermione. "Lean on my arm, Emile."

"May I?" Artois asked of Maurice, with a faint smile that was almost pathetic.

"Please do. You must be tired!"

Hermione and Artois walked slowly forward to the terrace, arm linked in arm. Maurice was about to follow them when he felt a hand catch hold of him, a hand that was hot and imperative.

"Gaspare! What is it?"

"Signorino, signorino, I must speak to you!"

Startled, Maurice looked into the boy's flushed face. The great eyes searched him fiercely.

"Put the donkeys in the stable," Maurice said. "I'll come."

"Come behind the house, signorino. Ah, Madonna!"

The last exclamation was breathed out with an intensity that was like the intensity of despair. The boy's look and manner were tragic.

"Gaspare," Maurice said, "what——?"

He saw Hermione turning towards him.

"I'll come in a minute, Gaspare."

"Madonna!" repeated the boy. "Madonna!"

He held up his hands and let them drop to his sides. Then he muttered something—a long sentence—in dialect. His voice sounded like a miserable old man's.

"Ah—ah!"

He called to the donkeys and drove them forward to the out-house. Maurice followed.

What had happened? Gaspare had the manner, the look, of one confronted by a terror from which there was no escape. His eyes had surely at the same time rebuked and furiously pitied his master. What did they mean?

"This is our Garden of Paradise!" Hermione was saying as Maurice came up to her and Artois. "Do you wonder that we love it?"

"I wonder that you left it." Artois replied.

He was sunk in a deep straw chair, a chaise longue piled up with cushions, facing the great and radiant view. After he had spoken he sighed.

"I don't think," he said, "that either of you really know that this is Eden. That knowledge has been reserved for the interloper, for me."

Hermione sat down close to him. Maurice was standing by the wall, listening furtively to the noises from the out-house, where Gaspare was unsaddling the donkeys. Artois glanced at him, and was more sharply conscious of change in him. To Artois this place, after the long journey, which had sorely tried his feeble body, seemed an enchanted place of peace, a veritable Elysian Field in which the saddest, the most driven man must surely forget his pain and learn how to rest and to be joyful in repose. But he felt that his host, the man who had been living in paradise, who ought surely to have been learning its blessed lessons through sunlit days and starry nights, was restless like a man in a city, was anxious, was intensely ill at ease. Once, watching this man, Artois had thought of the messenger, poised on winged feet, radiantly ready for movement that would be exquisite because it would be obedient. This man still looked ready for flight, but for a flight how different! As Artois was thinking this Maurice moved.

"Excuse me just for an instant!" he said. "I want to speak to Gaspare."

He saw now that Gaspare was taking into the cottage the provisions that had been carried up by the donkey from Marechiaro.

"I—I told him to do something for me in the village," he added, "and I want just to know—"

He looked at them, almost defiantly, as if he challenged them not to believe what he had said. Then, without finishing his sentence, he went quickly into the cottage.

"You have chosen your garden well," Artois said to Hermione directly they were alone. "No other sea has ever given to me such an impression of tenderness and magical space as this; no other sea has surely ever had a horizon-line so distant from those who look as this."

He went on talking about the beauty, leading her with him. He feared lest she might begin to speak about her husband.

Meanwhile, Maurice had reached the mountain-side behind the house and was waiting there for Gaspare. He heard the boy's voice in the kitchen speaking to Lucrezia, angrily it seemed by the sound. Then the voice ceased and Gaspare appeared for an instant at the kitchen door, making violent motions with his arms towards the mountain. He disappeared. What did he want? What did he mean? The gestures had been imperative. Maurice looked round. A little way up the mountain there was a large, closed building, like a barn, built of stones. It belonged to a contadino, but Maurice had never seen it open, or seen any one going to or coming from it. As he stared at it an idea occurred to him. Perhaps Gaspare meant him to go and wait there, behind the barn, so that Lucrezia should not see or hear their colloquy. He resolved to do this, and went swiftly up the hill-side. When he was in the shadow of the building he waited. He did not know what was the matter, what Gaspare wanted, but he realized that something had occurred which had stirred the boy to the depths. This something must have occurred while he was at Marechiaro. Before he had time mentally to make a list of possible events in Marechiaro, Maurice heard light feet running swiftly up the mountain, and Gaspare came round the corner, still with the look of tragedy, a wild, almost terrible look in his eyes.

"Signorino," he began at once, in a low voice that was full of the pressure of an intense excitement. "Tell me! Where were you last night when we were making the fireworks go off?"

Maurice felt the blood mount to his face.

"Close to where you left me," he answered.

"Oh, signore! Oh, signore!"

It was almost a cry. The sweat was pouring down the boy's face.

"Ma non è mia colpa! Non è mia colpa!" he exclaimed.

"What do you mean? What has happened, Gaspare?"

"I have seen Salvatore."

His voice was more quiet now. He fixed his eyes almost sternly on his padrone, as if in the effort to read his very soul.

"Well? Well, Gaspare?"

Maurice was almost stammering now. He guessed—he knew what was coming.

"Salvatore came up to me just before I got to the village. I heard him calling, 'Stop!' I stood still. We were on the path not far from the fountain. There was a broken branch on the ground, a branch of olive. Salvatore said: 'Suppose that is your padrone, that branch there!' and he spat on it. He spat on it, signore, he spat—and he spat."

Maurice knew now.

"Go on!" he said.

And this time there was no uncertainty in his voice. Gaspare was breathing hard. His breast rose and fell.

"I was going to strike him in the face, but he caught my hand, and then—Signorino, signorino, what have you done?"

His voice rose. He began to look uncontrolled, distracted, wild, as if he might do some frantic thing.

"Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Maurice had him by the arms.

"Why did you?" panted the boy. "Why did you?"

"Then Salvatore knows?"

Maurice saw that any denial was useless.

"He knows! He knows!"

If Maurice had not held Gaspare tightly the boy would have flung himself down headlong on the ground, to burst into one of those storms of weeping which swept upon him when he was fiercely wrought up. But Maurice would not let him have this relief.

"Gaspare! Listen to me! What is he going to do? What is Salvatore going to do?"

"Santa Madonna! Santa Madonna!"

The boy rocked himself to and fro. He began to invoke the Madonna and the saints. He was beside himself, was almost like one mad.

"Gaspare—in the name of God——!"

"H'sh!"

Suddenly the boy kept still. His face changed, hardened. His body became tense. With his hand still held up in a warning gesture, he crept to the edge of the barn and looked round it.

"What is it?" Maurice whispered.

Gaspare stole back.

"It is only Lucrezia. She is spreading the linen. I thought——"

"What is Salvatore going to do?"

"Unless you go down to the sea to meet him this evening, signorino, he is coming up here to-night to tell everything to the signora."

Maurice went white.

"I shall go," he said. "I shall go down to the sea."

"Madonna! Madonna!"

"He won't come now? He won't come this morning?"

Maurice spoke almost breathlessly, with his hands on the boy's hands which streamed with sweat. Gaspare shook his head.

"I told him if he came up I would meet him in the path and kill him."

The boy had out a knife.

Maurice put his arm round Gaspare's shoulder. At that moment he really loved the boy.

"Will he come?"

"Only if you do not go."

"I shall go."

"I will come with you, signorino."

"No. I must go alone."

"I will come with you!"

A dogged obstinacy hardened his whole face, made even his shining eyes look cold, like stones.

"Gaspare, you are to stay with the signora. I may miss Salvatore going down. While I am gone he may come up here. The signora is not to speak with him. He is not to come to her."

Gaspare hesitated. He was torn in two by his dual affection, his dual sense of the watchful fidelity he owed to his padrone and to his padrona.

"Va bene," he said, at last, in a half whisper.

He hung down his head like one exhausted.

"How will it finish?" he murmured, as if to himself. "How will it finish?"

"I must go," Maurice said. "I must go now. Gaspare!"

"Si, signore?"

"We must be careful, you and I, to-day. We must not let the signora, Lucrezia, any one suspect that—that we are not just as usual. Do you see?"

"Si, signore."

The boy nodded. His eyes now looked tired.

"And try to keep a lookout, when you can, without drawing the attention of the signora. Salvatore might change his mind and come up. The signora is not to know. She is never to know. Do you think"—he hesitated—"do you think Salvatore has told any one?"

"Non lo so."

The boy was silent. Then he lifted his hands again and said:

"Signorino! Signorino!"

And Maurice seemed to hear at that moment the voice of an accusing angel.

"Gaspare," he said, "I was mad. We men—we are mad sometimes. But now I must be sane. I must do what I can to—I must do what I can—and you must help me."

He held out his hand. Gaspare took it. The grasp of it was strong, that of a man. It seemed to reassure the boy.

"I will always help my padrone," he said.

Then they went down the mountain-side.

It was perhaps very strange—Maurice thought it was—but he felt now less tired, less confused, more master of himself than he had before he had spoken with Gaspare. He even felt less miserable. Face to face with an immediate and very threatening danger, courage leaped up in him, a certain violence of resolve which cleared away clouds and braced his whole being. He had to fight. There was no way out. Well, then, he would fight. He had played the villain, perhaps, but he would not play the poltroon. He did not know what he was going to do, what he could do, but he must act, and act decisively. His wild youth responded to this call made upon it. There was a new light in his eyes as he went down to the cottage, as he came upon the terrace.

Artois noticed it at once, was aware at once that in this marvellous peace to which Hermione had brought him there were elements which had nothing to do with peace.

"What hast thou to do with peace? Turn thee behind me."

These words from the Bible came into his mind as he looked into the eyes of his host, and he felt that Hermione and he were surely near to some drama of which they knew nothing, of which Hermione, perhaps, suspected nothing.

Maurice acted his part. The tonic of near danger gave him strength, even gave him at first a certain subtlety. From the terrace he could see far over the mountain flanks. As one on a tower he watched for the approach of his enemy from the sea, but he did not neglect his two companions. For he was fighting already. When he seemed natural in his cordiality to his guest, when he spoke and laughed, when he apologized for the misfortune of the previous day, he was fighting. The battle with circumstances was joined. He must bear himself bravely in it. He must not allow himself to be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, there came presently a moment which brought with it a sense of fear.

Hermione got up to go into the house.

"I must see what Lucrezia is doing," she said. "Your collazione must not be a fiasco, Emile."

"Nothing could be a fiasco here, I think," he answered.

She laughed happily.

"But poor Lucrezia is not in paradise," she said. "Ah, why can't every one be happy when one is happy one's self? I always think of that when I——"

She did not finish her sentence in words. Her look at the two men concluded it. Then she turned and went into the house.

"What is the matter with Lucrezia?" asked Artois.

"Oh, she—she's in love with a shepherd called Sebastiano."

"And he's treating her badly?"

"I'm afraid so. He went to the Lipari Isles, and he doesn't come back."

"A girl there keeps him captive?"

"It seems so."

"Faithful women must not expect to have a perfect time in Sicily," Artois said.

As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his companion's face. It was fleeting, but it was marked. It made Artois think:

"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."

It made him, too, remember sharply some words of his own said long ago in London:

"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."

There was a silence between the two men. Heat was growing in the long summer day, heat that lapped them in the influence of the South. Africa had been hotter, but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence which inclines the heart of man to passion and the body of man to yield to its desires. It was glorious, this wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome for Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked at the great, shining waste of the sea, purple and gold, dark and intense and jewelled, at the outline of Etna, at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on the cliff opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of the quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against the blinding white wall above the steep bank of the ravine, Artois said to himself that the South was dangerous to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to such a man as Delarey. And he asked himself the question, "What has this man been doing here in this glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife has been saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost of alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione away. In the terrible solitude that comes near to the soul with the footfalls of death he had not been strong enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend had heard and had answered. And Delarey had been left alone with the sun.

"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy," he said.

And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this man's enemy?"

"Oh no. Why?"

"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone here."

"I made friends of the Sicilians."

Maurice spoke lightly, but through his mind ran the thought, "What an enemy this man has been to me, without knowing it!"

"They are easy to get on with," said Artois. "When I was in Sicily I learned to love them."

"Oh, love!" said Maurice, hastily.

He checked himself.

"That's rather a strong word, but I like them. They're a delightful race."

"Have you found out their faults?"

Both men were trying to hide themselves in their words.

"What are their faults, do you think?" Maurice said.

He looked over the wall and saw, far off on the path by the ravine, a black speck moving.

"Treachery when they do not trust; sensuality, violence, if they think themselves wronged."

"Are—are those faults? I understand them. They seem almost to belong to the sun."

Artois had not been looking at Maurice. The sound of Maurice's voice now made him aware that the speaker had turned away from him. He glanced up and saw his companion staring over the wall across the ravine. What was he gazing at? Artois wondered.

"Yes, the sun is perhaps partly responsible for them. Then you have become such a sun-worshipper that——"

"No, no, I don't say that," Maurice interrupted.

He looked round and met Artois's observant eyes. He had dreaded having those eyes fixed upon him.

"But I think—I think things done in such a place, such an island as this, shouldn't be judged too severely, shouldn't be judged, I mean, quite as we might judge them, say, in England."

He looked embarrassed as he ended, and shifted his gaze from his companion.

"I agree with you," Artois said.

Maurice looked at him again, almost eagerly. An odd feeling came to him that this man, who unwittingly had done him a deadly harm, would be able to understand what perhaps no woman could ever understand, the tyranny of the senses in a man, their fierce tyranny in the sunlit lands. Had he been so wicked? Would Artois think so? And the punishment that was perhaps coming—did he deserve that it should be terrible? He wondered, almost like a boy. But Hermione was not with them. When she was there he did not wonder. He felt that he deserved lashes unnumbered.

And Artois—he began to feel almost clairvoyant. The new softness that had come to him with the pain of the body, that had been developed by the blessed rest from pain that was convalescence, had not stricken his faculty of seeing clear in others, but it had changed, at any rate for a time, the sentiments that followed upon the exercise of that faculty. Scorn and contempt were less near to him than they had been. Pity was nearer. He felt now almost sure that Delarey had fallen into some trouble while Hermione was in Africa, that he was oppressed at this moment by some great uneasiness or even fear, that he was secretly cursing some imprudence, and that his last words were a sort of surreptitious plea for forgiveness, thrown out to the Powers of the air, to the Spirits of the void, to whatever shadowy presences are about the guilty man ready to condemn his sin. He felt, too, that he owed much to Delarey. In a sense it might be said that he owed to him his life. For Delarey had allowed Hermione to come to Africa, and if Hermione had not come the end for him, Artois, might well have been death.

"I should like to say something to you, monsieur," he said. "It is rather difficult to say, because I do not wish it to seem formal, when the feeling that prompts it is not formal."

Maurice was again looking over the wall, watching with intensity the black speck that was slowly approaching on the little path.

"What is it, monsieur?" he asked, quickly.

"I owe you a debt—indeed I do. You must not deny it. Through your magnanimous action in permitting your wife to leave you, you, perhaps indirectly, saved my life. For, without her aid, I do not think I could have recovered. Of her nobility and devotion I will not, because I cannot adequately, speak. But I wish to say to you that if ever I can do you a service of any kind I will do it."

As he finished Maurice, who was looking at him now, saw a veil over his big eyes. Could it—could it possibly be a veil of tears!

"Thank you," he answered.

He tried to speak warmly, cordially. But his heart said to him: "You can do nothing for me now. It is all too late!"

Yet the words and the emotion of Artois were some slight relief to him. He was able to feel that in this man he had no secret enemy, but, if need be, a friend.

"You have a nice fellow as servant," Artois said, to change the conversation.

"Gaspare—yes. He's loyal. I intend to ask Hermione to let me take him to England with us."

He paused, then added, with an anxious curiosity:

"Did you talk to him much as you came up?"

He wondered whether the novelist had noticed Gaspare's agitation or whether the boy had been subtle enough to conceal it.

"Not very much. The path is narrow, and I rode in front. He sang most of the time, those melancholy songs of Sicily that came surely long ago across the sea from Africa."

"They nearly always sing on the mountains when they are with the donkeys."

"Dirges of the sun. There is a sadness of the sun as well as a joy."

"Yes."

As Maurice answered, he thought, "How well I know that now!" And as he looked at the black figure drawing nearer in the sunshine it seemed to him that there was a terror in that gold which he had often worshipped. If that figure should be Salvatore! He strained his eyes. At one moment he fancied that he recognized the wild, free, rather strutting walk of the fisherman. At another he believed that his fear had played him a trick, that the movements of the figure were those of an old man, some plodding contadino of the hills. Artois wondered increasingly what he was looking at. A silence fell between them. Artois lay back in the chaise longue and gazed up at the blue, then at the section of distant sea which was visible above the rim of the wall though the intervening mountain land was hidden. It was a paradise up here. And to have it with the great love of a woman, what an experience that must be for any man! It seemed to him strange that such an experience had been the gift of the gods to their messenger, their Mercury. What had it meant to him? What did it mean to him now? Something had changed him. Was it that? In the man by the wall Artois did not see any longer the bright youth he remembered. Yet the youth was still there, the supple grace, the beauty, bronzed now by the long heats of the sun. It was the expression that had changed. In cities one sees anxious-looking men everywhere. In London Delarey had stood out from the crowd not only because of his beauty of the South, but because of his light-hearted expression, the spirit of youth in his eyes. And now here, in this reality that seemed almost like a dream in its perfection, in this reality of the South, there was a look of strain in his eyes and in his whole body. The man had contradicted his surroundings in London—now he contradicted his surroundings here.

While Artois was thinking this Maurice's expression suddenly changed, his attitude became easier. He turned round from the wall, and Artois saw that the keen anxiety had gone out of his eyes. Gaspare was below with his gun pretending to look for birds, and had made a sign that the approaching figure was not that of Salvatore. Maurice's momentary sense of relief was so great that it threw him off his guard.

"What can have been happening beyond the wall?" Artois thought.

He felt as if a drama had been played out there and the dénouement had been happy.

Hermione came back at this moment.

"Poor Lucrezia!" she said. "She's plucky, but Sebastiano is making her suffer horribly."

"Here!" said Artois, almost involuntarily.

"It does seem almost impossible, I know."

She sat down again near him and smiled at her husband.

"You are coming back to health, Emile. And Maurice and I—well, we are in our garden. It seems wrong, terribly wrong, that any one should suffer here. But Lucrezia loves like a Sicilian. What violence there is in these people!"

"England must not judge them."

He looked at Maurice.

"What's that?" asked Hermione. "Something you two were talking about when I was in the kitchen?"

Maurice looked uneasy.

"I was only saying that I think the sun—the South has an influence," he said, "and that——"

"An influence!" exclaimed Hermione. "Of course it has! Emile, you would have seen that influence at work if you had been with us on our first day in Sicily. Your tarantella, Maurice!"

She smiled again happily, but her husband did not answer her smile.

"What was that?" said Artois. "You never told me in Africa."

"The boys danced a tarantella here on the terrace to welcome us, and it drove Maurice so mad that he sprang up and danced too. And the strange thing was that he danced as well as any of them. His blood called him, and he obeyed the call."

She looked at Artois to remind him of his words.

"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella, isn't it?" she asked him. "I think it's the most wildly innocent expression of extreme joy in the world. And yet"—her expressive face changed, and into her prominent brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest look—"at the end—Maurice, do you know that I was almost frightened that day at the end?"

"Frightened! Why?" he said.

He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.

"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his brown hands on the arms of the chair.

"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't it absurd?"

He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.

"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"

She laughed.

"But I soon learned to delight in—in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.

She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.

"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.

"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.

"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a Sicilian would be much good in England. We—we don't want romance there. We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense about them."

"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what has happened to you while I've been away?"

"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me here?"

"Do you—are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"

"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I think I've had a long enough holiday."

He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his country.

"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.

But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them, lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.

"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added. "Remember—I have only just come back."

"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid, Monsieur Delarey!"

He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that his suspicion was well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy. He wanted to get away from this peace that held no peace for him. He wanted to put something behind him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy. He might try to be subtle, he might even be subtle—for him. But to this acute and trained observer of the human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.

During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm. What affected or threatened Delarey must affect, threaten Hermione. Whether he were one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling of Artois towards the woman who had shown him such noble, such unusual friendship was exquisitely delicate and intensely strong. Unmingled with any bodily passion, it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate and strong on that account. He was a man who had an instinctive hatred of heroics. His taste revolted from them as it revolted from violence in literature. They seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he was conscious that to protect from sorrow or shame the woman who had protected him in his dark hour he would be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this moment, for Hermione. He knew that, and he took the alarm. Till now he had been feeling curiosity about the change in Delarey. Now he felt the touch of fear.

Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione had been in Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the call of the blood. All that he had said, and all that he had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for the first time in London, came back to Artois. He had prophesied, vaguely perhaps. Had his prophecy already been fulfilled? In this great and shining peace of nature Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of peace deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the danger of the South, and he added to his light words some words that were not light.

"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And I must be getting northward very soon. I need the bracing air, the Spartan touch of the cold that the Sybarite in me dreads. Perhaps we all need them."

"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are, to-day and—yes, call me weak if you like—and to-morrow!"

Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois covered his silence, and kept the talk going on safe topics till Gaspare came to the terrace to lay the cloth for collazione.

It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up like a flood over the land. Flies buzzed about the terrace, buzzed against the white walls and ceilings of the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly, musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone pots beneath the broken columns drooped their dry heads. The lizards darted and stopped, darted and stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the tiles were burning to the touch. There was no moving figure on the baked mountains, no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the fires of the earth.

Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was little vivacity. But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in them the watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had been in Maurice's eyes.

"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they must be expecting some one to come, these two."

"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.

"Visitors! Emile, why are we here? Do you anticipate a knock and 'If you please, ma'am, Mrs. and the Misses Watson'? Good Heavens—visitors on Monte Amato!"

He smiled, but he persisted.

"Never a contadino, or a shepherd, or"—he looked down at the sea—"or a fisherman with his basket of sarde?"

Maurice moved in his chair, and Gaspare, hearing a word he knew, looked hard at the speaker.

"Oh, we sometimes have the people of the hills to see us," said Hermione. "But we don't call them 'visitors.' As to fishermen—here they are!"

She pointed to her husband and Gaspare.

"But they eat all the fish they catch, and we never see the fin of even one at the cottage."

Collazione was ready now. Hermione helped Artois up from his chaise longue, and they went to the table under the awning.

"You must sit facing the view, Emile," Hermione said.

"What a dining-room!" Artois exclaimed.

Now he could see over the wall. His gaze wandered over the mountain-sides, travelled down to the land that lay along the edge of the sea.

"Have you been fishing much since I've been away, Maurice?" Hermione asked, as they began to eat.

"Oh yes. I went several times. What wine do you like, Monsieur Artois?"

He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione, quite innocently, returned to the subject.

"They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that coast by Isola Bella and on to the point there that looks like an island, where the House of the Sirens is."

A tortured look went across Maurice's face. He had begun to eat, but now he stopped for a moment like a man suddenly paralyzed.

"The House of the Sirens!" said Artois. "Then there are sirens here? I could well believe it. Have you seen them, Monsieur Maurice, at night, when you have been fishing?"

He had been gazing at the coast, but now he turned towards his host. Maurice began hastily to eat again.

"I'm afraid not. But we didn't look out for them. We were prosaic and thought of nothing but the fish."

"And is there really a house down there?" said Artois.

"Yes," said Hermione. "It used to be a ruin, but now it's built up and occupied. Gaspare"—she spoke to him as he was taking a dish from the table—"who is it lives in the Casa delle Sirene now? You told me, but I've forgotten."

A heavy, obstinate look came into the boy's face, transforming it. The question startled him, and he had not understood a word of the conversation which had led up to it. What had they been talking about? He glanced furtively at his master. Maurice did not look at him.

"Salvatore and Maddalena, signora," he answered, after a pause.

Then he took the dish and went into the house.

"What's the matter with Gaspare?" said Hermione. "I never saw him look like that before—quite ugly. Doesn't he like these people?"

"Oh yes," replied Maurice. "Why—why, they're quite friends of ours. We saw them at the fair only yesterday."

"Well, then, why should Gaspare look like that?"

"Oh," said Artois, who saw the discomfort of his host, "perhaps there is some family feud that you know nothing of. When I was in Sicily I found the people singularly subtle. They can gossip terribly, but they can keep a secret when they choose. If I had won the real friendship of a Sicilian, I would rather trust him with my secret than a man of any other race. They are not only loyal—that is not enough—but they are also very intelligent."

"Yes, they are both—the good ones," said Hermione. "I would trust Gaspare through thick and thin. If they were only as stanch in love as they can be in friendship!"

Gaspare came out again with another course. The ugly expression had gone from his face, but he still looked unusually grave.

"Ah, when the senses are roused they are changed beings," Artois said. "They hate and resent governance from outside, but their blood governs them."

"Our blood governs us when the time comes—do you remember?"

Hermione had said the words before she remembered the circumstances in which they had been spoken and of whom they were said. Directly she had uttered them she remembered.

"What was that?" Maurice asked, before Artois could reply.

He had seen a suddenly conscious look in Hermione's face, and instantly he was aware of a feeling of jealousy within him.

"What was that?" he repeated, looking quickly from one to the other.

"Something I remember saying to your wife," Artois answered. "We were talking about human nature—a small subject, monsieur, isn't it?—and I think I expressed the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say that—that our blood governs us when the time comes."

"The time?" Maurice asked.

His feeling of jealousy died away, and was replaced by a keen personal interest unmingled with suspicions of another.

"Well, I confess it sometimes seems to me as if, when a certain hour strikes, a certain deed must be committed by a certain man or woman. It is perhaps their hour of madness. They may repent it to the day of their death. But can they in that hour avoid that deed? Sometimes, when I witness the tragic scenes that occur abruptly, unexpectedly, in the comedy of life, I am moved to wonder."

"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione said.

"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be, forgiving?"

Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his wife with intensity.

"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that—I mean because I thought the deed might not have been avoided. I think I should forgive because I pitied so, because I know how desperately unhappy I should be myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was exceptional, that was not natural to my nature as I had generally known it. When one really does love cleanliness, to have thrown one's self down deliberately in the mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot—that must be terrible. I think I should forgive because I pitied so. What do you say, Maurice?"

It was like a return to their talk in London at Caminiti's restaurant, when Hermione and Artois discussed topics that interested them, and Maurice listened until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But now he was more deeply interested than his companions.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying and forgiving, but I expect you're right, Hermione."

"How?"

"In what you say about—about the person who's done the wrong thing feeling awful afterwards. And I think Monsieur Artois is right, too—about the hour of madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One seems not to be really one's self in it, but somebody else, and—and—"

Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas Hermione and Artois had been considering a subject impersonally, he was introducing the personal element into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly from Hermione to Artois, and said:

"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've known fellows—in London, you know—who've done such odd things that I can only explain it like that. They must have—well, they must have gone practically mad for the moment. You—you see what I mean, Hermione?"

The question was uneasy.

"Yes, but I think we can control ourselves. If we couldn't, remorse would lose half its meaning. I could never feel remorse because I had been mad—horror, perhaps, but not remorse. It seems to me that remorse is our sorrow for our own weakness, the heart's cry of 'I need not have done the hateful thing, and I did it, I chose to do it!' But I could pity, I could pity, and forgive because of my pity."

Gaspare came out with coffee.

"And then, Emile, you must have a siesta," said Hermione. "This is a tiring day for you. Maurice and I will leave you quite alone in the sitting-room."

"I don't think I could sleep," said Artois.

He was feeling oddly excited, and attributed the sensation to his weak state of health. For so long he had been shut up, isolated from the world, that even this coming out was an event. He was accustomed to examine his feelings calmly, critically, to track them to their sources. He tried to do so now.

"I must beware of my own extra sensitiveness," he said to himself. "I'm still weak. I am not normal. I may see things distorted. I may exaggerate, turn the small into the great. At least half of what I think and feel to-day may come from my peculiar state."

Thus he tried to raise up barriers against his feeling that Delarey had got into some terrible trouble during the absence of Hermione, that he was now stricken with remorse, and that he was also in active dread of something, perhaps of some Nemesis.

"All this may be imagination," Artois thought, as he sipped his coffee. But he said again:

"I don't think I could sleep. I feel abnormally alive to-day. Do you know the sensation, as if one were too quick, as if all the nerves were standing at attention?"

"Then our peace here does not soothe you?" Hermione said.

"If I must be truthful—no," he answered.

He met Maurice's restless glance.

"I think I've had enough coffee," he added. "Coffee stimulates the nerves too much at certain times."

Maurice finished his and asked for another cup.

"He isn't afraid of being overstimulated," said Hermione. "But, Emile, you ought to sleep. You'll be dead tired this evening when you ride down."

"This evening," Hermione had said. Maurice wondered suddenly how late Artois was going to stay at the cottage.

"Oh no, it will be cool," Artois said.

"Yes," Maurice said. "Towards five we get a little wind from the sea nearly always, even sooner sometimes. I—I usually go down to bathe about that time."

"I must begin to bathe, too," Hermione said.

"What—to-day!" Maurice said, quickly.

"Oh no. Emile is here to-day."

Then Artois did not mean to go till late. But he—Maurice—must go down to the sea before nightfall.

"Unless I bathe," he said, trying to speak naturally—"unless I bathe I feel the heat too much at night. A dip in the sea does wonders for me."

"And in such a sea!" said Artois. "You must have your dip to-day. I shall go directly that little wind you speak of comes. I told a boy to come up from the village at four to lead the donkey down."

He smiled deprecatingly.

"Dreadful to be such a weakling, isn't it?" he said.

"Hush. Don't talk, like that. It's all going away. Strength is coming. You'll soon be your old self. But you've got to look forward all the time."

Hermione spoke with a warmth, an energy that braced. She spoke to Artois, but Maurice, eager to grasp at any comfort, strove to take the words to himself. This evening the climax of his Sicilian tragedy must come. And then? Beyond, might there not be the calm, the happiness of a sane life? He must look forward, he would look forward.

But when he looked, there stood Maddalena weeping.

He hated himself. He loved happiness, he longed for it, but he knew he had lost his right to it, if any man ever has such a right. He had created suffering. How dared he expect, how dared he even wish, to escape from suffering?

"Now, Emile," Hermione said, "you have really got to go in and lie down whether you feel sleepy or not. Don't protest. Maurice and I have hardly seen anything of each other yet. We want to get rid of you."

She spoke laughingly, and laughingly he obeyed her. When she had settled him comfortably in the sitting-room

she came out again to the terrace where her husband

was standing, looking towards the sea. She had a rug over her arm and was holding two cushions.

"I thought you and I might go down and take our siesta under the oak-trees, Maurice. Would you like that?"

He was longing to get away, to go up to the heap of stones on the mountain-top and set a match to the fragments of Hermione's letter, which the dangerous wind might disturb, might bring out into the light of day. But he acquiesced at once. He would go later—if not this afternoon, then at night when he came back from the sea. They went down and spread the rug under the shadow of the oaks.

"I used to read to Gaspare here," he said. "When you were away in Africa."

"What did you read?"

"The Arabian Nights."

She stretched herself on the rug.

"To lie here and read the Arabian Nights! And you want to go away, Maurice?"

"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here I should become fit for nothing."

"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But—Maurice, it's so strange—I have a feeling as if you would always be in Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet I have it. I feel as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean to part from you."

"That can't be. How could I stay here always?"

"I know."

"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started suddenly into his mind—"unless I were—"

He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in the sea that gray morning of sirocco. He had remembered how he had played at dying.

"What?"

She looked at him and understood.

"Maurice—don't! I—I can't bear that!"

"Not one of us can know," he answered.

"I—I thought of that once," she said—"long ago, on the first night that we were here. I don't know why—but perhaps it was because I was so happy. I think it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought it may stop soon, it may end. But why should it? Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be happy."

"If he wants us—"

"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy. But we won't do that, Maurice—you and I—will we?"

He did not answer.

"This world—nature—is so wonderfully beautiful, so happily beautiful. Surely we can learn to be happy, to keep happy in it. Look at that sky, that sea! Look at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the coast-line fading away, and Etna. The God who created it all must have meant men to be happy in such a world. It isn't my brain tells me that, Maurice, it's my heart, my whole heart that you have made whole. And I know it tells the truth."

Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step, a figure standing before her, a few Sicilian words—and all this world in which she gloried would be changed for her. But she must not know. He felt that he would be willing to die to keep her ignorant of the truth forever.

"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her from speaking any more of the words that were torturing him. "We must have our siesta. I had very little sleep last night."

"And I had none at all. But now—we're together."

He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft shadow and could see the shining world. The distant gleams upon the sea spoke to her. She fancied them voices rising out of the dream of the waters, voices from the breast of nature that was the breast of God, saying that she was not in error, that God did mean men to be happy, that they could be happy if they would learn of Him.

She watched those gleams until she fell asleep.

CHAPTER XX

When Hermione woke it was four o'clock. She sat up on the rug, looked down over the mountain flank to the sea, then turned and saw her husband. He was lying with his face half buried in his folded arms.

"Maurice!" she said, softly.

"Yes," he answered, lifting his face.

"Then you weren't asleep!"

"No."

"Have you been asleep?"

"No."

She looked at her watch.

"All this time! It's four. What a disgraceful siesta! But I was really tired after the long journey and the night."

She stood up. He followed her example and threw the rug over his arm.

"Emile will think we've deserted him and aren't going to give him any tea."

"Yes."

They began to walk up the track towards the terrace.

"Maurice," Hermione said, presently, more thoroughly wide-awake now. "Did you get up while I was asleep? Did you begin to move away from me, and did I stop you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague recollection—or is it only imagination?—of stretching out my hand and saying, 'Don't leave me alone—don't leave me alone!'"

"I moved a little," he answered, after a slight pause.

"And you did stretch out your hand and murmur something."

"It was that—'don't leave me alone.'"

"Perhaps. I couldn't hear. It was such a murmur."

"And you only moved a little? How stupid of me to think you were getting up to go away!"

"When one is half asleep one has odd ideas often."

He did not tell her that he had been getting up softly, hoping to steal away to the mountain-top and destroy the fragments of her letter, hidden there, while she slept.

"You won't mind," he added, "if I go down to bathe this evening. I sha'n't sleep properly to-night unless I do."

"Of course—go. But won't it be rather late after tea?"

"Oh no. I've often been in at sunset."

"How delicious the water must look then! Maurice!"

"Yes?"

"Shall I come with you? Shall I bathe, too? It would be lovely, refreshing, after this heat! It would wash away all the dust of the train!"

Her face was glowing with the anticipation of pleasure. Every little thing done with him was an enchantment after the weeks of separation.

"Oh, I don't think you'd better, Hermione," he answered, hastily. "I—you—there might be people. I—I must rig you up something first, a tent of some kind. Gaspare and I will do it. I can't have my wife—"

"All right," she said.

She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

"How lucky you men are! You can do anything. And there's no fuss. Ah, there's poor Emile, patiently waiting!"

Artois was already established once more in the chaise longue. He greeted them with a smile that was gentle, almost tender. Those evil feelings to which he had been a prey in London had died away. He loved now to see the happiness in Hermione's face. His illness had swept out his selfishness, and in it he had proved her affection. He did not think that he could ever be jealous of her again.

"Sleeping all this time?" he said.

"I was. I'm ashamed of myself. My hair is full of mountain-side, but you must forgive me, Emile. Ah, there's Lucrezia! Is tea ready, Lucrezia?"

"Si, signora."

"Then ask Gaspare to bring it."

"Gaspare—he isn't here, signora. But I'll bring it."

She went away.

"Where's Gaspare, I wonder?" said Hermione. "Have you seen him, Emile?"

"No."

"Perhaps he's sleeping, too. He sleeps generally among the hens."

She looked round the corner into the out-house.

"No, he isn't there. Have you sent him anywhere, Maurice?"

"I? No. Where should I—"

"I only thought you looked as if you knew where he was."

"No. But he may have gone out after birds and forgotten the time. Here's tea!"

These few words had renewed in Maurice the fever of impatience to get away and meet his enemy. This waiting, this acting of a part, this suspense, were almost unbearable. All the time that Hermione slept he had been thinking, turning over again and again in his mind the coming scene, trying to imagine how it would be, how violent or how deadly, trying to decide exactly what line of conduct he should pursue. What would Salvatore demand? What would he say or do? And where would they meet? If Salvatore waited for his coming they would meet at the House of the Sirens. And Maddalena? She would be there. His heart sickened. He was ready to face a man—but not Maddalena. He thought of Gaspare's story of the fallen olive-branch upon which Salvatore had spat. It was strange to be here in this calm place with these two happy people, wife and friend, and to wonder what was waiting for him down there by the sea.

How lonely our souls are!—something like that he thought. Circumstances were turning him away from his thoughtless youth. He had imagined it sinking down out of his sight into the purple sea, with the magic island in which it had danced the tarantella and heard the voice of the siren. But was it not leaving him, vanishing from him while still his feet trod the island and his eyes saw her legendary mountains?

Gaspare, he knew, was on the watch. That was why he was absent from his duties. But the hour was at hand when he would be relieved. The evening was coming. Maurice was glad. He was ready to face even violence, but he felt that he could not for much longer endure suspense and play the quiet host and husband.

Tea was over and Gaspare had not returned. The clock he had bought at the fair struck five.

"I ought to be going," Artois said.

There was reluctance in his voice. Hermione noticed it and knew what he was feeling.

"You must come up again very soon," she said.

"Yes, monsieur, come to-morrow, won't you?" Maurice seconded her.

The thought of what was going to happen before to-morrow made it seem to him a very long way off.

Hermione looked pleased.

"I must not be a bore," Artois answered. "I must not remind you and myself of limpets. There are rocks in your garden which might suggest the comparison. I think to-morrow I ought to stay quietly in Marechiaro."

"No, no," said Maurice. "Do come to-morrow."

"Thank you very much. I can't pretend that I do not wish to come. And, now that donkey-boy—has he climbed up, I wonder?"

"I'll go and see," said Maurice.

He was feverishly impatient to get rid of Artois. He hurried to the arch. A long way off, near the path that led up from the ravine, he saw a figure with a gun. He was not sure, but he was almost sure that it was Gaspare. It must be he. The gun made him look, indeed, a sentinel. If Salvatore came the boy would stop him, stop him, if need be, at the cost of his own life. Maurice felt sure of that, and realized the danger of setting such faithfulness and violence to be sentinel. He stood for a moment looking at the figure. Yes, he knew it now for Gaspare. The boy had forgotten tea-time, had forgotten everything, in his desire to carry out his padrone's instructions. The signora was not to know. She was never to know. And Salvatore might come. Very well, then, he was there in the sun—ready.

"We'll never part from Gaspare," Maurice thought, as he looked and understood.

He saw no other figure. The donkey-boy had perhaps forgotten his mission or had started late. Maurice chafed bitterly at the delay. But he could not well leave his guest on this first day of his coming to Monte Amato, more especially after the events of the preceding day. To do so would seem discourteous. He returned to the terrace ill at ease, but strove to disguise his restlessness. It was nearly six o'clock when the boy at last appeared. Artois at once bade Hermione and Maurice good-bye and mounted his donkey.

"You will come to-morrow, then?" Maurice said to him at parting.

"I haven't the courage to refuse," Artois replied. "Good-bye."

He had already shaken Maurice's hand, but now he extended his hand again.

"It is good of you to make me so welcome," he said.

He paused, holding Maurice's hand in his. Both Hermione and Maurice thought he was going to say something more, but he glanced at her, dropped his host's hand, lifted his soft hat, and signed to the boy to lead the donkey away.

Hermione and Maurice followed to the arch, and from there watched him riding slowly down till he was out of sight. Maurice looked for Gaspare, but did not see him. He must have moved into the shadow of the ravine.

"Dear old Emile!" Hermione said. "He's been happy to-day. You've made him very happy, Maurice. Bless you for it!"

Maurice said nothing. Now the moment had arrived when he could go he felt a strange reluctance to say good-bye to Hermione, even for a short time. So much might—must—happen before he saw her again that evening.

"And you?" she said, at last, as he was silent. "Are you really going down to bathe? Isn't it too late?"

"Oh no. I must have a dip. It will do me all the good in the world." He tried to speak buoyantly, but the words seemed to himself to come heavily from his tongue.

"Will you take Tito?"

"I—no, I think I'll walk. I shall get down quicker, and I like going into the sea when I'm hot. I'll just fetch my bathing things."

They walked back together to the house. Maurice wondered what had suddenly come to him. He felt horribly sad now—yet he wished to get the scene that awaited him over. He was longing to have it over. He went into the house, got his bathing-dress and towels, and came out again onto the terrace.

"I shall be a little late back, I suppose," he said.

"Yes. It's six o'clock now. Shall we dine at half-past eight—or better say nine? That will give you plenty of time to come up quietly."

"Yes. Let's say nine."

Still he did not move to go.

"Have you been happy to-day, Hermione?" he asked.

"Yes, very—since this morning."

"Since?"

"Yes. This morning I—"

She stopped.

"I was a little puzzled," she said, after a minute, with her usual frankness. "Tell me, Maurice—you weren't made unhappy by—by what I told you?"

"About—about the child?"

"Yes."

He did not answer with words, but he put his arms about her and kissed her, as he had not kissed her since she went away to Africa. She shut her eyes. Presently she felt the pressure of his arms relax.

"I'm perfectly happy now," she said. "Perfectly happy."

He moved away a step or two. His face was flushed, and she thought that he looked younger, that the boyish expression she loved had come back to him.

"Good-bye, Hermione," he said.

Still he did not go. She thought that he had something more to say but did not know how to say it. She felt so certain of this that she said:

"What is it, Maurice?"

"We shall come back to Sicily, I suppose, sha'n't we, some time or other?"

"Surely. Many times, I hope."

"Suppose—one can never tell what will happen—suppose one of us were to die here?"

"Yes," she said, soberly.

"Don't you think it would be good to lie there where we lay this afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it would. Good-bye, Hermione."

He swung the bathing-dress and the towels up over his shoulder and went away through the arch. She followed and watched him springing down the mountain-side. Just before he reached the ravine he turned and waved his hand to her. His movements, that last gesture, were brimful of energy and of life. He acted better then than he had that day upon the terrace. But the sense of progress, the feeling that he was going to meet fate in the person of Salvatore, quickened the blood within him. At last the suspense would be over. At last he would be obliged to play not the actor but the man. He longed to be down by the sea. The youth in him rose up at the thought of action, and his last farewell to Hermione, looking down to him from the arch, was bold and almost careless.

Scarcely had he got into the ravine before he met Gaspare. He stopped. The boy's face was aflame with expression as he stood, holding his gun, in front of his padrone.

"Gaspare!" Maurice said to him.

He held out his hand and grasped the boy's hot hand.

"I sha'n't forget your faithful service," he said. "Thank you, Gaspare."

He wanted to say more, to find other and far different words. But he could not.

"Let me come with you, signorino."

The boy's voice was intensely, almost savagely, earnest.

"No. You must stay with the signora."

"I want to come with you."

His great eyes were fastened on his padrone's face.

"I have always been with you."

"But you were with the signora first. You were her servant. You must stay with her now. Remember one thing, Gaspare—the signora is never to know."

The boy nodded. His eyes still held Maurice. They glittered as if with leaping fires. That deep and passionate spirit of Sicilian loyalty, which is almost savage in its intensity and heedless of danger, which is ready to go to hell with, or for, a friend or a master who is beloved and believed in, was awake in Gaspare, illuminated him at this moment. The peasant boy looked noble.

"Mayn't I come with you, signorino?"

"Gaspare," Maurice said, "I must leave some one with the padrona. Salvatore might come still. I may miss him going down. Whom can I trust to stop Salvatore, if he comes, but you? You see?"

"Va bene, signorino."

The boy seemed convinced, but he suffered and did not try to conceal it.

"Now I must go," Maurice said.

He shook Gaspare's hand.

"Have you got the revolver, signorino?" said the boy.

"No. I am not going to fight with Salvatore."

"How do you know what Salvatore will do?"

Maurice looked down upon the stones that lay on the narrow path.

"My revolver can have nothing to do with Maddalena's father," he said.

He sighed.

"That's how it is, Gaspare. Addio!"

"Addio, signorino."

Maurice went on down the path into the shadow of the trees. Presently he turned. Gaspare stood quite still, looking after him.

"Signorino!" he called. "May I not come? I want to come with you."

Maurice waved his hand towards the mountain-side.

"Go to the signora," he called back. "And look out for me to-night. Addio, Gaspare!"

The boy's "Addio!" came to him sadly through the gathering shadows of the evening.

Presently Hermione, who was sitting alone on the terrace with a book in her lap which she was not reading, saw Gaspare walking listlessly through the archway holding his gun. He came slowly towards her, lifted his hat, and was going on without a word, but she stopped him.

"Why, Gaspare," she said, lightly, "you forgot us to-day. How was that?"

"Signora?"

Again she saw the curious, almost ugly, look of obstinacy, which she had already noticed, come into his face.

"You didn't remember about tea-time!"

"Signora," he answered, "I am sorry."

He looked at her fixedly while he spoke.

"I am sorry," he said again.

"Never mind," Hermione said, unable to blame him on this first day of her return. "I dare say you have got out of regular habits while I've been away. What have you been doing all the time?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Niente."

Again she wondered what was the matter with the boy to-day. Where were his life and gayety? Where was his sense of fun? He used to be always joking, singing. But now he was serious, almost heavy in demeanor.

"Gaspare," she said, jokingly, "I think you've all become very solemn without me. I am the old person of the party, but I begin to believe that it is I who keep you lively. I mustn't go away again."

"No, signora," he answered, earnestly; "you must never go away from us again. You should never have gone away from us."

The deep solemnity of his great eyes startled her. He put on his hat and went away round the angle of the cottage.

"What can be the matter with him?" she thought.

She remained sitting there on the terrace, wondering. Now she thought over things quietly, it struck her as strange the fact that she had left behind her in the priest's house three light-hearted people, and had come back to find Lucrezia drowned in sorrow, Gaspare solemn, even mysterious in his manner, and her husband—but here her thoughts paused, not labelling Maurice. At first he had puzzled her the most. But she thought she had found reasons for the change—a passing one, she felt sure—in him. He had secretly resented her absence, and, though utterly free from any ignoble suspicion of her, he had felt boyishly jealous of her friendship with Emile. That was very natural. For this was their honeymoon. She considered it their honeymoon prolonged, delightfully prolonged, beyond any fashionable limit. Lucrezia's depression was easily comprehensible. The change in her husband she accounted for; but now here was Gaspare looking dismal!

"I must cheer them all up," she thought to herself. "This beautiful time mustn't end dismally."

And then she thought of the inevitable departure. Was Maurice looking forward to it, desiring it? He had spoken that day as if he wished to be off. In London she had been able to imagine him in the South, in the highway of the sun. But now that she was here in Sicily she could not imagine him in London.

"He is not in his right place there," she thought.

Yet they must go, and soon. She knew that they were going, and yet she could not feel that they were going. What she had said under the oak-trees was true. In the spring her tender imagination had played softly with the idea of Sicily's joy in the possession of her son, of Maurice. Would Sicily part from him without an effort to retain him? Would Sicily let him go? She smiled to herself at her fancies. But if Sicily kept him, how would she keep him? The smile left her lips and her eyes as she thought of Maurice's suggestion. That would be too horrible. God would not allow that. And yet what tragedies He allowed to come into the lives of others. She faced certain facts, as she sat there, facts permitted, or deliberately brought about by the Divine Will. The scourge of war—that sowed sorrows over a land as the sower in the field scatters seeds. She, like others, had sat at home and read of battles in which thousands of men had been killed, and she had grieved—or had she really grieved, grieved with her heart? She began to wonder, thinking of Maurice's veiled allusion to the possibility of his death. He was the spirit of youth to her. And all the boys slain in battle! Had not each one of them represented the spirit of youth to some one, to some woman—mother, sister, wife, lover?

What were those women's feelings towards God?

She wondered. She wondered exceedingly. And presently a terrible thought came into her mind. It was this. How can one forgive God if He snatches away the spirit of youth that one loves?

Under the shadow of the oak-trees she had lain that day and looked out upon the shining world—upon the waters, upon the plains, upon the mountains, upon the calling coast-line and the deep passion of the blue. And she had felt the infinite love of God. When she had thought of God, she had thought of Him as the great Provider of happiness, as One who desired, with a heart too large and generous for the mere accurate conception of man, the joy of man.

But Maurice was beside her then.

Those whose lives had been ruined by great tragedies, when they looked out upon the shining world what must they think, feel?

She strove to imagine. Their conception of God must surely be very different from hers.

Once she had been almost unable to believe that God could choose her to be the recipient of a supreme happiness. But we accustom ourselves with a wonderful readiness to a happy fate. She had come back—she had been allowed to return to the Garden of Paradise. And this fact had given to her a confidence in life which was almost audacious. So now, even while she imagined the sorrows of others, half strove to imagine what her own sorrows might be, her inner feeling was still one of confidence. She looked out on the shining world, and in her heart was the shining world. She looked out on the glory of the blue, and in her heart was the glory of the blue. The world shone for her because she had Maurice. She knew that. But there was light in it. There would always be light whatever happened to any human creature. There would always be the sun, the great symbol of joy. It rose even upon the battle-field where the heaps of the dead were lying.

She could not realize sorrow to-day. She must see the sunlight even in the deliberate visions conjured up by her imagination.

Gaspare did not reappear. For a long time she was alone. She watched the changing of the light, the softening of the great landscape as the evening approached. Sometimes she thought of Maurice's last words about being laid to rest some day in the shadows of the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea. When the years had gone, perhaps they would lie together in Sicily, wrapped in the final siesta of the body. Perhaps the unborn child, of whose beginning she was mystically conscious, would lay them to rest there.

"Buon riposo." She loved the Sicilian good-night. Better than any text she would love to have those simple words written above her sleeping-place and his. "Buon riposo!"—she murmured the words to herself as she looked at the quiet of the hills, at the quiet of the sea. The glory of the world was inspiring, but the peace of the world was almost more uplifting, she thought. Far off, in the plain, she discerned tiny trails of smoke from Sicilian houses among the orange-trees beside the sea. The gold was fading. The color of the waters was growing paler, gentler, the color of the sky less passionate. The last point of the coast-line was only a shadow now, scarcely that. Somewhere was the sunset, its wonder unseen by her, but realized because of this growing tenderness, that was like a benediction falling upon her from a distant love, intent to shield her and her little home from sorrow and from danger. Nature was whispering her "Buon riposo!" Her hushed voice spoke withdrawn among the mountains, withdrawn upon the spaces of the sea. The heat of the golden day was blessed, but after it how blessed was the cool of the dim night!

Again she thought that the God who had placed man in the magnificent scheme of the world must have intended and wished him to be always happy there. Nature seemed to be telling her this, and her heart was convinced by Nature, though the story of the Old Testament had sometimes left her smiling or left her wondering. Men had written a Bible. God had written a Bible, too. And here she read its pages and was made strong by it.

"Signora!"

Hermione started and turned her head.

"Lucrezia! What is it?"

"What time is it, signora?"

Hermione looked at her watch.

"Nearly eight o'clock. An hour still before supper."

"I've got everything ready."

"To-night we've only cold things, haven't we? You made us a very nice collazione. The French signore praised your cooking, and he's very particular, as French people generally are. So you ought to be proud of yourself."

Lucrezia smiled, but only for an instant. Then she stood with an anxious face, twisting her apron.

"Signora!"

"Yes? What is it?"

"Would you mind—may I—"

She stopped.

"Why, Lucrezia, are you afraid of me? I've certainly been away too long!"

"No, no, signora, but—" Tears hung in her eyes. "Will you let me go away if I promise to be back by nine?"

"But you can't go to Marechiaro in—"

"No, signora. I only want to go to the mountain over there under Castel Vecchio. I want to go to the Madonna."

Hermione took one of the girl's hands.

"To the Madonna della Rocca?"

"Si, signora."

"I understand."

"I have a candle to burn to the Madonna. If I go now I can be back before nine."

She stood gazing pathetically, like a big child, at her padrona.

"Lucrezia," Hermione said, moved to a great pity by her own great happiness, "would you mind if I came, too? I think I should like to say a prayer for you to-night. I am not a Catholic, but my prayer cannot hurt you."

Lucrezia suddenly forgot distinctions, threw her arms round Hermione, and began to sob.

"Hush, you must be brave!"

She smoothed the girl's dark hair gently.

"Have you got your candle?"

"Si."

She showed it.

"Let us go quickly, then. Where's Gaspare?"

"Close to the house, signora, on the mountain. One cannot speak with him to-day."

"Why not?"

"Non lo so. But he is terrible to-day!"

So Lucrezia had noticed Gaspare's strangeness, too, even in the midst of her sorrow!

"Gaspare!" Hermione called.

There was no answer.

"Gaspare!"

She called louder.

"Si, signora!"

The voice came from somewhere behind the house.

"I am going for a walk with Lucrezia. We shall be back at nine. Tell the padrone if he comes."

"Si, signora."

The two women set out without seeing Gaspare. They walked in silence down the mountain-path. Lucrezia held her candle carefully, like one in a procession. She was not sobbing now. There were no tears in her eyes. The companionship and the sympathy of her padrona had given her some courage, some hope, had taken away from her the desolate feeling, the sensation of abandonment which had been torturing her. And then she had an almost blind faith in the Madonna della Rocca. And the padrona was going to pray, too. She was not a Catholic, but she was a lady and she was good. The Madonna della Rocca must surely be influenced by her petition.

So Lucrezia plucked up a little courage. The activity of the walk helped her. She knew the solace of movement. And perhaps, without being conscious of it, she was influenced by the soft beauty of the evening, by the peace of the hills. But as they crossed the ravine they heard the tinkle of bells, and a procession of goats tripped by them, following a boy who was twittering upon a flute. He was playing the tune of the tarantella, that tune which Hermione associated with careless joy in the sun. He passed down into the shadows of the trees, and gradually the airy rapture of his fluting and the tinkle of the goat-bells died away towards Marechiaro. Then Hermione saw tears rolling down over Lucrezia's brown cheeks.

"He can't play it like Sebastiano, signora!" she said.

The little tune had brought back all her sorrow.

"Perhaps we shall soon hear Sebastiano play it again," said Hermione.

They began to climb upward on the far side of the ravine towards the fierce silhouette of the Saracenic castle on the height. Beneath the great crag on which it was perched was the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca. Night was coming now, and the little lamp before the shrine shone gently, throwing a ray of light upon the stones of the path. When they reached it, Lucrezia crossed herself, and they stood together for a moment looking at the faded painting of the Madonna, almost effaced against its rocky background. Within the glass that sheltered it stood vases of artificial flowers, and on the ledge outside the glass were two or three bunches of real flowers, placed there by peasants returning to their homes in Castel Vecchio from their labors in the vineyards and the orchards. There were also two branches with clustering, red-gold oranges lying among the flowers. It was a strange, wild place. The precipice of rock, which the castello dominated, leaned slightly forward above the head of the Madonna, as if it meditated overwhelming her. But she smiled gently, as if she had no fear of it, bending down her pale eyes to the child who lay upon her girlish knees. Among the bowlders, the wild cactus showed its spiked leaves, and in the daytime the long black snakes sunned themselves upon the stones.

To Hermione this lonely and faded Madonna, smiling calmly beneath the savagely frowning rock upon which dead men had built long years ago a barbarous fastness, was touching in her solitude. There was something appealing in her frailness, in her thin, anæmic calm. How long had she been here? How long would she remain? She was fading away, as things fade in the night. Yet she had probably endured for years, would still be here for years to come, would be here to receive the wild flowers of peasant children, the prayers of peasant lovers, the adoration of the poor, who, having very little here, put their faith in far-off worlds, where they will have harvests surely without reaping in the heat of the sun, where they will have good wine without laboring in the vineyards, where they will be able to rest without the thought coming to them, "If to-day I rest, to-morrow I shall starve."

As Hermione looked at the painting lit by the little lamp, at the gifts of the flowers and the fruit, she began to feel as if indeed a woman dwelt there, in that niche of the crag, as if a heart were there, a soul to pity, an ear to listen.

Lucrezia knelt down quietly, lit her candle, turned it upside down till the hot wax dripped onto the rock and made a foundation for it, then stuck it upright, crossed herself silently, and began to pray. Her lips moved quickly. The candle-flame flickered for a moment, then burned steadily, sending its thin fire up towards the evening star. After a moment Hermione knelt down beside her.

She had never before prayed at a shrine. It was curious to be kneeling under this savage wall of rock above which the evening star showed itself in the clear heaven of night. She looked at the star and at the Madonna, then at the little bunches of flowers, and at Lucrezia's candle. These gifts of the poor moved her heart. Poverty giving is beautiful. She thought that, and was almost ashamed of the comfort of her life. She wished she had brought a candle, too. Then she bent her head and began to pray that Sebastiano might remember Lucrezia and return to her. To make her prayer more earnest, she tried to realize Lucrezia's sorrow by putting herself in Lucrezia's place, and Maurice in Sebastiano's. It was such a natural effort as people make every day, every hour. If Maurice had forgotten her in absence, had given his love to another, had not cared to return to her! If she were alone now in Sicily while he was somewhere else, happy with some one else!

Suddenly the wildness of this place where she knelt became terrible to her. She felt the horror of solitude, of approaching darkness. The outlines of the rocks and of the ruined castle looked threatening, alarming. The pale light of the lamp before the shrine and of Lucrezia's votive candle drew to them not only the fluttering night-moths, but the spirits of desolation and of hollow grief that dwell among the waste places and among the hills. Night seemed no more beneficent, but dreary as a spectre that came to rob the world of all that made it beautiful. The loneliness of deserted women encompassed her. Was there any other loneliness comparable to it?

She felt sure that there was not, and she found herself praying not only for Lucrezia, but for all women who were sad because they loved, for all women who were deserted by those whom they loved, or who had lost those whom they loved.

At first she believed that she was addressing her prayer to the Madonna della Rocca, the Blessed Virgin of the Rocks, whose pale image was before her. But presently she knew that her words, the words of her lips and the more passionate words of her heart, were going out to a Being before whom the sun burned as a lamp and the moon as a votive taper. She was thinking of women, she was praying for women, but she was no longer praying to a woman. It seemed to her as if she was so ardent a suitor that she pushed past the Holy Mother of God into the presence of God Himself. He had created women. He had created the love of women. To Him she would, she must, appeal.

Often she had prayed before, but never as now, never with such passion, with such a sensation of personally pleading. The effort of her heart was like the effort of womanhood. It seemed to her—and she had no feeling that this was blasphemous—as if God knew, understood, everything of the world He had created except perhaps this—the inmost agony some women suffer, as if she, perhaps, could make Him understand this by her prayer. And she strove to recount this agony, to make it clear to God.

Was it a presumptuous effort? She did not feel that it was. And now she felt selfless. She was no more thinking of herself, was no longer obliged to concentrate her thoughts and her imagination upon herself and the one she loved best. She had passed beyond that, as she had passed beyond the Madonna della Rocca. She was the voice and the heart not of a woman, but of woman praying in the night to the God who had made woman and the night.

From behind a rock Gaspare watched the two praying women. He had not forgotten his padrone's words, and when Hermione and Lucrezia set off from the cottage he had followed them, faithful to his trust. Intent upon their errand, they had not seen him. His step was light among the stones, and he had kept at a distance. Now he stood still, gazing at them as they prayed.

Gaspare did not believe in priests. Very few Sicilians do. An uncle of his was a priest's son, and he had other reasons, quite sufficient to his mind, for being incredulous of the sanctity of those who celebrated the mass to which he seldom went. But he believed in God, and he believed superstitiously in the efficacy of the Madonna and in the powers of the saints. Once his little brother had fallen dangerously ill on the festa of San Giorgio, the santo patrono of Castel Vecchio. He had gone to the festa, and had given all his money, five lire, to the saint to heal his brother. Next day the child was well. In misfortune he would probably utter a prayer, or burn a candle, himself. That Lucrezia might think that she had reason to pray he understood, though he doubted whether the Madonna and all the saints could do much for the reclamation of his friend Sebastiano. But why should the padrona kneel there out-of-doors sending up such earnest petitions? She was not a Catholic. He had never seen her pray before. He looked on with wonder, presently with discomfort, almost with anger. To-night he was what he would himself have called "nervoso," and anything that irritated his already strung-up nerves roused his temper. He was in anxiety about his padrone, and he wanted to be back at the priest's house, he wanted to see his padrone again at the earliest possible moment. The sight of his padrona committing an unusual action alarmed him. Was she, then, afraid as he was afraid? Did she know, suspect anything? His experience of women was that whenever they were in trouble they went for comfort and advice to the Madonna and the saints.

He grew more and more uneasy. Presently he drew softly a little nearer. It was getting late. Night had fallen. He must know the result of the padrone's interview with Salvatore, and he could not leave the padrona. Well, then—! He crept nearer and nearer till at last he was close to the shrine and could see the Madonna smiling. Then he crossed himself and said, softly:

"Signora!"

Hermione did not hear him. She was wrapped in the passion of her prayer.

"Signora!"

He bent forward and touched her on the shoulder. She started, turned her head, and rose to her feet.

"Gaspare!"

She looked startled. This abrupt recall to the world confused her for a moment.

"Gaspare! What is it? The padrone?"

He took off his cap.

"Signora, do you know how late it is?"

"Has the padrone come back?"

Lucrezia was on her feet, too. The tears were in her eyes.

"Scusi, signora!" said Gaspare.

Hermione began to look more natural.

"Has the padrone come back and sent you for us?"

"He did not send me, signora. It was getting dark. I thought it best to come. But I expect he is back. I expect he is waiting for us now."

"You came to guard me?"

She smiled. She liked his watchfulness.

"What's the time?"

She looked at her watch.

"Why, it is nine already! We must hurry. Come, Lucrezia!"

They went quickly down the path.

They did not talk as they went. Gaspare led the way. It was obvious that he was in great haste. Sometimes he forgot that the padrona was not so light-footed as he was, and sprang on so swiftly that she called to him to wait. When at last they came in sight of the arch Hermione and Lucrezia were panting.

"The padrone will—forgive us—when—he—sees how we have—hurried," said Hermione, laughing at her own fatigue. "Go on, Gaspare!"

She stood for a moment leaning against the arch.

"And you go quickly, Lucrezia, and get the supper. The padrone—will be—hungry after his bath."

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia went off to the back of the house. Then Hermione drew a long breath, recovered herself, and walked to the terrace.

Gaspare met her with flaming eyes.

"The padrone is not here, signora. The padrone has not come back!"

He stood and stared at her.

It was not yet very dark. They stood in a sort of soft obscurity in which all objects could be seen, not with sharp clearness, but distinctly.

"Are you sure, Gaspare?"

"Si, signora! The padrone has not come back. He is not here."

The boy's voice sounded angry, Hermione thought. It startled her. And the way he looked at her startled her too.

"You have looked in the house? Maurice!" she called. "Maurice!"

"I say the padrone is not here, signora!"

Never before had Gaspare spoken to Hermione like this, in a tone almost that she ought to have resented. She did not resent it, but it filled her with a creeping uneasiness.

"What time is it? Nearly half-past nine. He ought to be here by now."

The boy nodded, keeping his flaming eyes on her.

"I said nine to give him lots of time to get cool, and change his clothes, and—it's very odd."

"I will go down to the sea, signora. A rivederci."

He swung round to go, but Hermione caught his arm.

"No; don't go. Wait a moment, Gaspare. Don't leave me like this!"

She detained him.

"Why, what's the matter? What—what are you afraid of?"

Instantly there came into his face the ugly, obstinate look she had already noticed, and wondered at, that day.

"What are you afraid of, Gaspare?" she repeated.

Her voice vibrated with a strength of feeling that as yet she herself scarcely understood.

"Niente!" the boy replied, doggedly.

"Well, but then"—she laughed—"why shouldn't the padrone be a few minutes late? It would be absurd to go down. You might miss him on the way."

Gaspare said nothing. He stood there with his arms hanging and the ugly look still on his face.

"Mightn't you? Mightn't you, Gaspare, if he came up by Marechiaro?"

"Si, signora."

"Well, then—"

They stood there in silence for a minute. Hermione broke it.

"He—you know how splendidly the padrone swims," she said. "Don't you, Gaspare?"

The boy said nothing.

"Gaspare, why don't you answer when I speak to you?"

"Because I've got nothing to say, signora."

His tone was almost rude. At that moment he nearly hated Hermione for holding him by the arm. If she had been a man he would have struck her off and gone.

"Gaspare!" she said, but not angrily.

Her instinct told her that he was obliged to be utterly natural just then under the spell of some violent feeling. She knew he loved his padrone. The feeling must be one of anxiety. But it was absurd to be so anxious. It was ridiculous, hysterical. She said to herself that it was Gaspare's excitement that was affecting her. She was catching his mood.

"My dear Gaspare," she said, "we must just wait. The padrone will be here in a minute. Perhaps he has come up by Marechiaro. Very likely he has looked in at the hotel to see how the sick signore is after his day up here. That is it, I feel sure."

She looked at him for agreement and met his stern and flaming eyes, utterly unmoved by what she had said, utterly unconvinced. At this moment she could not deny that this untrained, untutored nature had power over hers. She let go his arm and sat down by the wall.

"Let us wait out here for a minute," she said.

"Va bene, signora."

He stood there quite still, but she felt as if in this unnatural stillness there was violent movement, and she looked away from him. It was fully night now. She gazed down at the ravine. By that way Maurice would come, unless he really had gone to Marechiaro to see Artois. She had suggested to Gaspare that this might be the reason of Maurice's delay, but she knew that she did not think it was. Yet what other reason could there be? He swam splendidly. She said that to herself. She kept on saying it. Why?

Slowly the minutes crept by. The silence around them was intense, yet she felt no calm, no peace in it. Like the stillness of Gaspare it seemed to be violent. It began to frighten her. She began to wish for movement, for sound. Presently a light shone in the cottage.

"Signora! Signora!"

Lucrezia's voice was calling.

"What is it?" she said.

"Supper is quite ready, signora."

"The signore has not come back yet. He is a little late."

Lucrezia came to the top of the steps.

"Where can the signore be, signora?" she said. "It only takes—"

Her voice died suddenly away. Hermione looked quickly at Gaspare, and saw that he was gazing ferociously at Lucrezia as if to bid her be silent.

"Gaspare!" Hermione said, suddenly getting up.

"Signora?"

"I—it's odd the signore's not coming."

The boy answered nothing.

"Perhaps—perhaps there really has been an—an accident."

She tried to speak lightly.

"I don't think he would keep me waiting like this if—"

"I will go down to the sea," the boy said. "Signora, let me go down to the sea!"

There was a fury of pleading in his voice. Hermione hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she answered:

"Yes, you shall go. Stop, Gaspare!"

He had moved towards the arch.

"I'm coming with you."

"You, signora?"

"Yes."

"You cannot come! You are not to come!"

He was actually commanding her—his padrona.

"You are not to come, signora!" he repeated, violently.

"But I am coming," she said.

They stood facing each other. It was like a battle, Gaspare's manner, his words, the tone in which they were spoken—all made her understand that there was some sinister terror in his soul. She did not ask what it was. She did not dare to ask. But she said again:

"I am coming with you, Gaspare."

He stared at her and knew that from that decision there was no appeal. If he went she would accompany him.

"Let us wait here, signora," he said. "The padrone will be coming presently. We had better wait here."

But now she was as determined on activity as before she had been—or seemed—anxious for patience.

"I am going," she answered. "If you like to let me go alone you can."

She spoke very quietly, but there was a thrill in her voice. The boy saw it was useless just then to pit his will against hers. He dropped his head, and the ugly look came back to his face, but he made no reply.

"We shall be back very soon, Lucrezia. We are going a little way down to meet the padrone. Come, Gaspare!"

She spoke to him gently, kindly, almost pleadingly. He made an odd sound. It was not a word, nor was it a sob. She had never heard anything like it before. It seemed to her to be like a smothered outcry of a heart torn by some acute emotion.

"Gaspare!" she said. "We shall meet him. We shall meet him in the ravine!"

Then they set out. As she was going, Hermione cast a look down towards the sea. Always at this hour, when night had come, a light shone there, the light in the siren's house. To-night that little spark was not kindled. She saw only the darkness. She stopped.

"Why," she said, "there's no light!"

"Signora?"

She pointed over the wall.

"There's no light!" she repeated.

This little fact—she did not know why—frightened her.

"Signora, I am going!"

"Gaspare!" she said. "Give me your hand to help me down the path. It's so dark. Isn't it?"

She put out her hand. The boy's hand was cold.

They set out towards the sea.

CHAPTER XXI

They did not talk as they went down the steep mountain-side, but when they reached the entrance of the ravine Gaspare stopped abruptly and took his cold hand away from his padrona's hand.

"Signora," he said, almost in a whisper. "Let me go alone!"

They were under the shade of the trees here and it was much darker than upon the mountain-side. Hermione could not see the boy's face plainly. She came close up to him.

"Why do you want to go alone?" she asked.

Without knowing it, she, too, spoke in an under-voice.

"What is it you are afraid of?" she added.

"I am not afraid."

"Yes," she said, "you are. Your hand is quite cold."

"Let me go alone, signora."

"No, Gaspare. There is nothing to be afraid of, I believe. But if—if there should have been an accident, I ought to be there. The padrone is my husband, remember."

She went on and he followed her.

Hermione had spoken firmly, even almost cheerfully, to comfort the boy, whose uneasiness was surely greater than the occasion called for. So many little things may happen to delay a man. And Maurice might really have made the détour to Marechiaro on his way home. If he had, then they would miss him by taking this path through the ravine. Hermione knew that, but she did not hesitate to take it. She could not remain inactive to-night. Patience was out of her reach. It was only by making a strong effort that she had succeeded in waiting that short time on the terrace. Now she could wait no longer. She was driven. Although she had not yet sincerely acknowledged it to herself, fear was gradually taking possession of her, a fear such as she had never yet known or even imagined.

She had never yet known or imagined such a fear. That she felt. But she had another feeling, contradictory, surely. It began to seem to her as if this fear, which was now coming upon her, had been near her for a long time, ever since the night when she knew that she was going to Africa. Had she not even expressed it to Maurice?

Those beautiful days and nights of perfect happiness—can they ever come again? Had she not thought that many times? Was it not the voice of this fear which had whispered those words, and others like them, to her mind? And had there not been omens? Had there not been omens?

She heard Gaspare's feet behind her in the ravine, and it seemed to her that she could tell by the sound of them upon the many little loose stones that he was wild with impatience, that he was secretly cursing her for obliging him to go so slowly. Had he been alone he would have sped down with a rapidity almost like that of travelling light. She was strong, active. She was going fast. Instinctively she went fast. But she was a woman, not a boy.

"I can't help it, Gaspare!"

She was saying that mentally, saying it again and again, as she hurried onward.

Had there not been omens?

That last letter of hers, whose loss had prevented Maurice from meeting her on her return, from welcoming her! When she had reached the station of Cattaro, and had not seen him upon the platform, she had felt "I have lost him." Afterwards, directly almost, she had laughed at the feeling as absurd. But she had had it. And then, when at last he had come, she had been moved to suggest that he might like to sleep outside upon the terrace. And he had agreed to the suggestion. They had not resumed their old, sweet relation of husband and wife.

Had there not been omens?

And only an hour ago, scarcely that, not that, she had knelt before the Madonna della Rocca and she had prayed, she had prayed passionately for deserted women, for women who loved and who had lost those whom they loved.

The fear was upon her fully now, and she fully knew that it was. Why had she prayed for lonely, deserted women? What had moved her to such a prayer?

"Was I praying for myself?"

At that thought a physical weakness came to her, and she felt as if she could not go on. By the side of the path, growing among pointed rocks, there was a gnarled olive-tree, whose branches projected towards her. Before she knew what she was doing she had caught hold of one and stood still. So suddenly she had stopped that Gaspare, unprepared, came up against her in the dark.

"Signora! What is the matter?"

His voice was surely angry. For a moment she thought of telling him to go on alone, quickly.

"What is it, signora?"

"Nothing—only—I've walked so fast. Wait one minute!"

She felt the agony of his impatience, and it seemed to her that she was treating him very cruelly to-night.

"You know, Gaspare," she said, "it's not easy for women—this rough walking, I mean. We've got our skirts."

She laughed. How unnatural, how horrible her laugh sounded in the darkness! He did not say any more. She knew he was wondering why she had laughed like that. After a moment she let go the branch. But her legs were trembling, and she stumbled when she began to walk on.

"Signora, you are tired already. You had better let me go alone."

For the first time she told him a lie.

"I should be afraid to wait here all by myself in the night," she said. "I couldn't do that."

"Who would come?"

"I should be frightened."

She thought she saw him look at her incredulously in the dark, but was not sure.

"Be kind to me to-night, Gaspare!" she said.

She felt a sudden passionate need of gentleness, of support, a woman's need of sympathy.

"Won't you?" she added.

"Signora!" he said.

His voice sounded shocked, she thought; but in a moment, when they came to an awkward bit of the path, he put his hand under her arm, and very carefully, almost tenderly, helped her over it. Tears rushed into her eyes. For such a small thing she was crying! She turned her head so that Gaspare should not see, and tried to control her emotion. That terrible question kept on returning to her heart.

"Was I praying for myself when I prayed at the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"

Hermione was gifted, or cursed, with imagination, and as she never made use of her imaginative faculty in any of the arts, it was, perhaps, too much at the service of her own life. In happiness it was a beautiful handmaid, helping her to greater joy, but in unhappy, or in only anxious moments, it was, as it usually is, a cursed thing. It stood at her elbow, then, like a demon full of suggestions that were terrible. With an inventiveness that was diabolic it brought vividly before her scenes to shake the stoutest courage. It painted the future black. It showed her the world as a void. And in that void she was as something falling, falling, yet reaching nothing.

Now it was with her in the ravine, and as she asked questions, terrible questions, it gave her terrible answers. And it reminded her of other omens—it told her these facts were really omens—which till now she had not thought of.

Why had both she and Maurice been led to think and to speak of death to-day?

Upon the mountain-top the thought of death had come to her when she looked at the glory of the dawn. She had said to Maurice, "'The mountains will endure'—but we!" Of course it was a truism, such a thing as she might say at any time when she was confronted by the profound stability of nature. Thousands of people had said much the same thing on thousands of occasions. Yet now the demon at her elbow whispered to her that the remark had had a peculiar significance. She had even said, "What is it makes one think most of death when—when life, new life, is very near?"

Existence is made up of loss and gain. New beings rush into life day by day and hour by hour. Birth is about us, but death is about us too. And when we are given something, how often is something also taken from us! Was that to be her fate?

And Maurice—he had been led to speak of death, afterwards, just as he was going away to the sea. She recalled his words, or the demon whispered them over to her:

"'One can never tell what will happen—suppose one of us were to die here? Don't you think it would be good to lie there where we lay this afternoon, under the oak-trees, in sight of Etna and the sea? I think it would."

They were his very last words, his who was so full of life, who scarcely ever seemed to realize the possibility of death. All through the day death had surely been in the air about them. She remembered her dream, or quasi-dream. In it she had spoken. She had muttered an appeal, "Don't leave me alone!" and at another time she had tried to realize Maurice in England and had failed. She had felt as if Sicily would never let him go. And when she had spoken her thought he had hinted that Sicily could only keep him by holding him in arms of earth, holding him in those arms that keep the body of man forever.

Perhaps it was ordained that her Sicilian should never leave the island that he loved. In all their Sicilian days how seldom had she thought of their future life together in England! Always she had seen herself with Maurice in the south. He had seemed to belong to the south, and she had brought him to the south. And now—would the south let him go? The thought of the sirens of legend flitted through her mind. They called men to destruction. She imagined them sitting among the rocks near the Casa della Sirene, calling—calling to her Sicilian.

Long ago, when she first knew him well and loved his beauty, she had sometimes thought of him as a being of legend. She had let her fancy play about him tenderly, happily. He had been Mercury, Endymion, a dancing faun, Cupid vanishing from Psyche as the dawn came. And now she let a cruel fancy have its will for a moment. She imagined the sirens calling among the rocks, and Maurice listening to their summons, and going to his destruction. The darkness of the ravine helped the demon who hurried with her down the narrow path, whispering in her ears. But though she yielded for a time to the nightmare spell, common-sense had not utterly deserted her, and presently it made its voice heard. She began to say to herself that in giving way to such fantastic fears she was being unworthy of herself, almost contemptible. In former times she had never been a foolish woman or weak. She had, on the contrary, been strong and sensible, although unconventional and enthusiastic. Many people had leaned upon her, even strong people. Artois was one. And she had never yet failed any one.

"I must not fail myself," she suddenly thought. "I must not be a fool because I love."

She loved very much, and she had been separated from her lover very soon. Her eagerness to return to him had been so intense that it had made her afraid. Yet she had returned, been with him again. Her fear in Africa that they would perhaps never be together again in their Sicilian home had been groundless. She remembered how it had often tormented her, especially at night in the dark. She had passed agonizing hours, for no reason. Her imagination had persecuted her. Now it was trying to persecute her more cruelly. Suddenly she resolved not to let it have its way. Why was she so frightened at a delay that might be explained in a moment and in the simplest manner? Why was she frightened at all?

Gaspare's foot struck a stone and sent it flying down the path past her.

Ah! it had been Gaspare. His face, his manner, had startled her, had first inclined her to fear.

"Gaspare!" she said.

"Si, signora?"

"Come up beside me. There's room now."

The boy joined her.

"Gaspare," she continued, "do you know that when we meet the padrone, you and I, we shall look like two fools?"

"Meet the padrone?" he repeated, sullenly.

"Yes. He'll laugh at us for rushing down like this. He'll think we've gone quite mad."

Silence was the only response she had.

"Won't he?" she asked.

"Non lo so."

"Oh, Gaspare!" she exclaimed. "Don't—don't be like this to-night. Do you know that you are frightening me?"

He did not answer.

"What is the matter with you? What has been the matter with you all day?"

"Niente."

His voice was hard, and he fell behind again.

Hermione knew that he was concealing something from her. She wondered what it was. It must be something surely in connection with his anxiety. Her mind worked rapidly. Maurice—the sea—bathing—Gaspare's fear—Maurice and Gaspare had bathed together often while she had been in Africa.

"Gaspare," she said. "Walk beside me—I wish it."

He came up reluctantly.

"You've bathed with the padrone lately?"

"Si, signora."

"Many times?"

"Si, signora."

"Have you ever noticed that he was tired in the sea, or afterwards, or that bathing seemed to make him ill in any way?"

"Tired, signora?"

"You know there's a thing, in English we call it cramp. Sometimes it seizes the best swimmers. It's a dreadful pain, I believe, and the limbs refuse to move. You've never—when he's been swimming with you, the padrone has never had anything of that kind, has he? It wasn't that which made you frightened this evening when he didn't come?"

She had unwittingly given the boy the chance to save her from any worse suspicion. With Sicilian sharpness he seized it. Till now he had been in a dilemma, and it was that which had made him sullen, almost rude. His position was a difficult one. He had to keep his padrone's confidence. Yet he could not—physically he could not—stay on the mountain when he knew that some tragedy was probably being enacted, or had already been enacted by the sea. He was devoured by an anxiety which he could not share and ought not to show because it was caused by the knowledge which he was solemnly pledged to conceal. This remark of Hermione gave him a chance of shifting it from the shoulders of the truth to the shoulders of a lie. He remembered the morning of sirocco, his fear, his passion of tears in the boat. The memory seemed almost to make the lie he was going to tell the truth.

"Si, signora. It was that."

His voice was no longer sullen.

"The padrone had an attack like that?"

Again the terrible fear came back to her.

"Signora, it was one morning."

"Used you to bathe in the morning?"

A hot flush came in Gaspare's face, but Hermione did not see it in the darkness.

"Once we did, signora. We had been fishing."

"Go on. Tell me!"

Then Gaspare related the incident of his padrone's sinking in the sea. Only he made Maurice's travesty appear a real catastrophe. Hermione listened with painful attention. So Maurice had nearly died, had been into the jaws of death, while she had been in Africa! Her fears there had been less ill-founded than she had thought. A horror came upon her as she heard Gaspare's story.

"And then, signora, I cried," he ended. "I cried."

"You cried?"

"I thought I never could stop crying again."

How different from an English boy's reticence was this frank confession! and yet what English boy was ever more manly than this mountain lad?

"Why—but then you saved the padrone's life! God bless you!"

Hermione had stopped, and she now put her hand on Gaspare's arm.

"Oh, signora, there were two of us. We had the boat."

"But"—another thought came to her—"but, Gaspare, after such a thing as that, how could you let the padrone go down to bathe alone?"

Gaspare, a moment before credited with a faithful action, was now to be blamed for a faithless one. For neither was he responsible, if strict truth were to be regarded. But he had insisted on saving his padrone from the sea when it was not necessary. And he knew his own faithfulness and was secretly proud of it, as a good woman knows and is proud of her honor. He had borne the praise therefore. But one thing he could not bear, and that was an imputation of faithlessness in his stewardship.

"It was not my fault, signora!" he cried, hotly. "I wanted to go. I begged to go, but the padrone would not let me."

"Why not?"

Hermione, peering in the darkness, thought she saw the ugly look come again into the boy's face.

"Why not, signora?"

"Yes, why not?"

"He wished me to stay with you. He said: 'Stay with the padrona, Gaspare. She will be all alone.'"

"Did he? Well, Gaspare, it is not your fault. But I never thought it was. You know that."

She had heard in his voice that he was hurt.

"Come! We must go on!"

Her fear was now tangible. It had a definite form, and with every moment it grew greater in the night, towering over her, encompassing her about. For she had hoped to meet Maurice coming up the ravine, and, with each moment that went by, her hope of hearing his footstep decreased, her conviction that something untoward must have occurred grew more solid. Only once was her terror abated. When they were not far from the mouth of the ravine Gaspare suddenly seized her arm from behind.

"Gaspare! What is it?" she said, startled.

He held up one hand.

"Zitta!" he whispered.

Hermione listened, holding her breath. It was a silent night, windless and calm. The trees had no voices, the watercourse was dry, no longer musical with the falling stream. Even the sea was dumb, or, if it were not, murmured so softly that these two could not hear it where they stood. And now, in this dark silence, they heard a faint sound. It was surely a foot-fall upon stones. Yes, it was.

By the fierce joy that burst up in her heart Hermione measured her previous fear.

"It's he! It's the padrone!"

She put her face close to Gaspare's and whispered the words. He nodded. His eyes were shining.

"Andiamo!" he whispered back.

With a boy's impetuosity he wished to rush on and meet the truant pilgrim from the sea, but Hermione held him back. She could not bear to lose that sweet sound, the foot-fall on the stones, coming nearer every moment.

"No. Let's wait for him here! Let's give him a surprise."

"Va bene!"

His body was quivering with suppressed movement. But they waited. The step was slow, or so it seemed to Hermione as she listened again, like the step of a tired man. Maurice seldom walked like that, she thought. He was light-footed, swift. His actions were ardent as were his eyes. But it must be he! Of course it was he! He was languid after a long swim, and was walking slowly for fear of getting hot. That must be it. The walker drew nearer, the crunch of the stones was louder under his feet.

"It isn't the padrone!"

Gaspare had spoken. All the light had gone out of his eyes.

"Si! Si! It is he!"

Hermione contradicted him.

"No, signora. It is a contadino."

Her joy was failing. Although she contradicted Gaspare, she began to feel that he was right. This step was heavy, weary, an old man's step. It could not be her Mercury coming up to his home on the mountain. But still she waited. Presently there detached itself from the darkness a faint figure, bent, crowned with a long Sicilian cap.

"Andiamo!"

This time she did not keep Gaspare back. Without a word they went on. As they came to the figure it stopped. She did not even glance at it, but as she went by it she heard an old, croaky voice say:

"Benedicite!"

Never before had the Sicilian greeting sounded horrible in her ears. She did not reply to it. She could not. And Gaspare said nothing. They hastened on in silence till they reached the high-road by Isola Bella, the road where Maurice had met Maddalena on the morning of the fair.

It was deserted. The thick white dust upon it looked ghastly at their feet. Now they could hear the faint and regular murmur of the oily sea by which the fishermen's boats were drawn up, and discern, far away on the right, the serpentine lights of Cattaro.

"Where do you go to bathe?" Hermione asked, always speaking in a hushed voice. "Here, by Isola Bella?"

She looked down at the rocks of the tiny island, at the dimness of the spreading sea. Till now she had always gloried in its beauty, but to-night it looked to her mysterious and cruel.

"No, signora."

"Where then?"

"Farther on—a little. I will go."

His voice was full of hesitation. He did not know what to do.

"Please, signora, stay here. Sit on the bank by the line. I will go and be back in a moment. I can run. It is better. If you come we shall take much longer."

"Go, Gaspare!" she said. "But—stop—where do you bathe exactly?"

"Quite near, signora."

"In that little bay underneath the promontory where the Casa delle Sirene is?"

"Sometimes there and sometimes farther on by the caves. A rivederla!"

The white dust flew up from the road as he disappeared.

Hermione did not sit down on the bank. She had never meant to wait by Isola Bella, but she let him go because what he had said was true, and she did not wish to delay him. If anything serious had occurred every moment might be valuable. After a short pause she followed him. As she walked she looked continually at the sea. Presently the road mounted and she came in sight of the sheltered bay in which Maurice had heard Maddalena's cry when he was fishing. A stone wall skirted the road here. Some twenty feet below was the railway line laid on a bank which sloped abruptly to the curving beach. She leaned her hands upon the wall and looked down, thinking she might see Gaspare. But he was not there. The dark, still sea, protected by the two promontories, and by an islet of rock in the middle of the bay, made no sound here. It lay motionless as a pool in a forest under the stars. To the left the jutting land, with its turmoil of jagged rocks, was a black mystery. As she stood by the wall, Hermione felt horribly lonely, horribly deserted. She wished she had not let Gaspare go. Yet she dreaded his return. What might he have to tell her? Now that she was here by the sea she felt how impossible it was for Maurice to have been delayed upon the shore. For there was no one here. The fishermen were up in the village. The contadini had long since left their work. No one passed upon the road. There was nothing, there could have been nothing to keep a man here. She felt as if it were already midnight, the deepest hour of darkness and of silence.

As she took her hands from the wall, and turned to go on up the hill to the point which commanded the open sea and the beginning of the Straits of Messina, she was terrified. Suspicion was hardening into certainty. Something dreadful must have happened to Maurice.

Her legs had begun to tremble again. All her body felt weak and incapable, like the body of an old person whose life was drawing to an end. The hill, not very steep, faced her like a precipice, and it seemed to her that she would not be able to mount it. In the road the deep dust surely clung to her feet, refusing to let her lift them. And she felt sick and contemptible, no longer her own mistress either physically or mentally. The voices within her that strove to whisper commonplaces of consolation, saying that Maurice had gone to Marechiaro, or that he had taken another path home, not the path from Isola Bella, brought her no comfort. The thing within her soul that knew what she, the human being containing it, did not know, told her that her terror had its reason, that she was not suffering in this way without cause. It said, "Your terror is justified."

At last she was at the top of the hill, and could see vaguely the shore by the caves where the fishermen had slept in the dawn. To her right was the path which led to the wall of rock connecting the Sirens' Isle with the main-land. She glanced at it, but did not think of following it. Gaspare must have followed the descending road. He must be down there on that beach searching, calling his padrone's name, perhaps. She began to descend slowly, still physically distressed. True to her fixed idea that if there had been a disaster it must be connected with the sea, she walked always close to the wall, and looked always down to the sea. Within a short time, two or three minutes, she came in sight of the lakelike inlet, a miniature fiord which lay at the feet of the woods where hid the Casa delle Sirene. The water here looked black like ebony. She stared down at it and saw a boat lying on the shore. Then she gazed for a moment at the trees opposite from which always, till to-night, had shone the lamp which she and Maurice had seen from the terrace. All was dark. The thickly growing trees did not move. Secret and impenetrable seemed to her the hiding-place they made. She could scarcely imagine that any one lived among them. Yet doubtless the inhabitants of the Casa delle Sirene were sleeping quietly there while she wandered on the white road accompanied by her terror.

She had stopped for a minute, and was just going to walk on, when she heard a sound that, though faint and distant, was sharp and imperative. It seemed to her to be a violent beating on wood, and it was followed by the calling of a voice. She waited. The sound died away. She listened, straining her ears. In this absolutely still night sound travelled far. At first she had no idea from what direction came this noise which had startled her. But almost immediately it was repeated, and she knew that it must be some one striking violently and repeatedly upon wood—probably a wooden door.

Then again the call rang out. This time she recognized, or thought she recognized, Gaspare's voice raised angrily, fiercely, in a summons to someone. She looked across the ebon water at the ebon mass of the trees on its farther side, and realized swiftly that Gaspare must be there. He had gone to the only house between the two bathing-places to ask if its inhabitants had seen anything of the padrone.

This seemed to her to be a very natural and intelligent action, and she waited eagerly and watched, hoping to see a light shine out as Salvatore—yes, that had been the name told to her by Gaspare—as Salvatore got up from sleep and came to open. He might know something, know at least at what hour Maurice had left the sea.

Again came the knocking and the call, again—four, five times. Then there was a long silence. Always the darkness reigned, unbroken by the earth-bound star, the light she looked for. The silence began to seem to her interminable. At first she thought that perhaps Gaspare was having a colloquy with the owner of the house, was learning something of Maurice. But presently she began to believe that there could be no one in the house, and that he had realized this. If so, he would have to return either to the road or the beach. She could see no boat moored to the shore opposite. He would come by the wall of rock, then, unless he swam the inlet. She went back a little way to a point from which dimly she saw the wall, and waited there a few minutes. Surely it would be dangerous to traverse that wall on such a dark night! Now, to her other fear was added fear for Gaspare. If an accident were to happen to him! Suddenly she hastened back to the path which led from the high-road along the spit of cultivated land to the wall, turned from the road, traversed the spit, and went down till she stood at the edge of the wall. She looked at the black rock, the black sea that lay motionless far down on either side of it. Surely Gaspare would not venture to come this way. It seemed to her that to do so would mean death, or, if not that, a dangerous fall into the sea—and probably there were rocks below, hidden under the surface of the water. But Gaspare was daring. She knew that. He was as active as a cat and did not know the meaning of fear for his own safety. He might—

Out of the darkness on the land beyond the wall, something came, the form of some one hurrying.

"Gaspare!"

The form stopped.

"Gaspare!"

"Signora! What are you doing here? Madonna!"

"Gaspare, don't come this way! You are not to come this way."

"Why are you here, signora? I told you to wait for me by Isola Bella."

The startled voice was hard.

"You are not to cross the wall. I won't have it."

"The wall—it is nothing, signora. I have crossed it many times. It is nothing for a man."

"In the day, perhaps, but at night—don't, Gaspare—d'you hear me?—you are not—"

She stopped, holding her breath, for she saw him coming lightly, poised on bare feet, straight as an arrow, and balancing himself with his out-stretched arms.

"Ah!"

She had shrieked out. Just as he was midway Gaspare had looked down at the sea—the open sea on the far side of the wall. Instantly his foot slipped, he lost his balance and fell. She thought he had gone, but he caught the wall with his hands, hung for a moment suspended above the sea, then raised himself, as a gymnast does on a parallel bar, slowly till his body was above the wall. Then—Hermione did not know how—he was beside her.

She caught hold of him with both hands. She felt furiously angry.

"How dare you disobey me?" she said, panting and trembling. "How dare you—"

But his eyes silenced her. She broke off, staring at him. All the healthy color had left his face. There was a leaden hue upon it.

"Gaspare—are you—you aren't hurt—you—"

"Let me go, signora! Let me go!"

She let him go instantly.

"What is it? Where are you going?"

He pointed to the beach.

"To the boat. There's—down there in the water—there's something in the water!"

"Something?" she said.

"Wait in the road."

He rushed away from her, and she heard him saying: "Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"—crying it out as he ran.

Something in the water! She felt as if her heart stood still for a century, then at last beat again somewhere up in her throat, choking her. Something—could Gaspare have seen what? She moved on a step. One of her feet was on the wall, the other still on the firm earth. She leaned down and tried to look over into the sea beyond, the sea close to the wall. But her head swam. Had she not moved back hastily, obedient to an imperious instinct of self-preservation, she would have fallen. She sat down, there where she had been standing, and dropped her face into her hands close to her knees, and kept quite still. She felt as if she were in a train going through a tunnel. Her ears were full of a roaring clamor. How long she sat and heard tumult she did not know. When she looked up the night seemed to her to be much darker than before, intensely dark. Yet all the stars were there in the sky. No clouds had come to hide them. She tried to get up quickly, but there was surely something wrong with her body. It would not obey her will at first. Presently she lay down, turned over on her side, put both hands on the ground, and with an effort, awkward as that of a cripple, hoisted herself up and stood on her feet. Gaspare had said, "Wait in the road." She must find the road. That was what she must do.

"Wait in the road—wait in the road." She kept on saying that to herself. But she could not remember for a moment where the road was. She could only think of rock, of water black like ebony. The road was white. She must look for something white. And when she found it she must wait. Presently, while she thought she was looking, she found that she was walking in the dust. It flew up into her nostrils, dry and acrid. Then she began to recover herself and to realize more clearly what she was doing.

She did not know yet. She knew nothing yet. The night was dark, the sea was dark. Gaspare had only cast one swift glance down before his foot had slipped. It was impossible that he could have seen what it was that was there in the water. And she was always inclined to let her imagination run riot. God isn't cruel. She had said that under the oak-trees, and it was true. It must be true.

"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to herself now. "I've never meant to. I've always tried to do the right thing. God knows that! God wouldn't be cruel to me."

In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted her, all that in her might have been called "cleverness." She was reduced to an extraordinary simplicity like that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated person.

"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God—He isn't bad. He wouldn't wish to hurt me. He wouldn't wish to kill me."

She was walking on mechanically while she thought this, but presently she remembered again that Gaspare had told her to wait in the road. She looked over the wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The boat which she had seen there was gone. Gaspare had taken it. She stood staring at the place where the boat had been. Then she sought a means of descending to that strip of beach. She would wait there. A little lower down the road some of the masonry of the wall had been broken away, perhaps by a winter flood, and at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over the wall at this point and was soon on the beach, standing almost on the spot where Maurice had stripped off his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare would presently come back. His arms were strong. He could row fast. She would only have to wait a few minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She strained her eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding the promontory as it returned from the open sea. At first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went by and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness returned and she sat down on the stones with her feet almost touching the water.

"Gaspare knows now," she thought. "I don't know, but Gaspare knows."

That seemed to her strange, that any one should know the truth of this thing before she did. For what did it matter to any one but her? Maurice was hers—was so absolutely hers that she felt as if no one else had any concern in him. He was Gaspare's padrone. Gaspare loved him as a Sicilian may love his padrone. Others in England, too, loved him—his mother, his father. But what was any love compared with the love of the one woman to whom he belonged. His mother had her husband. Gaspare—he was a boy. He would love some girl presently; he would marry. No, she was right. The truth about that "something in the water" only concerned her. God's dealing with this creature of his to-night only really mattered to her.

As she waited, pressing her hands on the stones and looking always at the point of the dark land round which the boat must come, a strange and terrible feeling came to her, a feeling that she knew she ought to drive out of her soul, but that she was powerless to expel.

She felt as if at this moment God were on His trial before her—before a poor woman who loved.

"If God has taken Maurice from me," she thought, "He is cruel, frightfully cruel, and I cannot love Him. If He has not taken Maurice from me, He is the God who is love, the God I can, I must worship!"

Which God was he?

The vast scheme of the world narrowed; the wide horizons vanished. There was nothing beyond the limit of her heart. She felt, as almost all believing human beings feel in such moments, that God's attention was entirely concentrated upon her life, that no other claimed His care, begged for His pity, demanded His tenderness because hers was so intense.

Did God wish to lose her love? Surely not! Then He could not commit this frightful act which she feared. He had not committed it.

A sort of relief crept through her as she thought this. Her agony of apprehension was suddenly lessened, was almost driven out.

God wants to be loved by the beings He has created. Then He would not deliberately, arbitrarily destroy a love already existing in the heart of one of them—a love thankful to Him, enthusiastically grateful for happiness bestowed by Him.

Beyond the darkness of the point there came out of the dimness of the night that brooded above the open sea a moving darkness, and Hermione heard the splash of oars in the calm water. She got up quickly. Now her body was trembling again. She stared at the boat as if she would force it to yield its secret to her eyes. But that was only for an instant. Then her ears seemed to be seeking the truth, seeking it from the sound of the oars in the water!

There was no rhythmic regularity in the music they made, no steadiness, no—no—

She listened passionately, instinctively bending down her head sideways. It seemed to her that she was listening to a drunken man rowing. Now there was a quick beating of the oars in the water, then silence, then a heavy splash as if one of the oars had escaped from an uncertain hand, then some uneven strokes, one oar striking the water after the other.

"But Gaspare is a contadino," she said to herself, "not a fisherman. Gaspare is a contadino and—"

"Gaspare!" she called out. "Gaspare!"

The boat stopped midway in the mouth of the inlet.

"Gaspare! Is it you?"

She saw a dark figure standing up in the boat.

"Gaspare, is it you?" she cried, more loudly.

"Si."

Was it Gaspare's voice? She did not recognize it. Yet the voice had answered "Yes." The boat still remained motionless on the water midway between shore and shore. She did not speak again; she was afraid to speak. She stood and stared at the boat and at the motionless figure standing up in it. Why did not he row in to land? What was he doing there? She stared at the boat and at the figure standing in it till she could see nothing. Then she shut her eyes.

"Gaspare!" she called, keeping her eyes shut. "What are you doing? Gaspare!"

There was no reply.

She opened her eyes, and now she could see the boat again and the rower.

"Gaspare!" she cried, with all her strength, to the black figure. "Why don't you row to the shore? Why don't you come to me?"

"Vengo!"

Loudly the word came to her, loudly and sullenly as if the boy were angry with her, almost hated her. It was followed by a fierce splash of oars. The boat shot forward, coming straight towards her. Then suddenly the oars ceased from moving, the dark figure of the rower fell down in a heap, and she heard cries, like cries of despair, and broken exclamations, and then a long sound of furious weeping.

"Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Her voice was strangled in her throat and died away.

"And then, signora, I cried—I cried!"

When had Gaspare said that to her? And why had he cried?

"Gaspare!"

It came from her lips in a whisper almost inaudible to herself.

Then she rushed forward into the dark water.

CHAPTER XXII

Late that night Dr. Marini, the doctor of the commune of Marechiaro, was roused from sleep in his house in the Corso by a violent knocking on his street door. He turned over in his bed, muttered a curse, then lay still for a moment and listened. The knocking was renewed more violently. Evidently the person who stood without was determined to gain admission. There was no help for it. The good doctor, who was no longer young, dropped his weary legs to the floor, walked across to the open window, and thrust his head out of it. A man was standing below.

"What is it? What do you want?" said the doctor, in a grumbling voice. "Is it another baby? Upon my word, these—"

"Signor Dottore, come down, come down instantly! The signore of Monte Amato, the signore of the Casa del Prete has had an accident. You must come at once. I will go to fetch a donkey."

The doctor leaned farther out of the window.

"An accident! What—?"

But the man, a fisherman of Marechiaro, was already gone, and the doctor saw only the narrow, deserted street, black with the shadows of the tall houses.

He drew in quickly and began to dress himself with some expedition. An accident, and to a forestiere! There would be money in this case. He regretted his lost sleep less now and cursed no more, though he thought of the ride up into the mountains with a good deal of self-pity. It was no joke to be a badly paid Sicilian doctor, he thought, as he tugged at his trousers buttons, and fastened the white front that covered the breast of his flannel shirt, and adjusted the cuffs which he took out of a small drawer. Without lighting a candle he went down-stairs, fumbled about, and found his case of instruments. Then he opened the street door and waited, yawning on the stone pavement. In two or three minutes he heard the tripping tip-tap of a donkey's hoofs, and the fisherman came up leading a donkey apparently as disinclined for a nocturnal flitting as the doctor.

"Ah, Giuseppe, it's you, is it?"

"Si, Signor Dottore!"

"What's this accident?"

The fisherman looked grave and crossed himself.

"Oh, signore, it is terrible! They say the poor signore is dead!"

"Dead!" exclaimed the doctor, startled. "You said is was an accident. Dead you say now?"

"Signore, he is dead beyond a doubt. I was going to the fishing when I heard dreadful cries in the water by the inlet—you know, by Salvatore's terreno!"

"In the water?"

"Si, signore. I went down quickly and I found Gaspare, the signore's—"

"I know—I know!"

"Gaspare in a boat with the padrone lying at the bottom, and the signora standing up to her middle in the sea."

"Z't! z't!" exclaimed the doctor, "the signora in the sea! Is she mad?"

"Signor Dottore, how do I know? I brought the boat to shore. Gaspare was like one crazed. Then we lifted the signore out upon the stones. Oh, he is dead, Signor Dottore; dead beyond a doubt. They had found him in the sea—"

"They?"

"Gaspare—under the rocks between Salvatore's terreno and the main-land. He had all his clothes on. He must have been there in the dark—"

"Why should he go in the dark?"

"How do I know, Signor Dottore?—and have fallen, and struck his head against the rocks. For there was a wound and—"

"The body should not have been moved from where it lay till the Pretore had seen it. Gaspare should have left the body."

"But perhaps the povero signore is not really dead, after all! Madonna! How—"

"Come! come! we must not delay! One minute! I will get some lint and—"

He disappeared into the house. Almost directly he came out again with a package under his arm and a long, black cigar lighted in his mouth.

"Take these, Giuseppe! Carry them carefully. Now then!"

He hoisted himself onto the donkey.

"A-ah! A-ah!"

They set off, the fisherman walking on naked feet beside the donkey.

"Then we have to go down to the sea?"

"No, Signor Dottore. There were others on the road, Antonio and—"

"The rest of you going to the boats—I know. Well?"

"And the signora would have him carried up to Monte Amato."

"She could give directions?"

"Si, signore. She ordered everything. When she came out of the sea she was all wet, the poor signora, but she was calm. I called the others. When they saw the signore they all cried out. They knew him. Some of them had been to the fishing with him. Oh, they were sorry! They all began to speak and to try to—"

"Diavolo! They could only make things worse! If the breath of life was in the signore's body they would drive it out. Per Dio!"

"But the signora stopped them. She told them to be silent and to carry the signore up to the Casa del Prete. Signore, she—the povera signora—she took his head in her hands. She held his head and she never cried, not a tear!"

The man brushed his hand across his eyes.

"Povera signora! Povera signora!" murmured the doctor.

"And she comforted Gaspare, too!" Giuseppe added. "She put her arm round him and told him to be brave, and help her. She made him walk by her and put his hand under the padrone's shoulder. Madonna!"

They turned away from the village into a narrow path that led into the hills.

"And I came to fetch you, Signor Dottore. Perhaps the povero signore is not really dead. Perhaps you can save him, Signor Dottore!"

"Chi lo sa?" replied the doctor.

He had let his cigar go out and did not know it.

"Chi lo sa?" he repeated, mechanically.

Then they went on in silence—till they reached the shoulder of the mountain under Castel Vecchio. From here they could see across the ravine to the steep slope of Monte Amato. Upon it, high up, a light shone, and presently a second light detached itself from the first, moved a little way, and then was stationary.

Giuseppe pointed.

"Ecco, Signor Dottore! They have carried the poor signore up."

The second light moved waveringly back towards the first.

"They are carrying him into the house, Signor Dottore. Madonna! And all this to happen in the night!"

The doctor nodded without speaking. He was watching the lights up there in that lonely place. He was not a man of strong imagination, and was accustomed to look on misery, the misery of the poor. But to-night he felt a certain solemnity descend upon him as he rode by these dark by-paths up into the bosom of the hills. Perhaps part of this feeling came from the fact that his mission had to do with strangers, with rich people from a distant country who had come to his island for pleasure, and who were now suddenly involved in tragedy in the midst of their amusement. But also he had a certain sense of personal sympathy. He had known Hermione on her former visit to Sicily and had liked her; and though this time he had seen scarcely anything of her he had seen enough to be aware that she was very happy with her young husband. Maurice, too, he had seen, full of the joy of youth and of bounding health. And now all that was put out, if Giuseppe's account were true. It was a pity, a sad pity.

The donkey crossed the mouth of the ravine, and picked its way upward carefully amid the loose stones. In the ravine a little owl hooted twice.

"Giuseppe!" said the doctor.

"Signore?"

"The signora has been away, hasn't she?"

"Si signore. In Africa."

"Nursing that sick stranger. And now directly she comes back here's this happening to her! Per Dio!"

He shook his head.

"Somebody must have looked on the povera signora with the evil-eye, Signor Dottore."

Giuseppe crossed himself.

"It seems so," the doctor replied, gravely.

He was almost as superstitious as the contadini among whom he labored.

"Ecco, Signor Dottore!"

The doctor looked up. At the arch stood a figure holding a little lamp. Almost immediately, two more figures appeared behind it.

"Il dottore! Ecco il dottore!"

There was a murmur of voices in the dark. As the donkey came up the excited fishermen crowded round, all speaking at once.

"He is dead, Signor Dottore. The povero signore is dead!"

"Let the Signor Dottore come to him, Beppe! What do you know? Let the—"

"Sure enough he is dead! Why, he must have been in the water a good hour. He is all swollen with the water and—"

"It is his head, Signor Dottore! If it had not been for his coming against the rocks he would not have been hurt. Per Dio, he can swim like a fish, the povero signorino. I have seen him swim. Why, even Peppino—"

"The signora wants us all to go away, Signor Dottore. She begs us to go and leave her alone with the povero signore!"

"Gaspare is in such a state! You would not know him. And the povera signora, she is all dripping wet. She has been into the sea, and now she has carried the head of the povero signore all the way up the mountain. She would not let any one—"

A succession of cries came out of the darkness, hysterical cries that ended in prolonged sobbing.

"That is Lucrezia!" cried one of the fishermen. "Madonna! That is Lucrezia!"

"Mamma mia! Mamma mia!"

Their voices were loud in the night. The doctor pushed his way between the men and came onto the terrace in front of the steps that led into the sitting-room.

Gaspare was standing there alone. His face was almost unrecognizable. It looked battered, puffy, and inflamed, as if he had been drinking and fighting. There were no tears in his eyes now, but long, violent sobs shook his body from time to time, and his blistered lips opened and shut mechanically with each sob. He stared dully at the doctor, but did not say a word, or move to get out of the way.

"Gaspare!" said the doctor. "Where is the padrona?"

The boy sobbed and sobbed, always in the same dry and terribly mechanical way.

"Gaspare!" repeated the doctor, touching him. "Gaspare!"

"E' morto!" the boy suddenly cried out, in a loud voice.

And he flung himself down on the ground.

The doctor felt a thrill of cold in his veins. He went up the steps into the little sitting-room. As he did so Hermione came to the door of the bedroom. Her dripping skirts clung about her. She looked quite calm. Without greeting the doctor she said, quietly:

"You heard what Gaspare said?"

"Si, signora, ma—"

The doctor stopped, staring at her. He began to feel almost dazed. The fishermen had followed him and stood crowding together on the steps and staring into the room.

"He is dead. I am sorry you came all this way."

They stood there facing one another. From the kitchen came the sound of Lucrezia's cries. Hermione put her hands up to her ears.

"Please—please—oh, there should be a little silence here now!" she said.

For the first time there was a sound of something like despair in her voice.

"Let me come in, signora!" stammered the doctor. "Let me come in and examine him."

"He is dead."

"Well, but let me. I must!"

"Please come in," she said.

The doctor turned round to the fishermen.

"Go, one of you, and make that girl keep quiet," he said, angrily. "Take her away out of the house—directly! Do you hear? And the rest of you stay outside, and don't make a sound."

The fishermen slunk a little way back into the darkness, while Giuseppe, walking on the toes of his bare feet, and glancing nervously at the furniture and the pictures upon the walls, crossed the room and disappeared into the kitchen. Then the doctor laid down his cigar on a table and went into the bedroom whither Hermione had preceded him.

There was a lighted candle on the white chest of drawers. The window and the shutters of the room were closed against the glances of the fishermen. On one of the two beds—Hermione's—lay the body of a man dripping with water. The doctor took the candle in his hand, went to this bed and leaned down, then set down the candle at the bedhead and made a brief examination. He found at once that Gaspare had spoken the truth. This man had been dead for some time. Nevertheless, something—he scarcely knew what—kept the doctor there by the bed for some moments before he pronounced his verdict. Never before had he felt so great a reluctance to speak the simple words that would convey a great truth. He fingered his shirt-front uneasily, and stared at the body on the bed and at the wet sheets and pillows. Meanwhile, Hermione had sat down on a chair near the door that opened into what had been Maurice's dressing-room, and folded her hands in her lap. The doctor did not look towards her, but he felt her presence painfully. Lucrezia's cries had died away, and there was complete silence for a brief space of time.

The body on the bed was swollen, but not very much, the face was sodden, the hair plastered to the head, and on the left temple there was a large wound, evidently, as the doctor had seen, caused by the forehead striking violently against a hard, resisting substance. It was not the sea alone which had killed this man. It was the sea and the rock in the sea. He had fallen, been stunned and then drowned. The doctor knew the place where he had been found. The explanation of the tragedy was very simple—very simple.

While the doctor was thinking this, and fingering his shirt-front mechanically, and bracing himself to turn towards the quiet woman in the chair, he heard a loud, dry noise in the sitting-room, then in the bedroom. Gaspare had come in, and was standing at the foot of the bed, sobbing and staring at the doctor with hopeless eyes, that yet asked a last question, begged desperately for a lie.

"Gaspare!"

The woman in the chair whispered to him. He took no notice.

"Gaspare!"

She got up and crossed over to the boy, and took one of his hands.

"It's no use," she said. "Perhaps he is happy."

Then the boy began to cry passionately. Tears poured out of his eyes while he held his padrona's hand. The doctor got up.

"He is dead, signora," he said.

"We knew it," Hermione replied.

She looked at the doctor for a minute. Then she said:

"Hush, Gaspare!"

The doctor stood by the bed.

"Scusi, signora," he said, "but—but will you take him into the next room?"

He pointed to Gaspare, who shivered as he wept.

"I must make a further examination."

"Why? You see that he is dead."

"Yes, but—there are certain formalities."

He stopped.

"Formalities!" she said. "He is dead."

"Yes. But—but the authorities will have to be informed. I am very sorry. I should wish to leave everything undisturbed."

"What do you mean? Gaspare! Gaspare!"

"But—according to the law, our law, the body should never have been moved. It should have been left where it was found until—"

"We could not leave him in the sea."

She still spoke quite quietly, but the doctor felt as if he could not go on.

"Since it is done—" he began.

He pulled himself together with an effort.

"There will have to be an inquiry, signora—the cause of death will have to be ascertained."

"You see it. He was coming from the island. He fell and was drowned. It is very simple."

"Yes, no doubt. Still, there must be an inquiry. Gaspare will have to explain—"

He looked at the weeping boy, then at the woman who stood there holding the boy's hand in hers.

"But that will be for to-morrow," he muttered, fingering his shirt-front and looking down. "That will be for to-morrow."

As he went out he added:

"Signora, do not remain in your wet clothes."

"I—oh, thank you. They do not matter."

She did not follow him into the next room. As he went down the steps to the terrace the sound of Gaspare's passionate weeping followed him into the night.

When the doctor was on the donkey and was riding out through the arch, after a brief colloquy with the fishermen and with Giuseppe, whom he had told to remain at the cottage for the rest of the night, he suddenly remembered the cigar which he had left upon the table, and he pulled up.

"What is it, Signor Dottore?" said one of the fishermen.

"I've left something, but—never mind. It does not matter."

He rode on again.

"It does not matter," he repeated.

He was thinking of the English signora standing beside the bed in her wet skirts and holding the hand of the weeping boy.

It was the first time in his life that he had ever sacrificed a good cigar.

He wondered why he did so now, but he did not care to return just then to the Casa del Prete.

CHAPTER XXIII

Hermione longed for quiet, for absolute silence.

It seemed strange to her that she still longed for anything—strange and almost horrible, almost inhuman. But she did long for that, to be able to sit beside her dead husband and to be undisturbed, to hear no voice speaking, no human movement, to see no one. If it had been possible she would have closed the cottage against every one, even against Gaspare and Lucrezia. But it was not possible. Destiny did not choose that she should have this calm, this silence. It had seemed to her, when fear first came upon her, as if no one but herself had any real concern with Maurice, as if her love conferred upon her a monopoly. This monopoly had been one of joy. Now it should be one of sorrow. But now it did not exist. She was not weeping for Maurice. But others were. She had no one to go to. But others came to her, clung to her. She could not rid herself of the human burden.

She might have been selfish, determined, she might have driven the mourners out. But—and that was strange, too—she found herself pitying them, trying to use her intellect to soothe them.

Lucrezia was terrified, almost like one assailed suddenly by robbers, terrified and half incredulous. When her hysteria subsided she was at first unbelieving.

"He cannot be really dead, signora!" she sobbed to Hermione. "The povero signorino. He was so gay! He was so—"

She talked and talked, as Sicilians do when face to face with tragedy.

She recalled Maurice's characteristics, his kindness, his love of climbing, fishing, bathing, his love of the sun—all his love of life.

Hermione had to listen to the story with that body lying on her bed.

Gaspare's grief was speechless, but needed comfort more. There was an element in it of fury which Hermione realized without rightly understanding. She supposed it was the fury of a boy from whom something is taken by one whom he cannot attack.

For God is beyond our reach.

She could not understand the conflict going on in the boy's heart and mind.

He knew that this death was probably no natural death, but a murder.

Neither Maddalena nor her father had been in the Casa delle Sirene when he knocked upon the door in the night. Salvatore had sent Maddalena to spend the night with relations in Marechiaro, on the pretext that he was going to sail to Messina on some business. And he had actually sailed before Gaspare's arrival on the island. But Gaspare knew that there had been a meeting, and he knew what the Sicilian is when he is wronged. The words "vengeance is mine!" are taken in Sicily by each wronged man into his own mouth, and Salvatore was notoriously savage and passionate.

As the first shock of horror and despair passed away from Gaspare he was devoured, as by teeth, devoured by the desire to spring upon Salvatore and revenge the death of his padrone. But the padrone had laid a solemn injunction upon him. Solemn, indeed, it seemed to the boy now that the lips which had spoken were sealed forever. The padrona was never to know. If he obeyed his impulse, if he declared the vendetta against Salvatore, the padrona would know. The knife that spilled the murderer's blood would give the secret to the world—and to the padrona.

Tremendous that night was the conflict in the boy's soul. He would not leave Hermione. He was like the dog that creeps to lie at the feet of his sorrowing mistress. But he was more than that. For he had his own sorrow and his own fury. And he had the battle with his own instincts.

What was he going to do?

As he began to think, really to think, and to realize things, he knew that after such a death the authorities of Marechiaro, the Pretore and the Cancelliere, would proceed to hold a careful examination into the causes of death. He would be questioned. That was certain. The opportunity would be given him to denounce Salvatore.

And was he to keep silence? Was he to act for Salvatore, to save Salvatore from justice? He would not have minded doing that, he would have wished to do it, if afterwards he could have sprung upon Salvatore and buried his knife in the murderer of his padrone.

But—the padrona? She was not to know. She was never to know. And she had been the first in his life. She had found him, a poor, ragged little boy working among the vines, and she had given him new clothes and had taken him into her home and into her confidence. She had trusted him. She had remembered him in England. She had written to him from far away, telling him to prepare everything for her and the padrone when they were coming.

He began to sob violently again, thinking of it all, of how he had ordered the donkeys to fetch the luggage from the station, of how—

"Hush, Gaspare!"

Hermione again put her hand on his. She was sitting near the bed on which the body was lying between dry sheets. For she had changed them with Gaspare's assistance. Maurice still wore the clothes which had been on him in the sea. Giuseppe, the fisherman, had explained to Hermione that she must not interfere with the body till it had been visited by the authorities, and she had obeyed him. But she had changed the sheets. She scarcely knew why. Now the clothes had almost dried on the body, and she did not see any more the stains of water. One sheet was drawn up over the body, to the chin. The matted dark hair was visible against the pillow, and had made her think several times vaguely of that day after the fishing when she had watched Maurice taking his siesta. She had longed for him to wake then, for she had known that she was going to Africa, that they had only a few hours together before she started. It had seemed almost terrible to her, his sleeping through any of those hours. And now he was sleeping forever. She was sitting there waiting for nothing, but she could not realize that yet. She felt as if she must be waiting for something, that something must presently occur, a movement in the bed, a—she scarcely knew what.

Presently the clock Gaspare had brought from the fair chimed, then played the "Tre Colori." Lucrezia had set it to play that evening when she was waiting for the padrone to return from the sea.

When he heard the tinkling tune Gaspare lifted his head and listened till it was over. It recalled to him all the glories of the fair. He saw his padrone before him. He remembered how he had decorated Maurice with flowers, and he felt as if his heart would break.

"The povero signorino! the povero signorino!" he cried, in a choked voice. "And I put roses above his ears! Si, signora, I did! I said he should be a real Siciliano!"

He began to rock himself to and fro. His whole body shook, and his face had a frantic expression that suggested violence.

"I put roses above his ears!" he repeated. "That day he was a real Siciliano!"

"Gaspare—Gaspare—hush! Don't! Don't!"

She held his hand and went on speaking softly.

"We must be quiet in here. We must remember to be quiet. It isn't our fault, Gaspare. We did all we could to make him happy. We ought to be glad of that. You did everything you could, and he loved you for it. He was happy with us. I think he was. I think he was happy till the very end. And that is something to be glad of. Don't you think he was very happy here?"

"Si, signora!" the boy whispered, with twitching lips.

"I'm glad I came back in time," Hermione said, looking at the dark hair on the pillow. "It might have happened before, while I was away. I'm glad we had one more day together."

Suddenly, as she said that, something in the mere sound of the words seemed to reveal more clearly to her heart what had befallen her, and for the first time she began to cry and to remember. She remembered all Maurice's tenderness for her, all his little acts of kindness. They seemed to pass rapidly in procession through her mind on their way to her heart. Not one surely was absent. How kind to her he had always been! And he could never be kind to her again. And she could never be kind to him—never again.

Her tears went on falling quietly. She did not sob like Gaspare. But she felt that now she had begun to cry she would never be able to stop again; that she would go on crying till she, too, died.

Gaspare looked up at her.

"Signora!" he said. "Signora!"

Suddenly he got up, as if to go out of the room, out of the house. The sight of his padrona's tears had driven him nearly mad with the desire to wreak vengeance upon Salvatore. For a moment his body seemed to get beyond his control. His eyes saw blood, and his hand darted down to his belt, and caught at the knife that was there, and drew it out. When Hermione saw the knife she thought the boy was going to kill himself with it. She sprang up, went swiftly to Gaspare, and put her hand on it over his hand.

"Gaspare, what are you doing?" she said.

For a moment his face was horrible in its savagery. He opened his mouth, still keeping his grasp on the knife, which she tried to wrest from him.

"Lasci andare! Lasci andare!" he said, beginning to struggle with her.

"No, Gaspare."

"Allora—"

He paused with his mouth open.

At that moment he was on the very verge of a revelation of the truth. He was on the point of telling Hermione that he was sure that the padrone had been murdered, and that he meant to avenge the murder. Hermione believed that for the moment he was mad, and was determined to destroy himself in her presence. It was useless to pit her strength against his. In a physical struggle she must be overcome. Her only chance was to subdue him by other means.

"Gaspare," she said, quickly, breathlessly, pointing to the bed. "Don't you think the padrone would have wished you to take care of me now? He trusted you. I think he would. I think he would rather you were with me than any one else in the whole world. You must take care of me. You must take care of me. You must never leave me!"

The boy looked at her. His face changed, grew softer.

"I've got nobody now," she added. "Nobody but you."

The knife fell on the floor.

In that moment Gaspare's resolve was taken. The battle within him was over. He must protect the padrona. The padrone would have wished it. Then he must let Salvatore go.

He bent down and kissed Hermione's hand.

"Lei non piange!" he muttered. "Forse Dio la aiuterà."

In the morning, early, Hermione left the body for the first time, went into the dressing-room, changed her clothes, then came back and said to Gaspare:

"I am going a little way up the mountain, Gaspare. I shall not be long. No, don't come with me. Stay with him. Are you dreadfully tired?"

"No, signora."

"We shall be able to rest presently," she said.

She was thinking of the time when they would take Maurice from her. She left Gaspare sitting near the bed, and went out onto the terrace. Lucrezia and Gaspare, both thoroughly tired out, were sleeping soundly. She was thankful for that. Soon, she knew, she would have to be with people, to talk, to make arrangements. But now she had a short spell of solitude.

She went slowly up the mountain-side till she was near the top. Then she sat down on a rock and looked out towards the sea.

The world was not awake yet, although the sun was coming. Etna was like a great phantom, the waters at its foot were pale in their tranquillity. The air was fresh, but there was no wind to rustle the leaves of the oak-trees, upon whose crested heads Hermione gazed down with quiet, tearless eyes.

She had a strange feeling of being out of the world, as if she had left it, but still had the power to see it. She wondered if Maurice felt like that.

He had said it would be good to lie beneath those oak-trees in sight of Etna and the sea. How she wished that she could lay his body there, alone, away from all other dead. But that was impossible, she supposed. She remembered the doctor's words. What were they going to do? She did not know anything about Italian procedure in such an event. Would they take him away? She had no intention of trying to resist anything, of offering any opposition. It would be useless, and besides he had gone away. Already he was far off. She did not feel, as many women do, that so long as they are with the body of their dead they are also with the soul. She would like to keep the dear body, to have it always near to her, to live close to the spot where it was committed to the earth. But Maurice was gone. Her Mercury had winged his way from her, obedient to a summons that she had not heard. Always she had thought of him as swift, and swiftly, without warning, he had left her. He had died young. Was that wonderful? She thought not. No; age could have nothing to say to him, could hold no commerce with him. He had been born to be young and never to be anything else. It seemed to her now strange that she had not felt this, foreseen that it must be so. And yet, only yesterday, she had imagined a far future, and their child laying them in the ground of Sicily, side by side, and murmuring "Buon riposo" above their mutual sleep.

Their child! A life had been taken from her. Soon a life would be given to her. Was that what is called compensation? Perhaps so. Many strange thoughts, come she could not tell why, were passing through her mind as she sat upon this height in the dawn. The thought of compensation recalled to her the Book of Job. Everything was taken from Job; not only his flocks and his herds, but his sons and his daughters. And then at the last he was compensated. He was given new flocks and herds and new sons and daughters. And it was supposed to be well with Job. If it was well with Job, then Job had been a man without a heart.

Never could she be compensated for this loss, which she was trying to realize, but which she would not be able to realize until the days went by, and the nights, the days and the nights of the ordinary life, when tragedy was supposed to be over and done with, and people would say, and no doubt sincerely believe, that she was "getting accustomed" to her loss.

Thinking of Job led her on to think of God's dealings with His creatures.

Hermione was a woman who clung to no special religion, but she had always, all her life, had a very strong personal consciousness of a directing Power in the world, had always had an innate conviction that this directing Power followed with deep interest the life of each individual in the scheme of His creation. She had always felt, she felt now, that God knew everything about her and her life, was aware of all her feelings, was constantly intent upon her.

He was intent. But was He kindly or was He cruelly intent?

Surely He had been dreadfully cruel to her!

Only yesterday she had been wondering what bereaved women felt about God. Now she was one of these women.

"Was Maurice dead?" she thought—"was he already dead when I was praying before the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"

She longed to know. Yet she scarcely knew why she longed. It was like a strange, almost unnatural curiosity which she could not at first explain to herself. But presently her mind grew clearer and she connected this question with that other question—of God and what He really was, what He really felt towards His creatures, towards her.

Had God allowed her to pray like that, with all her heart and soul, and then immediately afterwards deliberately delivered her over to the fate of desolate women, or had Maurice been already dead? If that were so, and it must surely have been so, for when she prayed it was already night, she had been led to pray for herself ignorantly, and God had taken away her joy before He had heard her prayer. If He had heard it first He surely could not have dealt so cruelly with her—so cruelly! No human being could have, she thought, even the most hard-hearted.

But perhaps God was not all-powerful.

She remembered that once in London she had asked a clever and good clergyman if, looking around upon the state of things in the world, he was able to believe without difficulty that the world was governed by an all-wise, all-powerful, and all-merciful God. And his reply to her had been, "I sometimes wonder whether God is all-powerful—yet." She had not pursued the subject, but she had not forgotten this answer; and she thought of it now.

Was there a conflict in the regions beyond the world which was the only one she knew? Had an enemy done this thing, an enemy not only of hers, but of God's, an enemy who had power over God?

That thought was almost more terrible than the thought that God had been cruel to her.

She sat for a long time wondering, thinking, but not praying. She did not feel as if she could ever pray any more. The world was lighted up by the sun. The sea began to gleam, the coast-line to grow more distinct, the outlines of the mountains and of the Saracenic Castle on the height opposite to her more hard and more barbaric against the deepening blue. She saw smoke coming from the mouth of Etna, sideways, as if blown towards the sea. A shepherd boy piped somewhere below her. And still the tune was the tarantella. She listened to it—the tarantella. So short a time ago Maurice had danced with the boys upon the terrace! How can such life be so easily extinguished? How can such joy be not merely clouded but utterly destroyed? A moment, and from the body everything is expelled; light from the eyes, speech from the lips, movement from the limbs, joy, passion from the heart. How can such a thing be?

The little shepherd boy played on and on. He was nearer now. He was ascending the slope of the mountain, coming up towards heaven with his little happy tune. She heard him presently among the oak-trees immediately below her, passing almost at her feet.

To Hermione the thin sound of the reed-flute always had suggested Arcady. Even now it suggested Arcady—the Arcady of the imagination: wide soft airs, blue skies and seas, eternal sunshine and delicious shade, and happiness where is a sweet noise of waters and of birds, a sweet and deep breathing of kind and bounteous nature.

And that little boy with the flute would die. His foot might slip now as he came upward, and no more could he play souls into Arcady!

The tune wound away to her left, like a gay and careless living thing that was travelling ever upward, then once more came towards her. But now it was above her. She turned her head and she saw the little player against the blue. He was on a rock, and for a moment he stood still. On his head was a long woollen cap, hanging over at one side. It made Hermione think of the woollen cap she had seen come out of the darkness of the ravine as she waited with Gaspare for the padrone. Against the blue, standing on the gray and sunlit rock, with the flute at his lips, and his tiny, deep-brown fingers moving swiftly, he looked at one with the mountain and yet almost unearthly, almost as if the blue had given birth to him for a moment, and in a moment would draw him back again into the womb of its wonder. His goats were all around him, treading delicately among the rocks. As Hermione watched he turned and went away into the blue, and the tarantella went away into the blue with him.

Her Sicilian and his tarantella, the tarantella of his joy in Sicily—they had gone away into the blue.

She looked at it, deep, quivering, passionate, intense; thousands and thousands of miles of blue! And she listened as she looked; listened for some far-off tarantella, for some echo of a fainting tarantella, that might be a message to her, a message left on the sweet air of the enchanted island, telling her where the winged feet of her beloved one mounted towards the sun.

CHAPTER XXIV

Giuseppe came to fetch Hermione from the mountain. He had a note in his hand and also a message to give. The authorities were already at the cottage; the Pretore of Marechiaro with his Cancelliere, Dr. Marini and the Maresciallo of the Carabinieri.

"They have come already?" Hermione said. "So soon?"

She took the note. It was from Artois.

"There is a boy waiting, signora," said Giuseppe. "Gaspare is with the Signor Pretore."

She opened Emile's note.

"I cannot write anything except this—do you wish me to come?—E."

"Do I wish him to come?" she thought.

She repeated the words mentally several times, while the fisherman stood by her, staring at her with sympathy. Then she went down to the cottage.

Dr. Marini met her on the terrace. He looked embarrassed. He was expecting a terrible scene.

"Signora," he said, "I am very sorry, but—but I am obliged to perform my duty."

"Yes," she said. "Of course. What is it?"

"As there is a hospital in Marechiaro—"

He stopped.

"Yes?" she said.

"The autopsy of the body must take place there. Otherwise I could have—"

"You have come to take him away," she said. "I understand. Very well."

But they could not take him away, these people. For he was gone; he had gone away into the blue.

The doctor looked relieved, though surprised, at her apparent nonchalance.

"I am very sorry, signora," he said—"very sorry."

"Must I see the Pretore?" she said.

"I am afraid so, signora. They will want to ask you a few questions. The body ought not to have been moved from the place where—"

"We could not leave him in the sea," she said, as she had said in the night.

"No, no. You will only just have to say—"

"I will tell them what I know. He went down to bathe."

"Yes. But the Pretore will want to know why he went to Salvatore's terreno."

"I suppose he bathed from there. He knew the people in the Casa delle Sirene, I believe."

She spoke indifferently. It seemed to her so utterly useless, this inquiry by strangers into the cause of her sorrow.

"I must just write something," she added.

She went up the steps into the sitting-room. Gaspare was there with three men—the Pretore, the Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. As she came in the strangers turned and saluted her with grave politeness, all looking earnestly at her with their dark eyes. But Gaspare did not look at her. He had the ugly expression on his face that Hermione had noticed the day before.

"Will you please allow me to write a line to a friend?" Hermione said. "Then I shall be ready to answer your questions."

"Certainly, signora," said the Pretore; "we are very sorry to disturb you, but it is our duty."

He had gray hair and a dark mustache, and his black eyes looked as if they had been varnished.

Hermione went to the writing-table, while the men stood in silence filling up the little room.

"What shall I say?" she thought.

She heard the boots of the Cancelliere creak as he shifted his feet upon the floor. The Maresciallo cleared his throat. There was a moment of hesitation. Then he went to the steps and spat upon the terrace.

"Don't come yet," she wrote, slowly.

Then she turned round.

"How long will your inquiry take, do you think, signore?" she asked of the Pretore. "When will—when can the funeral take place?"

"Signora, I trust to-morrow. I hope—I do not suppose there will be any reason to suspect, after what Dr. Marini has told us and we have seen, that the death was anything but an accident—an accident which we all most deeply grieve for."

"It was an accident."

She stood by the table with the pen in her hand.

"I suppose—I suppose he must be buried in the Campo Santo?" she said.

"Do you wish to convey the body to England, signora?"

"Oh no. He loved Sicily. He wished to stay always here, I think, although—"

She broke off.

"I could never take him away from Sicily. But there is a place here—under the oak-trees. He was very fond of it."

Gaspare began to sob, then controlled himself with a desperate effort, turned round and stood with his face to the wall.

"I suppose, if I could buy a piece of land there, it could not be permitted—?"

She looked at the Pretore.

"I am very sorry, signora, such a thing could not possibly be allowed. If the body is buried here it must be in the Campo Santo."

"Thank you."

She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come yet":

"They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village. I shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow. They tell me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I should have liked him to lie here under the oak-trees."

"Hermione."

When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.

No event in his life had shocked him so much as the death of Delarey.

It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And yet his intellect could hardly accept it as a fact. When, early that morning, one of the servants of the Hôtel Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell him, he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the fishermen, and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been obliged to believe. His natural impulse was to go to his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in his. But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers was of the affections, and how far greater than his had ever been! He could not bear to think of it. A great and generous indignation seized him, an indignation against the catastrophes of life. That this should be Hermione's reward for her noble unselfishness roused in him something that was like fury; and then there followed a more torturing fury against himself.

He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous irony, and he sent the line in pencil which she had received. And then he walked up and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself, hating himself.

In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friendship with Hermione he realized that he had always been selfish, always the egoist claiming rather than the generous donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire to be eased of some of their weight. He had always been calling upon her for sympathy, and she had always been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth of her great heart.

And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden time that had been stored up for her by the decree of the Gods, of God, of Fate, of—whatever it was that ruled, that gave and that deprived.

A bitterness of shame gripped him. He felt like a criminal. He said to himself that the selfish man is a criminal.

"She will hate me," he said to himself. "She must. She can't help it."

Again the egoist was awake and speaking within him. He realized that immediately and felt almost a fear of this persistence of character. What is the use of cleverness, of clear sight into others, even of genius, when the self of a man declines to change, declines to be what is not despicable?

"Mon Dieu!" he thought, passionately. "And even now I must be thinking of my cursed self!"

He was beset by an intensity of desire to do something for Hermione. For once in his life his heart, the heart she believed in and he was inclined to doubt or to despise, drove him as it might have driven a boy, even such a one as Maurice. It seemed to him that unless he could do something to make atonement he could never be with Hermione again, could never bear to be with her again. But what could he do?

"At least," he thought, "I may be able to spare her something to-day. I may be able to arrange with these people about the funeral, about all the practical things that are so frightful a burden to the living who have loved the dead, in the last moments before the dead are given to the custody of the earth."

And then he thought of the inquiry, of the autopsy. Could he not help her, spare her perhaps, in connection with them?

Despite his weakness of body he felt feverishly active, feverishly desirous to be of practical use. If he could do something he would think less, too; and there were thoughts which seemed furtively trying to press themselves forward in the chambers of his mind, but which, as yet, he was, also furtively, pushing back, striving to keep in the dark place from which they desired to emerge.

Artois knew Sicily well, and he knew that such a death as this would demand an inquiry, might raise suspicions in the minds of the authorities of Marechiaro. And in his own mind?

He was a mentally courageous man, but he longed now to leave Marechiaro, to leave Sicily at once, carrying Hermione with him. A great dread was not actually with him, but was very near to him.

Presently something, he did not know what, drew him to the window of his bedroom which looked out towards the main street of the village. As he came to it he heard a dull murmur of voices, and saw the Sicilians crowding to their doors and windows, and coming out upon their balconies.

The body of Maurice was being borne to the hospital which was at the far end of the town. As soon as he realized that, Artois closed his window. He could not look with the curious on that procession. He went back into his sitting-room, which faced the sea. But he felt the procession going past, and was enveloped in the black wonder of death.

That he should be alive and Delarey dead! How extraordinary that was! For he had been close to death, so close that it would have seemed quite natural to him to die. Had not Hermione come to him, he thought, he would almost, at the crucial stage in his illness, have preferred to die. It would have been a far easier, far simpler act than the return to health and his former powers. And now he stood here alive, looking at the sea, and Delarey's dead body was being carried to the hospital.

Was the fact that he was alive the cause of the fact that Delarey was dead? Abruptly one of those furtive thoughts had leaped forward out of its dark place and challenged him boldly, even with a horrible brutality. Too late now to try to force it back. It must be faced, be dealt with.

Again, and much more strongly than on the previous day, Artois felt that in Hermione's absence the Sicilian life of the dead man had not run smoothly, that there had been some episode of which she knew nothing, that he, Artois, had been right in his suspicions at the cottage. Delarey had been in fear of something, had been on the watch. When he had sat by the wall he had been tortured by some tremendous anxiety.

He had gone down to the sea to bathe. That was natural enough. And he had been found dead under a precipice of rock in the sea. The place was a dangerous one, they said. A man might easily fall from the rock in the night. Yes; but why should he be there?

That thought now recurred again and again to the mind of Artois. Why had Delarey been at the place where he had met his death? The authorities of Marechiaro were going to inquire into that, were probably down at the sea now. Suppose there had been some tragic episode? Suppose they should find out what it was?

He saw Hermione in the midst of her grief the central figure of some dreadful scandal, and his heart sickened.

But then he told himself that perhaps he was being led by his imagination. He had thought that possible yesterday. To-day, after what had occurred, he thought it less likely. This sudden death seemed to tell him that his mind had been walking in the right track. Left alone in Sicily, Delarey might have run wild. He might have gone too far. This death might be a vengeance.

Artois was deeply interested in all human happenings, but he was not a vulgarly curious man. He was not curious now, he was only afraid for Hermione. He longed to protect her from any further grief. If there were a dreadful truth to know, and if, by knowing it, he could guard her more efficiently, he wished to know it. But his instinct was to get her away from Sicily at once, directly the funeral was over and the necessary arrangements could be made. For himself, he would rather go in ignorance. He did not wish to add to the heavy burden of his remorse.

There came at this moment a knock at his door.

"Avanti!" he said.

The waiter of the hotel came in.

"Signore," he said. "The poor signora is here."

"In the hotel?"

"Si, signore. They have taken the body of the signore to the hospital. Everybody was in the street to see it pass. And now the poor signora has come here. She has taken the rooms above you on the little terrace."

"The signora is going to stay here?"

"Si, signore. They say, if the Signor Pretore allows after the inquiry is over, the funeral will be to-morrow."

Artois looked at the man closely. He was a young fellow, handsome and gentler-looking than are most Sicilians. Artois wondered what the people of Marechiaro were saying. He knew how they must be gossiping on such an occasion. And then it was summer, when they have little or nothing to do, no forestieri to divide their attentions and to call their ever-ready suspicions in various directions. The minds of the whole community must undoubtedly be fixed upon this tragic episode and its cause.

"If the Pretore allows?" Artois said. "But surely there can be no difficulty? The poor signore fell from the rock and was drowned."

"Si, signore."

The man stood there. Evidently he was anxious to talk.

"The Signor Pretore has gone down to the place now, signore, with the Cancelliere and the Maresciallo. They have taken Gaspare with them."

"Gaspare!"

Artois thought of this boy, Maurice's companion during Hermione's absence.

"Si, signore. Gaspare has to show them the exact place where he found the poor signore."

"I suppose the inquiry will soon be over?"

"Chi lo sa?"

"Well, but what is there to do? Whom can they inquire of? It was a lonely place, wasn't it? No one was there."

"Chi lo sa?"

"If there had been any one, surely the signore would have been rescued at once? Did not every one here love the signore? He was like one of you, wasn't he, one of the Sicilians?"

"Si, signore. Maddalena has been crying about the signore."

"Maddalena?"

"Si, signore, the daughter of Salvatore, the fisherman, who lives at the Casa delle Sirene."

"Oh!"

Artois paused; then he said:

"Were she and her—Salvatore is her father, you say?"

"Her father, signore."

"Were they at the Casa delle Sirene yesterday?"

Artois spoke quietly, almost carelessly, as if merely to say something, but without special intention.

"Maddalena was here in the town with her relations. And they say Salvatore is at Messina. This morning Maddalena went home. She was crying. Every one saw her crying for the signore."

"That is very natural if she knew him."

"Oh yes, signore, she knew him. Why, they were all at the fair of San Felice together only the day before."

"Then, of course, she would cry."

"Si, signore."

The man put his hand on the door.

"If the signora wishes to see me at any time I am here," said Artois. "But, of course, I shall not disturb her. But if I can do anything to help her—about the funeral, for instance—"

"The signora is giving all the directions now. The poor signore is to be buried in the high part of the Campo Santo by the wall. Those who are not Catholics are buried there, and the poor signore was not a Catholic. What a pity!"

"Thank you, Ferdinando."

The man went out slowly, as if he were reluctant to stop the conversation.

So the villagers were beginning to gossip already! Ferdinando had not said so, but Artois knew his Sicily well enough to read the silences that had made significant his words. Maddalena had been crying for the signore. Everybody had seen Maddalena crying for the signore. That was enough. By this time the village would be in a ferment, every woman at her door talking it over with her next-door neighbor, every man in the Piazza, or in one of the wine-shops.

Maddalena—a Sicilian girl—weeping, and Delarey's body found among the rocks at night in a lonely place close to her cottage. Artois divined something of the truth and hated himself the more. The blood, the Sicilian blood in Delarey, had called to him in the sunshine when he was left alone, and he had, no doubt, obeyed the call. How far had he gone? How strongly had he been governed? Probably Artois would never know. Long ago he had prophesied, vaguely perhaps, still he had prophesied. And now had he not engineered perhaps the fulfilment of his own prophecy?

But at all costs Hermione must be spared any knowledge of that fulfilment.

He longed to go to her and to guard her door against the Sicilians. But surely in such a moment they would not speak to her of any suspicions, of any certainties, even if they had them. She would surely be the last person to hear anything, unless—he thought of the "authorities"—of the Pretore, the Cancelliere, the Maresciallo, and suddenly it occurred to him to ride down to the sea. If the inquiry had yielded any terrible result he might do something to protect Hermione. If not, he might be able to prepare her. She must not receive any coarse shock from these strangers in the midst of her agony.

He got his hat, opened his door, and went quietly down-stairs. He did not wish to see Hermione before he went. Perhaps he would return with his mind relieved of its heaviest burden, and then at least he could meet her eyes without a furtive guilt in his.

At the foot of the stairs he met Ferdinando.

"Can you get me a donkey, Ferdinando?" he said.

"Si, signore."

"I don't want a boy. Just get me a donkey, and I shall go for a short ride. You say the signora has not asked for me?"

"No, signore."

"If she does, explain to her that I have gone out, as I did not like to disturb her."

Hermione might think him heartless to go out riding at such a time. He would risk that. He would risk anything to spare her the last, the nameless agony that would be hers if what he suspected were true, and she were to learn of it, to know that all these people round her knew it.

That Hermione should be outraged, that the sacredness of her despair should be profaned, and the holiness of her memories utterly polluted—Artois felt he would give his life willingly to prevent that.

When the donkey came he set off at once. He had drawn his broad-brimmed hat down low over his pale face, and he looked neither to right nor left, as he was carried down the long and narrow street, followed by the searching glances of the inhabitants, who, as he had surmised, were all out, engaged in eager conversation, and anxiously waiting for the return of the Pretore and his assistants, and the announcement of the result of the autopsy. His appearance gave them a fresh topic to discuss. They fell upon it like starveling dogs on a piece of offal found in the gutter.

Once out of the village, Artois felt a little safer, a little easier; but he longed to be in the train with Hermione, carrying her far from the chance of that most cruel fate in life—the fate of disillusion, of the loss of holy belief in the truth of one beloved.

When presently he reached the high-road by Isola Bella he encountered the fisherman, Giuseppe, who had spent the night at the Casa del Prete.

"Are you going to see the place where the poor signore was found, signore?" asked the man.

"Si," said Artois. "I was his friend. I wish to see the Pretore, to hear how it happened. Can I? Are they there, he and the others?"

"They are in the Casa delle Sirene, signore. They are waiting to see if Salvatore comes back this morning from Messina."

"And his daughter? Is she there?"

"Si, signore. But she knows nothing. She was in the village. She can only cry. She is crying for the poor signore."

Again that statement. It was becoming a refrain in the ears of Artois.

"Gaspare is angry with her," added the fisherman. "I believe he would like to kill her."

"It makes him sad to see her crying, perhaps," said Artois. "Gaspare loved the signore."

He saluted the fisherman and rode on. But the man followed and kept by his side.

"I will take you across in a boat, signore," he said.

"Grazie."

Artois struck the donkey and made it trot on in the dust.

Giuseppe rowed him across the inlet and to the far side of the Sirens' Isle, from which the little path wound upward to the cottage. Here, among the rocks, a boat was moored.

"Ecco, signore!" cried Giuseppe. "Salvatore has come back from Messina! Here is his boat!"

Artois felt a pang of anxiety, of regret. He wished he had been there before the fisherman had returned. As he got out of the boat he said:

"Did Salvatore know the signore well?"

"Si, signore. The poor signore used to go out fishing with Salvatore. They say in the village that he gave Salvatore much money."

"The signore was generous to every one."

"Si, signore. But he did not give donkeys to every one."

"Donkeys? What do you mean, Giuseppe?"

"He gave Salvatore a donkey, a fine donkey. He bought it at the fair of San Felice."

Artois said no more. Slowly, for he was still very weak, and the heat was becoming fierce as the morning wore on, he walked up the steep path and came to the plateau before the Casa delle Sirene.

A group of people stood there: the Pretore, the Cancelliere, the Maresciallo, Gaspare, and Salvatore. They seemed to be in strong conversation, but directly Artois appeared there was a silence, and they all turned and stared at him as if in wonder. Then Gaspare came forward and took off his hat.

The boy looked haggard with grief, and angry and obstinate, desperately obstinate.

"Signore," he said. "You know my padrone! Tell them—"

But the Pretore interrupted him with an air of importance.

"It is my duty to make an inquiry," he said. "Who is this signore?"

Artois explained that he was an intimate friend of the signora and had known her husband before his marriage.

"I have come to hear if you are satisfied, as no doubt you are, Signor Pretore," he said, "that this terrible death was caused by an accident. The poor signora naturally wishes that this necessary business should be finished as soon as possible. It is unavoidable, I know, but it can only add to her unhappiness. I am sure, signore, that you will do your best to conclude the inquiry without delay. Forgive me for saying this. But I know Sicily, and know that I can always rely on the chivalry of Sicilian gentlemen where an unhappy lady is concerned."

He spoke intentionally with a certain pomp, and held his hat in his hand while he was speaking.

The Pretore looked pleased and flattered.

"Certainly, Signor Barone," he said. "Certainly. We all grieve for the poor signora."

"You will allow me to stay?" said Artois.

"I see no objection," said the Pretore.

He glanced at the Cancelliere, a small, pale man, with restless eyes and a pointed chin that looked like a weapon.

"Niente, niente!" said the Cancelliere, obsequiously.

He was reading Artois with intense sharpness. The Maresciallo, a broad, heavily built man, with an enormous mustache, uttered a deep "Buon giorno, Signor Barone," and stood calmly staring. He looked like a magnificent bull, with his short, strong brown neck, and low-growing hair that seemed to have been freshly crimped. Gaspare stood close to Artois, as if he felt that they were allies and must keep together. Salvatore was a few paces off.

Artois glanced at him now with a carefully concealed curiosity. Instantly the fisherman said:

"Povero signorino! Povero signorino! Mamma mia! and only two days ago we were all at the fair together! And he was so generous, Signor Barone." He moved a little nearer, but Artois saw him glance swiftly at Gaspare, like a man fearful of violence and ready to repel it. "He paid for everything. We could all keep our soldi in our pockets. And he gave Maddalena a beautiful blue dress, and he gave me a donkey. Dio mio! We have lost a benefactor. If the poor signorino had lived he would have given me a new boat. He had promised me a boat. For he would come fishing with me nearly every day. He was like a compare—"

Salvatore stopped abruptly. His eyes were again on Gaspare.

"And you say," began the Pretore, with a certain heavy pomposity, "that you did not see the signore at all yesterday?"

"No, signore. I suppose he came down after I had started for Messina."

"What did you go to Messina for?"

"Signore, I went to see my nephew, Guido, who is in the hospital. He has—"

"Non fa niente! non fa niente!" interrupted the Cancelliere.

"Non fa niente! What time did you start?" said the Pretore.

The Maresciallo cleared his throat with great elaboration, and spat with power twice.

"Signor Pretore, I do not know. I did not look at the clock. But it was before sunset—it was well before sunset."

"And the signore only came down from the Casa del Prete very late," interposed Artois, quietly. "I was there and kept him. It was quite evening before he started."

An expression of surprise went over Salvatore's face and vanished. He had realized that for some reason this stranger was his ally.

"Had you any reason to suppose the signore was coming to fish with you yesterday?" asked the Pretore of Salvatore.

"No, signore. I thought as the signora was back the poor signore would stay with her at the house."

"Naturally, naturally!" said the Cancelliere.

"Naturally! It seems the signore had several times passed across the rocks, from which he appears to have fallen, without any difficulty," remarked the Pretore.

"Si, signore," said Gaspare.

He looked at Salvatore, seemed to make a great effort, then added:

"But never when it was dark, signore. And I was always with him. He used to take my hand."

His chest began to heave.

"Corragio, Gaspare!" said Artois to him, in a low voice.

His strong intuition enabled him to understand something of the conflict that was raging in the boy. He had seen his glances at Salvatore, and felt that he was longing to fly at the fisherman, that he only restrained himself with agony from some ferocious violence.

The Pretore remained silent for a moment. It was evident that he was at a loss. He wished to appear acute, but the inquiry yielded nothing for the exercise of his talents.

At last he said:

"Did any one see you going to Messina? Is there any corroboration of your statement that you started before the signore came down here?"

"Do you think I am not speaking the truth, Signor Pretore?" said Salvatore, proudly. "Why should I lie? The poor signore was my benefactor. If I had known he was coming I should have been here to receive him. Why, he has eaten in my house! He has slept in my house. I tell you we were as brothers."

"Si, si," said the Cancelliere.

Gaspare set his teeth, walked away to the edge of the plateau, and stood looking out to sea.

"Then no one saw you?" persisted the Pretore.

"Non lo so," said Salvatore. "I did not think of such things. I wanted to go to Messina, so I sent Maddalena to pass the night in the village, and I took the boat. What else should I do?"

"Va bene! Va bene!" said the Cancelliere.

The Maresciallo cleared his throat again. That, and the ceremony which invariably followed, were his only contributions to this official proceeding.

The Pretore, receiving no assistance from his colleagues, seemed doubtful what more to do. It was evident to Artois that he was faintly suspicious, that he was not thoroughly satisfied about the cause of this death.

"Your daughter seems very upset about all this," he said to Salvatore.

"Mamma mia! And how should she not? Why, Signor Pretore, we loved the poor signore. We would have thrown ourselves into the sea for him. When we saw him coming down from the mountain to us it was as if we saw God coming down from heaven."

"Certo! Certo!" said the Cancelliere.

"I think every one who knew the signore at all grew to be very fond of him," said Artois, quietly. "He was greatly beloved here by every one."

His manner to the Pretore was very civil, even respectful. Evidently it had its effect upon that personage. Every one here seemed to be assured that this death was merely an accident, could only have been an accident. He did not know what more to do.

"Va bene!" he said at last, with some reluctance. "We shall see what the doctors say when the autopsy is concluded. Let us hope that nothing will be discovered. I do not wish to distress the poor signora. At the same time I must do my duty. That is evident."

"It seems to me you have done it with admirable thoroughness," said Artois.

"Grazie, Signor Barone, grazie!"

"Grazie, grazie, Signor Barone!" added the Cancelliere.

"Grazie, Signor Barone!" said the deep voice of the Maresciallo.

The authorities now slowly prepared to take their departure.

"You are coming with us, Signor Barone?" said the Pretore.

Artois was about to say yes, when he saw pass across the aperture of the doorway of the cottage the figure of a girl with bent head. It disappeared immediately.

"That must be Maddalena!" he thought.

"Scusi, signore," he said, "but I have been seriously ill. The ride down here has tired me, and I should be glad to rest for a few minutes longer, if—" He looked at Salvatore.

"I will fetch a chair for the signore!" said the fisherman, quickly.

He did not know what this stranger wanted, but he felt instinctively that it was nothing that would be harmful to him.

The Pretore and his companions, after polite inquiries as to the illness of Artois, took their leave with many salutations. Only Gaspare remained on the edge of the plateau staring at the sea. As Salvatore went to fetch the chair Artois went over to the boy.

"Gaspare!" he said.

"Si!" said the boy.

"I want you to go up with the Pretore. Go to the signora. Tell her the inquiry is finished. It will relieve her to know."

"You will come with me, signore?"

"No."

The boy turned and looked him full in the face.

"Why do you stay?"

For a moment Artois did not speak. He was considering rapidly what to say, how to treat Gaspare. He was now sure that there had been a tragedy, with which the people of the sirens' house were, somehow, connected. He was sure that Gaspare either knew or suspected what had happened, yet meant to conceal his knowledge despite his obvious hatred for the fisherman. Was the boy's reason for this strange caution, this strange secretiveness, akin to his—Artois's—desire? Was the boy trying to protect his padrona or the memory of his padrone? Artois wondered. Then he said:

"Gaspare, I shall only stay a few minutes. We must have no gossip that can get to the padrona's ears. We understand each other, I think, you and I. We want the same thing. Men can keep silence, but girls talk. I wish to see Maddalena for a minute."

"Ma—"

Gaspare stared at him almost fiercely. But something in the face of Artois inspired him with confidence. Suddenly his reserve disappeared. He put his hand on Artois's arm.

"Tell Maddalena to be silent and not to go on crying, signore," he said, violently. "Tell her that if she does not stop crying I will come down here in the night and kill her."

"Go, Gaspare! The Pretore is wondering—go!"

Gaspare went down over the edge of the land and disappeared towards the sea.

"Ecco, signore!"

Salvatore reappeared from the cottage carrying a chair which he set down under an olive-tree, the same tree by which Maddalena had stood when Maurice first saw her in the dawn.

"Grazie."

Artois sat down. He was very tired, but he scarcely knew it. The fisherman stood by him, looking at him with a sort of shifty expectation, and Artois, as he noticed the hard Arab type of the man's face, the glitter of the small, cunning eyes, the nervous alertness of the thin, sensitive hands, understood a great deal about Salvatore. He knew Arabs well. He had slept under their tents, had seen them in joy and in anger, had witnessed scenes displaying fully their innate carelessness of human life. This fisherman was almost as much Arab as Sicilian. The blend scarcely made for gentleness. If such a man were wronged, he would be quick and subtle in revenge. Nothing would stay him. But had Maurice wronged him? Artois meant to assume knowledge and to act upon his assumption. His instinct advised him that in doing so he would be doing the best thing possible for the protection of Hermione.

"Can you make much money here?" he said, sharply yet carelessly.

The fisherman moved as if startled.

"Signore!"

"They tell me Sicily's a poor land for the poor. Isn't that so?"

Salvatore recovered himself.

"Si, signore, si, signore, one earns nothing. It is a hard life, Per Dio!"

He stopped and stared hard at the stranger with his hands on his hips. His eyes, his whole expression and attitude said, "What are you up to?"

"America is the country for a sharp-witted man to make his fortune in," said Artois, returning his gaze.

"Si, signore. Many go from here. I know many who are working in America. But one must have money to pay the ticket."

"Yes. This terreno belongs to you?"

"Only the bit where the house stands, signore. And it is all rocks. It is no use to any one. And in winter the winds come over it. Why, it would take years of work to turn it into anything. And I am not a contadino. Once I had a wine-shop, but I am a man of the sea."

"But you are a man with sharp wits. I should think you would do well in America. Others do, and why not you?"

They looked at each other hard for a full minute. Then Salvatore said, slowly:

"Signore, I will tell you the truth. It is the truth. I would swear it with sea-water on my lips. If I had the money I would go to America. I would take the first ship."

"And your daughter, Maddalena? You couldn't leave her behind you?"

"Signore, if I were ever to go to America you may be sure I should take Maddalena with me."

"I think you would," Artois said, still looking at the man full in the eyes. "I think it would be wiser to take Maddalena with you."

Salvatore looked away.

"If I had the money, signore, I would buy the tickets to-morrow. Here I can make nothing, and it is a hard life, always on the sea. And in America you get good pay. A man can earn eight lire a day there, they tell me."

"I have not seen your daughter yet," Artois said, abruptly.

"No, signore, she is not well to-day. And the Signor Pretore frightened her. She will stay in the house to-day."

"But I should like to see her for a moment."

"Signore, I am very sorry, but—"

Artois turned round in the chair and looked towards the house. The door, which had been open, was now shut.

"Maddalena is praying, signore. She is praying to the Madonna for the soul of the dead signore."

For the first time Artois noticed in the hard, bird-like face of the fisherman a sign of emotion, almost of softness.

"We must not disturb her, signore."

Artois got up and went a few steps nearer to the cottage.

"Can one see the place where the signore's body was found?" he asked.

"Si, signore, from the other side, among the trees."

"I will come back in a moment," said Artois.

He walked away from the fisherman and entered the wood, circling the cottage. The fisherman did not come with him. Artois's instinct had told him that the man would not care to come on such an errand. As Artois passed at the back of the cottage he noticed an open window, and paused near it in the long grass. From within there came the sound of a woman's voice, murmuring. It was frequently interrupted by sobs. After a moment Artois went close to the window, and said, but without showing himself:

"Maddalena!"

The murmuring voice stopped.

"Maddalena!"

There was silence.

"Maddalena!" Artois said. "Are you listening?"

He heard a faint movement as if the woman within came nearer to the casement.

"If you loved the dead signore, if you care for his memory, do not talk of your grief for him to others. Pray for him, and be silent for him. If you are silent the Holy Mother will hear your prayers."

As he said the last words Artois made his deep voice sound mysterious, mystical.

Then he went away softly among the thickly growing trees.

When he saw Salvatore again, still standing upon the plateau, he beckoned to him without coming into the open.

"Bring the boat round to the inlet," he said. "I will cross from there."

"Si, signore."

"And as we cross we can speak a little more about America."

The fisherman stared at him, with a faint smile that showed a gleam of sharp, white teeth.

"Si, signore—a little more about America."

CHAPTER XXV

A night and a day had passed, and still Artois had not seen Hermione. The autopsy had been finished, and had revealed nothing to change the theory of Dr. Marini as to the determining cause of death. The English stranger had been crossing the dangerous wall of rock, probably in darkness, had fallen, been stunned upon the rocks in the sea beneath, and drowned before he recovered consciousness.

Gaspare said nothing. Salvatore held his peace and began his preparations for America. And Maddalena, if she wept, wept now in secret; if she prayed, prayed in the lonely house of the sirens, near the window which had so often given a star to the eyes that looked down from the terrace of the Casa del Prete.

There was gossip in Marechiaro, and the Pretore still preserved his air of faint suspicion. But that would probably soon vanish under the influence of the Cancelliere, with whom Artois had had some private conversation. The burial had been allowed, and very early in the morning of the day following that of Hermione's arrival at the hotel it took place from the hospital.

Few people knew the hour, and most were still asleep when the coffin was carried down the street, followed only by Hermione, and by Gaspare in a black, ready-made suit that had been bought in the village of Cattaro. Hermione would not allow any one else to follow her dead, and as Maurice had been a Protestant there was no service. This shocked Gaspare, and added to his grief, till Hermione explained that her husband had been of a different religion from that of Sicily, a religion with different rites.

"But we can pray for him, Gaspare," she said. "He loved us, and perhaps he will know what we are doing."

The thought seemed to soothe the boy. He kneeled down by his padrona under the wall of the Campo Santo by which Protestants were buried, and whispered a petition for the repose of the soul of his padrone. Into the gap of earth, where now the coffin lay, he had thrown roses from his father's little terreno near the village. His tears fell fast, and his prayer was scarcely more than a broken murmur of "Povero signorino—povero signorino—Dio ci mandi buon riposo in Paradiso." Hermione could not pray although she was in the attitude of supplication; but when she heard the words of Gaspare she murmured them too. "Buon riposo!" The sweet Sicilian good-night—she said it now in the stillness of the lonely dawn. And her tears fell fast with those of the boy who had loved and served his master.

When the funeral was over she walked up the mountain with Gaspare to the Casa del Prete, and from there, on the following day, she sent a message to Artois, asking him if he would come to see her.

"I don't ask you to forgive me for not seeing you before," she wrote. "We understand each other and do not need explanations. I wanted to see nobody. Come at any hour when you feel that you would like to.

Hermione."

Artois rode up in the cool of the day, towards evening.

He was met upon the terrace by Gaspare.

"The signora is on the mountain, signore," he said. "If you go up you will find her, the povero signora. She is all alone upon the mountain."

"I will go, Gaspare. I have told Maddalena. I think she will be silent."

The boy dropped his eyes. His unreserve of the island had not endured. It had been a momentary impulse, and now the impulse had died away.

"Va bene, signore," he muttered.

He had evidently nothing more to say, yet Artois did not leave him immediately.

"Gaspare," he said, "the signora will not stay here through the great heat, will she?"

"Non lo so, signore."

"She ought to go away. It will be better if she goes away."

"Si, signore. But perhaps she will not like to leave the povero signorino."

Tears came into the boy's eyes. He turned away and went to the wall, and looked over into the ravine, and thought of many things: of readings under the oak-trees, of the tarantella, of how he and the padrone had come up from the fishing singing in the sunshine. His heart was full, and he felt dazed. He was so accustomed to being always with his padrone that he did not know how he was to go on without him. He did not remember his former life, before the padrone came. Everything seemed to have begun for him on that morning when the train with the padrone and the padrona in it ran into the station of Cattaro. And now everything seemed to have finished.

Artois did not say any more to him, but walked slowly up the mountain leaning on his stick. Close to the top, by a heap of stones that was something like a cairn, he saw, presently, a woman sitting. As he came nearer she turned her head and saw him. She did not move. The soft rays of the evening sun fell on her, and showed him that her square and rugged face was pale and grave and, he thought, empty-looking, as if something had deprived it of its former possession, the ardent vitality, the generous enthusiasm, the look of swiftness he had loved.

When he came up to her he could only say: "Hermione, my friend—"

The loneliness of this mountain summit was a fit setting for her loneliness, and these two solitudes, of nature and of this woman's soul, took hold of Artois and made him feel as if he were infinitely small, as if he could not matter to either. He loved nature, and he loved this woman. And of what use were he and his love to them?

She stretched up her hand to him, and he bent down and took it and held it.

"You said some day I should leave my Garden of Paradise, Emile."

"Don't hurt me with my own words," he said.

"Sit by me."

He sat down on the warm ground close to the heap of stones.

"You said I should leave the garden, but I don't think you meant like this. Did you?"

"No," he said.

"I think you thought we should be unhappy together. Well, we were never that. We were always very happy. I like to think of that. I come up here to think of that; of our happiness, and that we were always kind and tender to each other. Emile, if we hadn't been, if we had ever had even one quarrel, even once said cruel things to each other, I don't think I could bear it now. But we never did. God did watch us then, I think. God was with me so long as Maurice was with me. But I feel as if God had gone away from me with Maurice, as if they had gone together. Do you think any other woman has ever felt like that?"

"I don't think I am worthy to know how some women feel," he said, almost falteringly.

"I thought perhaps God would have stayed with me to help me, but I feel as if He hadn't. I feel as if He had only been able to love me so long as Maurice was with me."

"That feeling will pass away."

"Perhaps when my child comes," she said, very simply.

Artois had not known about the coming of the child, but Hermione did not remember that now.

"Your child!" he said.

"I am glad I came back in time to tell him about the child," she said. "I think at first he was almost frightened. He was such a boy, you see. He was the very spirit of youth, wasn't he? And perhaps that—but at the end he seemed happy. He kissed me as if he loved not only me. Do you understand, Emile? He seemed to kiss me the last time—for us both. Some day I shall tell my baby that."

She was silent for a little while. She looked out over the great view, now falling into a strange repose. This was the land he had loved, the land he had belonged to.

"I should like to hear the 'Pastorale' now," she said, presently. "But Sebastiano—" A new thought seemed to strike her. "I wonder how some women can bear their sorrows," she said. "Don't you, Emile?"

"What sorrows do you mean?" he asked.

"Such a sorrow as poor Lucrezia has to bear. Maurice always loved me. Lucrezia knows that Sebastiano loves some one else. I ought to be trying to comfort Lucrezia. I did try. I did go to pray with her. But that was before. I can't pray now, because I can't feel sure of almost anything. I sometimes think that this happened without God's meaning it to happen."

"God!" Artois said, moved by an irresistible impulse. "And the gods, the old pagan gods?"

"Ah!" she said, understanding. "We called him Mercury. Yes, it is as if he had gone to them, as if they had recalled their messenger. In the spring, before I went to Africa, I often used to think of legends, and put him—my Sicilian—"

She did not go on. Yet her voice had not faltered. There was no contortion of sorrow in her face. There was a sort of soft calmness about her almost akin to the calmness of the evening. It was the more remarkable in her because she was not usually a tranquil woman. Artois had never known her before in deep grief. But he had known her in joy, and then she had been rather enthusiastic than serene. Something of her eager humanity had left her now. She made upon him a strange impression, almost as of some one he had never previously had any intercourse with. And yet she was being wonderfully natural with him, as natural as if she were alone.

"What are you going to do, my friend?" he said, after a long silence.

"Nothing. I have no wish to do anything. I shall just wait—for our child."

"But where will you wait? You cannot wait here. The heat would weaken you. In your condition it would be dangerous."

"He spoke of going. It hurt me for a moment, I remember. I had a wish to stay here forever then. It seemed to me that this little bit of earth and rock was the happiest place in all the world. Yes, I will go, Emile, but I shall come back. I shall bring our child here."

He did not combat this intention then, for he was too thankful to have gained her assent to the departure for which he longed. The further future must take care of itself.

"I will take you to Italy, to Switzerland, wherever you wish to go."

"I have no wish for any other place. But I will go somewhere in Italy. Wherever it is cool and silent will do. But I must be far away from people; and when you have taken me there, dear Emile, you must leave me there."

"Quite alone?"

"Gaspare will be with me. I shall always keep Gaspare. Maurice and he were like two brothers in their happiness. I know they loved each other, and I know Gaspare loves me."

Artois only said:

"I trust the boy."

The word "trust" seemed to wake Hermione into a stronger life.

"Ah, Emile," she said, "once you distrusted the south. I remember your very words. You said, 'I love the south, but I distrust what I love, and I see the south in him.' I want to tell you, I want you to know, how perfect he was always to me. He loved joy, but his joy was always innocent. There was always something of the child in him. He was unconscious of himself. He never understood his own beauty. He never realized that he was worthy of worship. His thought was to reverence and to worship others. He loved life and the sun—oh, how he loved them! I don't think any one can ever have loved life and the sun as he did, ever will love them as he did. But he was never selfish. He was just quite natural. He was the deathless boy. Emile, have you noticed anything about me—since?"

"What, Hermione?"

"How much older I look now. He was like my youth, and my youth has gone with him."

"Will it not revive—when—?"

"No, never. I don't wish it to. Gaspare gathered roses, all the best roses from his father's little bit of land, to throw into the grave. And I want my youth to lie there with my Sicilian under Gaspare's roses. I feel as if that would be a tender companionship. I gave everything to him when he was alive, and I don't want to keep anything back now. I would like the sun to be with him under Gaspare's roses. And yet I know he's elsewhere. I can't explain. But two days ago at dawn I heard a child playing the tarantella, and it seemed to me as if my Sicilian had been taken away by the blue, by the blue of Sicily. I shall often come back to the blue. I shall often sit here again. For it was here that I heard the beating of the heart of youth. And there's no other music like that. Is there, Emile?"

"No," he said.

Had the music been wild? He suspected that the harmony she worshipped had passed on into the hideous crash of discords. And whose had been the fault? Who creates human nature as it is? In what workshop, of what brain, are forged the mad impulses of the wild heart of youth, are mixed together subtly the divine aspirations which leap like the winged Mercury to the heights, and the powerful appetites which lead the body into the dark places of the earth? And why is the Giver of the divine the permitter of those tremendous passions, which are not without their glory, but which wreck so many human lives?

Perhaps a reason may be found in the sacredness of pity. Evil and agony are the manure from which spring some of the whitest lilies that have ever bloomed beneath that enigmatic blue which roofs the terror and the triumph of the world. And while human beings know how to pity, human beings will always believe in a merciful God.

A strange thought to come into such a mind as Artois's! Yet it came in the twilight, and with it a sense of tears such as he had never felt before.

With the twilight had come a little wind from Etna. It made something near him flutter, something white, a morsel of paper among the stones by which he was sitting. He looked down and saw writing, and bent to pick the paper up.

"Emile may leave at once. But there is no good boat till the 10th. We shall take that…"

Hermione's writing!

Artois understood at once. Maurice had had Hermione's letter. He had known they were coming from Africa, and he had gone to the fair despite that knowledge. He had gone with the girl who wept and prayed beside the sea.

His hand closed over the paper.

"What is it, Emile? What have you picked up?"

"Only a little bit of paper."

He spoke quietly, tore it into tiny fragments and let them go upon the wind.

"When will you come with me, Hermione? When shall we go to Italy?"

"I am saying 'a rivederci' now"—she dropped her voice—"and buon riposo."

The white fragments blew away into the gathering night, separated from one another by the careful wind.

Three days later Hermione and Artois left Sicily, and Gaspare, leaning out of the window of the train, looked his last on the Isle of the Sirens. A fisherman on the beach by the inlet, not Salvatore, recognized the boy and waved a friendly hand. But Gaspare did not see him.

There they had fished! There they had bathed! There they had drunk the good red wine of Amato and called for brindisi! There they had lain on the warm sand of the caves! There they had raced together to Madre Carmela and her frying-pan! There they had shouted "O sole mio!"

There—there they had been young together!

The shining sea was blotted out from the boy's eyes by tears.

"Povero signorino!" he whispered. "Povero signorino!"

And then, as his "Paese" vanished, he added for the last time the words which he had whispered in the dawn by the grave of his padrone, "Dio ci mandi buon riposo in Paradiso."

THE END

A SPIRIT IN PRISON

by

Robert Hichens

Original Transcriber's Note: This text was prepared from a 1908 edition, published by Harper & Brothers, New York and London.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER I

Somewhere, not far off on the still sea that held the tiny islet in a warm embrace, a boy's voice was singing "Napoli Bella."

Vere heard the song as she sat in the sun with her face set towards Nisida and the distant peak of Ischia; and instinctively she shifted her position, and turned her head, looking towards the calm and untroubled water that stretched between her and Naples. For the voice that sang of the beautiful city was coming towards her from the beautiful city, hymning the siren it had left perhaps but two hours ago.

On his pedestal set upon rock San Francesco seemed to be attentive to the voice. He stood beyond the sheltered pool of the sea that divided the islet from the mainland, staring across at Vere as if he envied her; he who was rooted in Italy and deprived of her exquisite freedom. His beard hung down to his waist, his cross protruded over his left shoulder, and his robe of dusty grayish brown touched his feet, which had never wandered one step since he was made, and set there to keep watch over the fishermen who come to sleep under the lee of the island by night.

Now it was brilliant daylight. The sun shone vividly over the Bay of Naples, over the great and vital city, over Vesuvius, the long line of the land towards Sorrento, over Capri with its shadowy mountain, and Posilippo with its tree-guarded villas. And in the sharp radiance of May the careless voice of the fisher-boy sang the familiar song that Vere had always known and seldom heeded.

To-day, why she did not know, Vere listened to it attentively. Something in the sound of the voice caught her attention, roused within her a sense of sympathy.

Carelessness and happiness make a swift appeal to young hearts, and this voice was careless, and sounded very happy. There was a deliberate gruffness in it, a determination to be manly, which proved the vocalist to be no man. Vere knew at once that a boy was singing, and she felt that she must see him.

She got up, went into the little garden at the edge of the cliff, and looked over the wall.

There was a boat moving slowly towards her, not very far away. In it were three figures, all stripped for diving, and wearing white cotton drawers. Two were sitting on the gunwale with their knees drawn up nearly to their chins. The third was standing, and with a languid, but strong and regular movement, was propelling the boat forward with big-bladed oars. This was the singer, and as the boat drew nearer Vere could see that he had the young, lithe form of a boy.

While she watched, leaning down from her eyrie, the boat and the song stopped, and the singer let go his oars and turned to the men behind him. The boat had reached a place near the rocks that was good ground for frutti di mare.

Vere had often seen the divers in the Bay of Naples at their curious toil. Yet it never ceased to interest her. She had a passion for the sea, and for all things connected with it. Now she leaned a little lower over the wall, with her eyes fixed on the boat and its occupants.

Upon the water she saw corks floating, and presently one of the men swung himself round and sat facing the sea, with his back to the boat and his bare legs dipping into the water. The boy had dropped down to the bottom of the craft. His hands were busy arranging clothes, or tackle, and his lusty voice again rang out to the glory of "Napoli, bella Napoli." There was something infectious in his happy-go-lucky light-heartedness. Vere smiled as she listened, but there was a wistfulness in her heart. At that moment a very common desire of young and vigorous girls assailed her—the desire to be a boy; not a boy born of rich parents, destined to the idle, aimless life of aristocratic young Neapolitans, but a brown, badly dressed, or scarcely dressed at all boy of the people.

She was often light-hearted, careless. But was she ever as light-hearted and careless as that singing boy? She supposed herself to be free. But was she, could she ever be at liberty as he was?

The man who had been dipping his feet in the sea rested one hand on the gunwale, let his body droop forward, dropped into the water, paddled for a moment, reached one of the floating corks, turned over head downwards, describing a circle which showed his chocolate-colored back arched, kicked up his feet and disappeared. The second man lounged lazily from the boat into the sea and imitated him. The boy sat still and went on singing. Vere felt disappointed. Was not he going to dive too? She wanted him to dive. If she were that boy she would go in, she felt sure of it, before the men. It must be lovely to sink down into the underworld of the sea, to rifle from the rocks their fruit, that grew thick as fruit on the trees. But the boy—he was lazy, good for nothing but singing. She was half ashamed of him. Whimsically, and laughing to herself at her own absurdity, she lifted her two hands, brown with the sun, to her lips, and cried with all her might:

"Va dentro, pigro! Va dentro!"

As her voice died away, the boy stopped singing, sprang into the sea, kicked up his feet and disappeared.

Vere was conscious of a thrill that was like a thrill of triumph.

"He obeyed me!" she thought.

A pleasant feeling of power came to her. From her eyrie on the rock she was directing these strange sea doings. She was ruling over the men of the sea.

The empty boat swayed softly on the water, but its three former occupants were all hidden by the sea. It seemed as if they would never come up again. Vere began to hold her breath as they were holding theirs. At last a dark head rose above the surface, then another. The two men paddled for a minute, drawing the air into their lungs. But the boy did not reappear.

As the seconds passed, Vere began to feel proud of him. He was doing that which she would have tried to do had she been a boy. He was rivalling the men.

Another second slipped away—and another. He was more than rivalling, he was beating the men.

They dived once more. She saw the sun gleam on their backs, which looked polished as they turned slowly over, almost like brown porpoises.

But the boy remained hidden beneath the veil of water.

Vere began to feel anxious. What if some accident had happened? What if he had been caught by the seaweed, or if his groping hand had been retained by some crevice of the rock? There was a pain at her heart. Her quick imagination was at work. It seemed to her as if she felt his agony, took part in his struggle to regain his freedom. She clinched her small hands and set her teeth. She held her breath, trying to feel exactly as he was feeling. And then suddenly she lifted her hands up to her face, covering her nostrils. What a horrible sensation it was, this suffocation, this pressing of the life out of the body, almost as one may push a person brutally out of a room! She could bear it no more, and she dropped her hands. As she did so the boy's dark head rose above the sea.

Vere uttered a cry of joy.

"Brave! Bravo!"

She felt as if he had returned from the dead. He was a wonderful boy.

"Bravo! Bravissimo!"

Serenely unconscious of her enthusiasm, the boy swam slowly for a moment, breathing the air into his lungs, then serenely dived again.

"Vere!" called a woman's voice from the house—"Vere!"

"Madre!" cried the girl in reply, but without turning away from the sea. "I am here! Do come out! I want to show you something."

On a narrow terrace looking towards Naples a tall figure appeared.

"Where are you?"

"Here! here!"

The mother smiled and left the terrace, passed through a little gate, and almost directly was standing beside the girl, saying:

"What is it? Is there a school of whales in the Bay, or have you sighted the sea-serpent coming from Capri?"

"No, no! But—you see that boat?"

"Yes. The men are diving for frutti di mare, aren't they?"

Vere nodded.

"The men are nothing. But there is a boy who is wonderful."

"Why? What does he do?"

"He stays under water an extraordinary time. Now wait. Have you got a watch, Madre?"

"Yes."

"Take it out, there's a darling, and time him. I want to know—there he is! You see!"

"Yes."

"Have you got your watch? Wait till he goes under! Wait a minute! There! He's gone! Now begin."

She drew into her lungs a long breath, and held it. The mother smiled, keeping her eyes obediently on the watch which lay in her hand.

There was a silence between them as the seconds passed.

"Really," began the mother presently, "he must be—"

"Hush, Madre, hush!"

The girl had clasped her hands tightly. Her eyes never left the sea. The tick, tick of the watch was just audible in the stillness of the May morning. At last—

"There he is!" cried the girl. "Quick! How long has he been under?"

"Just fifty seconds."

"I wonder—I'm sure it's a record. If only Gaspare were here! When will he be back from Naples with Monsieur Emile?"

"About twelve, I should think. But I doubt if they can sail." She looked out to sea, and added: "I think the wind is changing to scirocco. They may be later."

"He's gone down again!"

"I never saw you so interested in a diver before," said the mother. "What made you begin to look at the boy?"

"He was singing. I heard him, and his voice made me feel—" She paused.

"What?" said her mother.

"I don't know. Un poco diavolesca, I'm afraid. One thing, though! It made me long to be a boy."

"Did it?"

"Yes! Madre, tell me truly—sea-water on your lips, as the fishermen say—now truly, did you ever want me to be a boy?"

Hermione Delarey did not answer for a moment. She looked away over the still sea, that seemed to be slowly losing its color, and she thought of another sea, of the Ionian waters that she had loved so much. They had taken her husband from her before her child was born, and this child's question recalled to her the sharp agony of those days and nights in Sicily, when Maurice lay unburied in the Casa del Prete, and afterwards in the hospital at Marechiaro—of other days and nights in Italy, when, isolated with the Sicilian boy, Gaspare, she had waited patiently for the coming of her child.

"Sea-water, Madre, sea-water on your lips!"

Her mother looked down at her.

"Do you think I wished it, Vere?"

"To-day I do."

"Why to-day?"

"Because I wish it so much. And it seems to me as if perhaps I wish it because you once wished it for me. You thought I should be a boy?"

"I felt sure you would be a boy."

"Madre! How strange!"

The girl was looking up at her mother. Her dark eyes—almost Sicilian eyes they were—opened very wide, and her lips remained slightly parted after she had spoken.

"I wonder why that was?" she said at length.

"I have wondered too. It may have been that I was always thinking of your father in those days, recalling him—well, recalling him as he had been in Sicily. He went away from me so suddenly that somehow his going, even when it had happened, for a long time seemed to be an impossibility. And I fancied, I suppose, that my child would be him in a way."

"Come back?"

"Or never quite gone."

The girl was silent for a moment.

"Povera Madre mia!" at last she said.

But she did not seem distressed for herself. No personal grievance, no doubt of complete love assailed her. And the fact that this was so demonstrated, very quietly and very completely, the relation existing between this mother and this child.

"I wonder, now," Vere said, presently, "why I never specially wished to be a boy until to-day—because, after all, it can't be from you that the wish came. If it had been it must have come long ago. And it didn't. It only came when I heard that boy's voice. He sings like all the boys, you know, that have ever enjoyed themselves, that are still enjoying themselves in the sun."

"I wish he would sing once more!" said Hermione.

"Perhaps he will. Look! He's getting into the boat. And the men are stopping too."

The boy was very quick in his movements. Almost before Vere had finished speaking he had pulled on his blue jersey and white trousers, and again taken the big oars in his hands. Standing up, with his face set towards the islet, he began once more to propel the boat towards it. And as he swung his body slowly to and fro he opened his lips and sang lustily once more,

"O Napoli, bella Napoli!"

Hermione and Vere sat silently listening as the song grew louder and louder, till the boat was almost in the shadow of the islet, and the boy, with a strong stroke of the left oar turned its prow towards the pool over which San Francesco watched.

"They're going into the Saint's Pool to have a siesta," said Vere. "Isn't he a splendid boy, Madre?"

As she spoke the boat was passing almost directly beneath them, and they saw its name painted in red letters on the prow, Sirena del Mare. The two men, one young, one middle-aged, were staring before them at the rocks. But the boy, more sensitive, perhaps, than they were to the watching eyes of women, looked straight up to Vere and to her mother. They saw his level rows of white teeth gleaming as the song came out from his parted lips, the shining of his eager dark eyes, full of the careless merriment of youth, the black, low-growing hair stirring in the light sea breeze about his brow, bronzed by sun and wind. His slight figure swayed with an easy motion that had the grace of perfectly controlled activity, and his brown hands gripped the great oars with a firmness almost of steel, as the boat glided under the lee of the island, and vanished from the eyes of the watchers into the shadowy pool of San Francesco.

When the boat had disappeared, Vere lifted herself up and turned round to her mother.

"Isn't he a jolly boy, Madre?"

"Yes," said Hermione.

She spoke in a low voice. Her eyes were still on the sea where the boat had passed.

"Yes," she repeated, almost as if to herself.

For the first time a little cloud went over Vere's sensitive face.

"Madre, how horribly I must have disappointed you," she said.

The mother did not break into protestations. She always treated her child with sincerity.

"Just for a moment, Vere," she answered. "And then, very soon, you made me feel how much more intimate can be the relationship between a mother and a daughter than between a mother and any son."

"Is that true, really?"

"I think it is."

"But why should that be?"

"Don't you think that Monsieur Emile can tell you much better than I? I feel all the things, you know, that he can explain."

There was a touch of something that was like a half-hidden irony in her voice.

"Monsieur Emile! Yes, I think he understands almost everything about people," said Vere, quite without irony. "But could a man explain such a thing as well as a woman? I don't think so."

"We have the instincts, perhaps, men the vocabulary. Come, Vere, I want to look over into the Saint's Pool and see what those men are doing."

Vere laughed.

"Take care, Madre, or Gaspare will be jealous."

A soft look came into Hermione's face.

"Gaspare and I know each other," she said, quietly.

"But he could be jealous—horribly jealous."

"Of you, perhaps, Vere, but never of me. Gaspare and I have passed through too much together for anything of that kind. Nobody could ever take his place with me, and he knows it quite well."

"Gaspare's a darling, and I love him," said Vere, rather inconsequently. "Shall we look over into the Pool from the pavilion, or go down by the steps?"

"We'll look over."

They passed in through a gateway to the narrow terrace that fronted the Casa del Mare facing Vesuvius, entered the house, traversed a little hall, came out again into the air by a door on its farther side, and made their way to a small pavilion that looked upon the Pool of San Francesco. Almost immediately below, in the cool shadow of the cliff, the boat was moored. The two men, lying at full length in it, their faces buried in their hands, were already asleep. But the boy, sitting astride on the prow, with his bare feet dangling on each side of it to the clear green water, was munching slowly, and rather seriously, a hunch of yellow bread, from which he cut from time to time large pieces with a clasp knife. As he ate, lifting the pieces of bread to his mouth with the knife, against whose blade he held them with his thumb, he stared down at the depths below, transparent here almost to the sea bed. His eyes were wide with reverie. He seemed another boy, not the gay singer of five minutes ago. But then he had been in the blaze of the sun. Now he was in the shade. And swiftly he had caught the influence of the dimmer light, the lack of motion, the delicate hush at the feet of San Francesco.

This time he did not know that he was being watched. His reverie, perhaps, was too deep, or their gaze less concentrated than it had been before. And after a moment, Hermione moved away.

"You are going in, Madre?"

"Yes."

"Do you mind if I give something to that boy?"

"Do you mean money?"

"Oh no. But the poor thing's eating dry bread, and—"

"And what, you puss?"

"Well, he's a very obedient boy."

"How can you know that?"

"He was idling in the boat, and I called out to him to jump into the sea, and he jumped in immediately."

"Do you think because he heard you?"

"Certainly I do."

"You conceited little creature! Perhaps he was only pleasing himself!"

"No, Madre, no. I think I should like to give him a little reward presently—for his singing too."

"Get him a dolce, then, from Carmela, if there is one. And you can give him some cigarettes."

"I will. He'll love that. Oh dear! I wish he didn't make me dissatisfied with myself!"

"Nonsense, Vere!"

Hermione bent down and kissed her child. Then she went rather quickly away from the pavilion and entered the Casa del Mare.

CHAPTER II

After her mother had gone, Vere waited for a moment, then ran lightly to the house, possessed herself of a dolce and a packet of cigarettes, and went down the steps to the Pool of San Francesco, full of hospitable intentions towards the singing boy. She found him still sitting astride of the boat's prow, not yet free of his reverie apparently; for when she gave a low call of "Pescator!" prolonging the last syllable with the emphasis and the accent of Naples, but always softly, he started, and nearly dropped into the sea the piece of bread he was lifting to his mouth. Recovering himself in time to save the bread deftly with one brown hand, he turned half round, leaning on his left arm, and stared at Vere with large, inquiring eyes. She stood by the steps and beckoned to him, lifting up the packet of cigarettes, then pointing to his sleeping companions:

"Come here for a minute!"

The boy smiled, sprang up, and leaped onto the islet. As he came to her, with the easy, swinging walk of the barefooted sea-people, he pulled up his white trousers, and threw out his chest with an obvious desire to "fare figura" before the pretty Padrona of the islet. When he reached her he lifted his hand to his bare head forgetfully, meaning to take off his cap to her. Finding that he had no cap, he made a laughing grimace, threw up his chin and, thrusting his tongue against his upper teeth and opening wide his mouth, uttered a little sound most characteristically Neapolitan—a sound that seemed lightly condemnatory of himself. This done, he stood still before Vere, looking at the cigarettes and at the dolce.

"I've brought these for you," she said.

"Grazie, Signorina."

He did not hold out his hand, but his eyes, now devoted entirely to the cigarettes, began to shine with pleasure. Vere did not give him the presents at once. She had something to explain first.

"We mustn't wake them," she said, pointing towards the boat in which the men were sleeping. "Come a little way with me."

She retreated a few steps from the sea, followed closely by the eager boy.

"We sha'n't disturb them now," she said, stopping. "Do you know why I've brought you these?"

She stretched out her hands, with the dolce and the cigarettes.

The boy threw his chin up again and half shut his eyes.

"No, Signorina."

"Because you did what I told you."

She spoke rather with the air of a little queen.

"I don't understand."

"Didn't you hear me call out to you from up there?"—she pointed to the cliff above their heads—"when you were sitting in the boat? I called to you to go in after the men."

"Why?"

"Why! Because I thought you were a lazy boy."

He laughed. All his brown face gave itself up to laughter—eyes, teeth, lips, cheeks, chin. His whole body seemed to be laughing. The idea of his being lazy seemed to delight his whole spirit.

"You would have been lazy if you hadn't done what I told you," said Vere, emphatically, forcing her words through his merriment with determination. "You know you would."

"I never heard you call, Signorina."

"You didn't?"

He shook his head several times, bent down, dipped his fingers in the sea, put them to his lips: "I say it."

"Really?"

There was a note of disappointment in her voice. She felt dethroned.

"But then, you haven't earned these," she said, looking at him almost with rebuke, "if you went in of your own accord."

"I go in because it is my mestiere, Signorina," the boy said, simply. "I go in by force."

He looked at her and then again at the cigarettes. His expression said, "Can you refuse me?" There was a quite definite and conscious attempt to cajole her to generosity in his eyes, and in the pose he assumed. Vere saw it, and knew that if there had been a mirror within reach at that moment the boy would have been looking into it, frankly admiring himself.

In Italy the narcissus blooms at all seasons of the year.

She was charmed by the boy, for he did his luring well, and she was susceptible to all that was naturally picturesque. But a gay little spirit of resistance sprang up like a flame and danced within her.

She let her hands fall to her sides.

"But you like going in?"

"Signorina?"

"You enjoy diving?"

He shrugged his shoulders, and again used what seemed with him a favorite expression.

"Signorina, I must enjoy it, by force."

"You do it wonderfully. Do you know that? You do it better than the men."

Again the conscious look came into the boy's face and body, as if his soul were faintly swaggering.

"There is no one in the Bay who can dive better than I can," he answered. "Giovannino thinks he can. Well, let him think so. He would not dare to make a bet with me."

"He would lose it if he did," said Vere. "I'm sure he would. Just now you were under water nearly a minute by my mother's watch."

"Where is the Signora?" said the boy, looking round.

"Why d'you ask?"

"Why—I can stay under longer than that."

"Now, look here!" said the girl, eagerly. "Never mind Madre! Go down once for me, won't you? Go down once for me, and you shall have the dolce and two packets of cigarettes."

"I don't want the dolce, Signorina; a dolce is for women," he said, with the complete bluntness characteristic of Southern Italians and of Sicilians.

"The cigarettes, then."

"Va bene. But the water is too shallow here."

"We'll take my boat."

She pointed to a small boat, white with a green line, that was moored close to them.

"Va bene," said the boy again.

He rolled his white trousers up above his knees, stripped off his blue jersey, leaving the thin vest that was beneath it, folded the jersey neatly and laid it on the stones, tightened his trousers at the back, then caught hold of the rope by which Vere's boat was moored to the shore and pulled the boat in.

Very carefully he helped Vere into it.

"I know a good place," he said, "where you can see right down to the bottom."

Taking the oars he slowly paddled a little way out to a deep clear pool of the sea.

"I'll go in here, Signorina."

He stood up straight, with his feet planted on each side of the boat's prow, and glanced at the water intimately, as might a fish. Then he shot one more glance at Vere and at the cigarettes, made the sign of the cross, lifted his brown arms above his head, uttered a cry, and dived cleanly below the water, going down obliquely till he was quite dim in the water.

Vere watched him with deep attention. This feat of the boy fascinated her. The water between them made him look remote, delicate and unearthly—neither boy nor fish. His head, she could see, was almost touching the bottom. She fancied that he was actually touching bottom with his hands. Yes, he was. Bending low over the water she saw his brown fingers, stretched out and well divided, promenading over the basin of the sea as lightly and springily as the claws of a crab tip-toeing to some hiding-place. Presently he let himself down a little more, pressed his flat palms against the ground, and with the impetus thus gained made his body shoot back towards the surface feet foremost. Then bringing his body up till it was in a straight line with his feet, he swam slowly under water, curving first in this direction then in that, with a lithe ease that was enchantingly graceful. Finally, he turned over on his back and sank slowly down until he looked like a corpse lying at the bottom of the sea.

Then Vere felt a sickness of fear steal over her, and leaning over the sea till her face almost touched the water, she cried out fiercely:

"Come up! Come up! Presto! Presto!"

As the boy had seemed to obey her when she cried out to him from the summit of the cliff, so he seemed to obey her now.

When her voice died down into the sea-depths he rose from those depths, and she saw his eyes laughing, his lips laughing at her, freed from the strange veil of the water, which had cast upon him a spectral aspect, the likeness of a thing deserted by its soul.

"Did you hear me that time?" Vere said, rather eagerly.

The boy lifted his dark head from the water to shake it, drew a long breath, trod water, then threw up his chin with the touch of tongue against teeth which is the Neapolitan negative.

"You didn't! Then why did you come up?"

He swam to the boat.

"It pleased me to come."

She looked doubtful.

"I believe you are birbante," she said, slowly. "I am nearly sure you are."

The boy was just getting out, pulling himself up slowly to the boat by his arms, with his wet hands grasping the gunwale firmly. He looked at Vere, with the salt drops running down his sunburnt face, and dripping from his thick, matted hair to his strong neck and shoulders. Again his whole face laughed, as, nimbly, he brought his legs from the water and stood beside her.

"Birbante, Signorina?"

"Yes. Are you from Naples?"

"I come from Mergellina, Signorina."

Vere looked at him half-doubtfully, but still with innocent admiration. There was something perfectly fearless and capable about him that attracted her.

He rowed in to shore.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Sixteen years old, Signorina."

"I am sixteen, too."

They reached the islet, and Vere got out. The boy followed her, fastened the boat, and moved away a few steps. She wondered why, till she saw him stop in a sun-patch and let the beams fall full upon him.

"You aren't afraid of catching cold?" she asked.

He threw up his chin. His eyes went to the cigarettes.

"Yes," said Vere, in answer to the look, "you shall have one. Here!"

She held out the packet. Very carefully and neatly the boy, after holding his right hand for a moment to the sun to get dry, drew out a cigarette.

"Oh, you want a match!"

He sprang away and ran lightly to the boat. Without waking his companions he found a matchbox and lit the cigarette. Then he came back, on the way stopping to get into his jersey.

Vere sat down on a narrow seat let into the rock close to the sun-patch. She was nursing the dolce on her knee.

"You won't have it?" she asked.

He gave her his usual negative, again stepping full into the sun.

"Well, then, I shall eat it. You say a dolce is for women!"

"Si, Signorina," he answered, quite seriously.

She began to devour it slowly, while the boy drew the cigarette smoke into his lungs voluptuously.

"And you are only sixteen?" she asked.

"Si, Signorina."

"As young as I am! But you look almost a man."

"Signorina, I have always worked. I am a man."

He squared his shoulders. She liked the determination, the resolution in his face; and she liked the face, too. He was a very handsome boy, she thought, but somehow he did not look quite Neapolitan. His eyes lacked the round and staring impudence characteristic of many Neapolitans she had seen. There was something at times impassive in their gaze. In shape they were long, and slightly depressed at the corners by the cheeks, and they had full, almost heavy, lids. The features of the boy were small and straight, and gave no promise of eventual coarseness. He was splendidly made. When Vere looked at him she thought of an arrow. Yet he was very muscular, and before he dived she had noticed that on his arms the biceps swelled up like smooth balls of iron beneath the shining brown skin.

"What month were you born in?" she asked.

"Signorina, I believe I was born in March. I believe I was sixteen last March."

"Then I am older than you are!"

This seemed to the boy a matter of indifference, though it was evidently exercising the girl beside him. She had finished the dolce now, and he was smoking the last fraction of an inch of the cigarette, economically determined to waste none of it, even though he burnt his fingers.

"Have another cigarette," Vere added, after a pause during which she considered him carefully. "You can't get anything more out of that one."

"Grazie, Signorina."

He took it eagerly.

"Do tell me your name, won't you?" Vere went on.

"Ruffo, Signorina."

"Ruffo—that's a nice name. It sounds strong and bold. And you live at Mergellina?"

"Si, Signorina. But I wasn't born there. I wasn't born in Naples at all."

"Where were you born?"

"In America, Signorina, near New York. I am a Sicilian."

"A Sicilian, are you!"

"Si, Signorina."

"I am a little bit Sicilian, too; only a little tiny bit—but still—"

She waited to see the effect upon him. He looked at her steadily with his long bright eyes.

"You are Sicilian, Signorina?"

"My great-grandmother was."

"Si?"

His voice sounded incredulous.

"Don't you believe me?" she cried, rather hotly.

"Ma si, Signorina! Only—that's not very Sicilian, if the rest is English. You are English, Signorina, aren't you?"

"The rest of me is. Are you all Sicilian?"

"Signorina, my mother is Sicilian."

"And your father, too?"

"Signorina, my father is dead," he said, in a changed voice. "Now I live with my mother and my step-father. He—Patrigno—he is Neapolitan."

There was a movement in the boat. The boy looked round.

"I must go back to the boat, Signorina," he said.

"Oh, must you?" Vere said. "What a pity! But look, they are really still asleep."

"I must go back, Signorina," he protested.

"You want to sleep, too, perhaps?"

He seized the excuse.

"Si, Signorina. Being under the sea so much—it tires the head and the eyes. I want to sleep, too."

His face, full of life, denied his words, but Vere only said:

"Here are the cigarettes."

"Grazie, Signorina."

"And I promised you another packet. Well, wait here—just here, d'you see?—under the bridge, and I'll throw it down, and you must catch it."

"Si, Signorina."

He took his stand on the spot she pointed out, and she disappeared up the steps towards the house.

"Madre! Madre!"

Hermione heard Vere's voice calling below a moment later.

"What is it?"

There was a quick step on the stairs, and the girl ran in.

"One more packet of cigarettes—may I? It's instead of the dolce. Ruffo says only women eat sweet things."

"Ruffo!"

"Yes, that's his name. He's been diving for me. You never saw anything like it! And he's a Sicilian. Isn't it odd? And sixteen—just as I am. May I have the cigarettes for him?"

"Yes, of course. In that drawer there's a whole box of the ones Monsieur Emile likes."

"There would be ten cigarettes in a packet. I'll give him ten."

She counted them swiftly out.

"There! And I'll make him catch them all, one by one. It will be more fun than throwing only a packet. Addio, mia bella Madre! Addi-io! Addi-io!"

And singing the words to the tune of "Addio, mia bella Napoli," she flitted out of the room and down the stairs.

"Ruffo! Ruffo!"

A minute later she was leaning over the bridge to the boy, who stood sentinel below. He looked up, and saw her laughing face full of merry mischief, and prepared to catch the packet she had promised him.

"Ruffo, I'm so sorry, but I can't find another packet of cigarettes."

The boy's bright face changed, looked almost sad, but he called up:

"Non fa niente, Signorina!" He stood still for a moment, then made a gesture of salutation, and added; "Thank you, Signorina. A rivederci!"

He moved to go to the boat, but Vere cried out, quickly:

"Wait, Ruffo! Can you catch well?"

"Signorina?"

"Look out now!"

Her arm was thrust out over the bridge, and Ruffo, staring up, saw a big cigarette—a cigarette such as he had never seen—in her small fingers. Quickly he made a receptacle of his joined hands, his eyes sparkling and his lips parted with happy anticipation.

"One!"

The cigarette fell and was caught.

"Two!"

A second fell. But this time Ruffo was unprepared, and it dropped on the rock by his bare feet.

"Stupido!" laughed the girl.

"Ma, Signorina—!"

"Three!"

It had become a game between them, and continued to be a game until all the ten cigarettes had made their journey through the air.

Vere would not let Ruffo know when a cigarette was coming, but kept him on the alert, pretending, holding it poised above him between his finger and thumb until even his eyes blinked from gazing upward; then dropping it when she thought he was unprepared, or throwing it like a missile. But she soon knew that she had found her match in the boy. And when he caught the tenth and last cigarette in his mouth she clapped her hands, and cried out so enthusiastically that one of the men in the boat heaved himself up from the bottom, and, choking down a yawn, stared with heavy amazement at the young virgin of the rocks, and uttered a "Che Diavolo!" under his stiff mustache.

Vere saw his astonishment, and swiftly, with a parting wave of her hand to Ruffo, she disappeared, leaving her protégé to run off gayly with his booty to his comrades of the Sirena del Mare.

CHAPTER III

"I can see the boat, Vere," said Hermione, when the girl came back, her eyes still gleaming with memories of the fun of the cigarette game with Ruffo.

"Where, Madre?"

She sat down quickly beside her mother on the window-seat, leaning against her confidentially and looking out over the sea. Hermione put her arm round the girl's shoulder.

"There! Don't you see!" She pointed. "It has passed Casa Pantano."

"I see! Yes, that is Gaspare, and Monsieur Emile in the stern. They won't be late for lunch. I almost wish they would, Madre."

"Why?"

"I'm not a bit hungry. Ruffo wouldn't eat the dolce, so I did."

"Ruffo! You seem to have made great friends with that boy."

She did not speak rebukingly, but with a sort of tender amusement.

"I really have," returned Vere.

She put her head against her mother's shoulder.

"Isn't this odd, Madre? Twice in the short time I've known Ruffo, he's obeyed me. The first time he was in the boat. I called out to him to dive in, and he did it instantly. The second time he was under water, at the very bottom of the sea. He looked as if he were dead, and for a minute I felt frightened. So I called out to him to come up, and he came up directly."

"But that only shows that he's a polite boy and does what you wish."

"No, no. He didn't hear me either time. He had no idea I had called. But each time I did, without hearing me he had the sudden wish to do what I wanted. Now, isn't that curious?"

She paused.

"Madre?" she added.

"You think you influenced him?"

"Don't you think I did?"

"Perhaps so. There's a sympathetic link of youth between you. You are gloriously young, both of you, little daughter. And youth turns naturally to youth, though I'm afraid old age doesn't always turn naturally to old age."

"What do you know about old age, Madre? You haven't a gray hair."

She spoke with anxious encouragement.

"It's true. My hair declines to get gray."

"I don't believe you'll ever be gray."

"Probably not. But there's another grayness—Life behind one instead of before; the emotional—"

She stopped herself. This was not for Vere.

"They're close in," she said, looking out of the window.

She waved her hand. The big man in the stern of the boat took off his hat in reply, and waved his hand, too. The rower pulled with the vivacity that comes to men near the end of a task, and the boat shot into the Pool of the Saint, where Ruffo was at that moment enjoying his third cigarette.

"I'll run down and meet Monsieur Emile," said Vere.

And she disappeared as swiftly as she had come.

The big man who got out of the boat could not claim Hermione's immunity from gray hairs. His beard was lightly powdered with them, and though much of the still thick hair on his head was brown, and his figure was erect, and looked strong and athletic—he seemed what he was, a man of middle age, who had lived, and thought, and observed much. His eyes had the peculiar expression of eyes that have seen very many and very various sights. It was difficult to imagine them not looking keenly intelligent. The vivacity of youth was no longer in them, but the vividness of intellect, of an intellect almost fiercely alive and tenacious of its life, was never absent from them.

As Artois got out, the boat's prow was being held by the Sicilian, Gaspare, now a man of thirty-five, but still young-looking. Many Sicilians grow old quickly—hard life wears them out. But Gaspare's fate had been easier than that of most of his contemporaries and friends of Marechiaro. Ever since the tragic death of the beloved master, whom he still always spoke of as "mio Padrone," he had been Hermione's faithful attendant and devoted friend. Yes, she knew him to be that—she wished him to be that. Their stations in life might be different, but they had come to sorrow together. They had suffered together and been in sympathy while they suffered. He had loved what she had loved, lost it when she had lost it, wept for it when she had wept.

And he had been with her when she had waited for the coming of the child.

Hermione really cared for three people: Gaspare was one of them. He knew it. The other two were Vere and Emile Artois.

"Vere," said Artois, taking her two hands closely in his large hands, and gazing into her face with the kind, even affectionate directness that she loved in him: "do you know that to-day you are looking insolent?"

"Insolent!" said the girl. "How dare you!"

She tried to take her hands away.

"Insolently young," he said, keeping them authoritatively.

"But I am young. What do you mean, Monsieur Emile?"

"I? It is your meaning I am searching for."

"I sha'n't let you find it. You are much too curious about people. But—I've been having a game this morning."

"A game! Who was your playmate?"

"Never mind."

But her bright eyes went for the fraction of a second to Ruffo, who close by in the boat was lying at his ease, his head thrown back, and one of the cigarettes between his lips.

"What! That boy there?"

"Nonsense! Come along! Madre has been sitting at the window for ages looking out for the boat. Couldn't you sail at all Gaspare?"

Artois had let go her hands, and now she turned to the Sicilian.

"To Naples, Signorina, and nearly to the Antico Giuseppone coming back."

"But we had to do a lot of tacking," said Artois. "Mon Dieu! That boy is smoking one of my cigarettes! You sacrilegious little creature! You have been robbing my box!"

Gaspare's eyes followed Artois' to Ruffo, who was watching them attentively, but who now looked suddenly sleepy.

"It belongs to Madre."

"It was bought for me."

"I like you better with a pipe. You are too big for cigarettes. And besides, artists always smoke pipes."

"Allow me to forget that I try to be an artist when I come to the island, Vere."

"Yes, yes, I will," she said, with a pretty air of relenting. "You poor thing, here you are a king incognito, and we all treat you quite familiarly. I'll even go first, regardless of etiquette." And she went off to the steps that led upward to the house.

Artois followed her. As he went he said to Ruffo in the Neapolitan dialect:

"It's a good cigarette, isn't it? You are in luck this morning."

"Si, Signore," said the boy, smiling. "The Signorina gave me ten."

And he blew out a happy cloud.

There was something in his welcoming readiness of response, something in his look and voice, that seemed to stir within the tenacious mind of Artois a quivering chord of memory.

"I wonder if I have spoken to that boy in Naples?" he thought, as he mounted the steps behind Vere.

Hermione met him at the door of her room, and they went in almost directly to lunch with Vere. When the meal was over Vere disappeared, without saying why, and Hermione and Artois returned to Hermione's room to have coffee. By this time the day was absolutely windless, the sky had become nearly white, and the sea was a pale gray, flecked here and there with patches of white.

"This is like a June day of scirocco," said Artois, as he lit his pipe with the air of a man thoroughly at home. "I wonder if it will succeed in affecting Vere's spirits. This morning, when I arrived, she looked wildly young. But the day held still some blue then."

Hermione was settling herself slowly in a low chair near the window that faced Capri. The curious, rather ghastly light from the sea fell over her.

"Vere is very sensitive to almost all influences," she said. "You know that, Emile."

"Yes," he said, throwing away the match he had been using; "and the influence of this morning roused her to joy. What was it?"

"She was very excited watching a diver for frutti di mare."

"A boy about seventeen or eighteen, black hair, Arab eyes, bronze skin, a smile difficult to refuse, and a figure almost as perfect as a Nubian's, but rather squarer about the shoulders?"

"You have seen him, then?"

"Smoking ten of my special Khali Targa cigarettes, with his bare toes cocked up, and one hand drooping into the Saint's Pool."

Hermione smiled.

"My cigarettes! They're common property here," she said.

"That boy can't be a pure-bred Neapolitan, surely. And yet he speaks the language. There's no mistaking the blow he gives to the last syllable of a sentence."

"He's a Sicilian, Vere says."

"Pure bred?"

"I don't know."

"I fancy I must have run across him somewhere in or about Naples. It is he who made Vere, as I told her, look so insolently young this morning."

"Ah, you noticed! I, too, thought I had never seen her so full of the inner spirit of youth—almost as he was in Sicily."

"Yes," Artois said, gravely. "In some things she is very much his daughter."

"In some things only?" asked Hermione.

"Don't you think so? Don't you think she has much of you in her also? I do."

"Has she? I don't know that I see it. I don't know that I want to see it. I always look for him in Vere. You see, I dreamed of having a boy. Vere is instead of the boy I dreamed of, the boy—who never came, who will never come."

"My friend," said Artois, very seriously and gently, "are you still allowing your mind to dwell upon that old imagination? And with Vere before you, can you regard her merely as a substitute, an understudy?"

An energy that was not free from passion suddenly flamed up in Hermione.

"I love Vere," she said. "She is very close to me. She knows it. She does not doubt me or my love."

"But," he quietly persisted, "you still allow your mind to rove ungoverned among those dangerous ways of the past?"

"Emile," she said, still speaking with vehemence, "it may be very easy to a strong man like you to direct his thoughts, to keep them out of one path and guide them along another. It may be—I don't know whether it is; but I don't pretend to such strength. I don't believe it is ever given to women. Perhaps even strength has its sex—I sometimes think so. I have my strength, believe me. But don't require of me the peculiar strength that is male."

"The truth is that you love living in the past as the Bedouin loves living in the desert."

"It was my oasis," she answered, simply.

"And all these years—they have made no difference?"

"Did you think they would? Did you think they had?"

"I hoped so. I thought—I had begun to think that you lived again in Vere."

"Emile, you can always stand the truth, can't you? Don't say you can't. That would hurt me horribly. Perhaps you do not know how sometimes I mentally lean on you. And I like to feel that if you knew the absolute truth of me you would still look upon me with the same kind, understanding eyes as now. Perhaps no one else would. Would you, do you think?"

"I hope and believe I could," he said. "You do not live in Vere. Is that it?"

"I know it is considered the right, the perfectly natural thing that a mother, stricken as I have been, should find in time perfect peace and contentment in her child. Even you—you spoke of 'living again.' It's the consecrated phrase, Emile, isn't it? I ought to be living again in Vere. Well, I'm not doing that. With my nature I could never do that. Is that horrible?"

"Ma pauvre amie!" he said.

He bent down and touched her hand.

"I don't know," she said, more calmly, as if relieved, but still with an undercurrent of passion, "whether I could ever live again in the life of another. But if I did it would be in the life of a man. I am not made to live in a woman's life, really to live, giving out the force that is in me. I know I'm a middle-aged woman—to these Italians here more than that, an old woman. But I'm not a finished woman, and I never shall be till I die. Vere is my child. I love her tenderly; more than that—passionately. She has always been close to me, as you know. But no, Emile, my relation to Vere, hers to me, does not satisfy all my need of love, my power to love. No, no, it doesn't. There's something in me that wants more, much more than that. There's something in me that—I think only a son of his could have satisfied my yearning. A son might have been Maurice come back to me, come back in a different, beautiful, wonderfully pure relation. I prayed for a son. I needed a son. Don't misunderstand me, Emile; in a way a son could never have been so close to me as Vere is,—but I could have lived in him as I can never live in Vere. I could have lived in him almost as once I lived in Maurice. And to-day I—"

She got up suddenly from her chair, put her arms on the window-frame, and leaned out to the strange, white day.

"Emile," she said, in a moment, turning round to him, "I want to get away, on to the sea. Will you row me out, into the Grotto of Virgil?[*] It's so dreadfully white here, white and ghastly. I can't talk naturally here. And I should like to go on a little farther, now I've begun. It would do me good to make a clean breast of it, dear brother confessor. Shall we take the little boat and go?"

[*] The grotto described in this book is not really the

Grotto of Virgil, but it is often called so by the fishermen

along the coast.

"Of course," he said.

"I'll get a hat."

She was away for two or three minutes. During that time Artois stood by the window that looked towards Ischia. The stillness of the day was intense, and gave to his mind a sensation of dream. Far off across the gray-and-white waters, partially muffled in clouds that almost resembled mist, the mountains of Ischia were rather suggested, mysteriously indicated, than clearly seen. The gray cliffs towards Bagnoli went down into motionless water gray as they were, but of a different, more pathetic shade.

There was a luminous whiteness in the sky that affected the eyes, as snow does.

Artois, as he looked, thought this world looked very old, a world arranged for the elderly to dwell in. Was it not, therefore, an appropriate setting for him and for Hermione? As this idea came into his mind it sent a rather bitter smile to his lips, and Hermione, coming in just then, saw the smile and said,—

"What is it, Emile? Why are you smiling?"

"Perhaps I will tell you when we are on the sea," he answered.

He looked at her. She had on a black hat, over which a white veil was fastened. It was tied beneath her chin, and hung down in a cloud over her breast. It made him think of the strange misty clouds which brooded about the breasts of the mountains of Ischia.

"Shall we go?" she said.

"Yes. What is Vere doing?"

"She is in her room."

"What is she doing there?"

"Reading, I suppose. She often shuts herself up. She loves reading almost more than I do."

"Well?"

Hermione led the way down-stairs. When they were outside, on the crest of the islet, the peculiar sickliness of the weather struck them both more forcibly.

"This is the strangest scirocco effect I think I have ever seen," said Artois. "It is as if nature were under the influence of a drug, and had fallen into a morbid dream, with eyes wide open, and pale, inert and folded hands. I should like to see Naples to-day, and notice if this weather has any effect upon that amazing population. I wonder if my young friend, Marchese Isidoro Panacci—By-the-way, I haven't told you about him?"

"No."

"I must. But not now. We will continue our former conversation. Where shall we find the boat, the small one?"

"Gaspare will bring it—Gaspare! Gaspare!"

"Signora!" cried a strong voice below.

"La piccola barca!"

"Va bene, Signora!"

They descended slowly. It would have been almost impossible to do anything quickly on such a day. The smallest movement, indeed, seemed almost an outrage, likely to disturb the great white dreamer of the sea. When they reached the foot of the cliff Gaspare was there, holding the little craft in which Vere had gone out with Ruffo.

"Do you want me, Signora?"

"No, thank you, Gaspare. Don Emilio will row me. We are only going a very little way."

She stepped in. As Artois followed her he said to Gaspare:

"Those fishermen have gone?"

"Five minutes ago, Signore. There they are!"

He pointed to a boat at some distance, moving slowly in the direction of Posilipo.

"I have been talking with them. One says he is of my country, a Sicilian."

"The boy?"

"Si, Signore, the giovinotto. But he cannot speak Sicilian, and he has never been in Sicily, poveretto!"

Gaspare spoke with an accent of pity in which there was almost a hint of contempt.

"A rivederci, Signore," he added, pushing off the little boat.

"A rivederci, Gaspare."

Artois took the oars and paddled very gently out, keeping near to the cliffs of the opposite shore.

"Even San Francesco looks weary to-day," he said, glancing across the pool at the Saint on his pedestal. "I should not be surprised if, when we return, we find that he has laid down his cross and is reclining like the tired fishermen who come here in the night. Where shall we go?"

"To the Grotto of Virgil."

"I wonder if Virgil was ever in his grotto? I wonder if he ever came here on such a day of scirocco as this, and felt that the world was very old, and he was even older than the world?"

"Do you feel like that to-day?"

"I feel that this is a world suitable for the old, for those who have white hairs to accord with the white waters, and whose nights are the white nights of age."

"Was that why you were smiling so strangely just now when I came in?"

"Yes."

He rowed on softly. The boat slipped out of the Pool of the Saint, and then they saw the Capo Coroglio and the Island of Nisida with its fort. On their right, and close to them, rose the weary-looking cliffs, honey-combed with caverns, and seamed with fissures as an old and haggard face is seamed with wrinkles that tell of many cares.

"Here is the grotto," said Hermione, almost directly. "Row in gently."

He obeyed her and turned the boat, sending it in under the mighty roof of rock.

A darkness fell upon them. They had a safe, enclosed sensation in escaping for a moment from the white day, almost as if they had escaped from a white enemy.

Artois let the oars lie still in the water, keeping his hands lightly upon them, and both Hermione and he were silent for a few minutes, listening to the tiny sounds made now and then by drops of moisture which fell from the cavern roof softly into the almost silent sea. At last Artois said:

"You are out of the whiteness now. This is a shadowed place like a confessional, where murmuring lips tell to strangers the stories of their lives. I am not a stranger, but tell me, my friend, about yourself and Vere. Perhaps you scarcely know how deeply the mother and child problem interests me—that is, when mother and child are two real forces, as you and Vere are."

"Then you think Vere has force?"

"Do not you?"

"What kind of force?"

"You mean physical, intellectual, or moral? Suppose I say she has the force of charm!"

"Indeed she has that, as he had. That is one of the attributes she derives from Maurice."

"Yes. He had a wonderful charm. And then, Vere has passion."

"You think so?"

"I am sure of it. Where does she get that from?"

"He was full of the passion of the South."

"I think Vere has a touch of Northern passion in her, too, combined perhaps with the other. And that, I think, she derives from you. Then I discern in Vere intellectual force, immature, embryonic if you like, but unmistakable."

"That does not come from me," Hermione said, suddenly, almost with bitterness.

"Why—why will you be unnecessarily humiliated?" Artois exclaimed.

His voice was confusedly echoed by the cavern, which broke into faint, but deep mutterings. Hermione looked up quickly to the mysterious vault which brooded above them, and listened till the chaotic noises died away. Then she said:

"Do you know what they remind me of?"

"Of what?"

"My efforts. Those efforts I made long ago to live again in work."

"When you wrote?"

"Yes, when I tried to throw my mind and my heart down upon paper. How strange it was! I had Vere—but she wasn't enough to still the ache. And I knew what work can be, what a consolation, because I knew you. And I stretched out my hands to it—I stretched out my soul. And it was no use; I wasn't made to be a successful writer. When I spoke from my heart to try and move men and save myself, my words were seized, as yours were just now by the rock—seized, and broken, and flung back in confusion. They struck my heart like stones. Emile, I'm one of those people who can only do one thing: I can only feel."

"It is true that you could never be an artist. Perhaps you were made to be an inspiration."

"But that's not enough. The role of starter to those who race—I haven't the temperament to reconcile myself to that. It's not that I have in me a conceit which demands to be fed. But I have in me a force that clamors to exercise itself. Only when I was living on Monte Amato with Maurice did I feel that the force was being used as God meant it to be used."

"In loving?"

"In loving passionately something that was utterly worthy to be loved."

Artois was silent. He knew Hermione's mistake. He knew what had never been told him: that Maurice had been false to her for the love of the peasant girl Maddalena. He knew that Maurice had been done to death by the betrayed girl's father, Salvatore. And Gaspare knew these things, too. But through all these years these two men had so respected silence, the nobility of it, the grand necessity of it in certain circumstances of life, that they had never spoken to each other of the black truth known to them both. Indeed, Artois believed that even now, after more than sixteen years, if he ventured one word against the dead man Gaspare would be ready to fly at his throat in defence of the loved Padrone. For this divined and persistent loyalty Artois had a sensation of absolute love. Between him and Gaspare there must always be the barrier of a great and mutual reserve. Yet that very reserve, because there was something truly delicate, and truly noble in it, was as a link of steel between them. They were watchdogs of Hermione. They had been watchdogs through all these years, guarding her from the knowledge of a truth. And so well had they done her service that now to-day she was able to say, with clasped hands and the light of passion in her eyes:

"Something that was utterly worthy to be loved."

When Artois spoke again he said:

"And that force cannot be fully used in loving Vere?"

"No, Emile. Is that very horrible, very unnatural?"

"Why should it be?"

"I have tried—I have tried for years, Emile, to make Vere enough. I have even been false with myself. I have said to myself that she was enough. I did that after I knew that I could never produce work of any value. When Vere was a baby I lived only for her. Again, when she was beginning to grow up, I tried to live, I did live only for her. And I remember I used to say, I kept on saying to myself, 'This is enough for me. I do not need any more than this. I have had my life. I am now a middle-aged woman. I must live in my child. This will be my satisfaction. This is my satisfaction. This is using rightly and naturally all that force I feel within me.' I kept on saying this. But there is something within one which rises up and defies a lie—however beautiful the lie is, however noble it is. And I think even a lie can sometimes be both. Don't you, Emile?"

It almost seemed to him for a moment that she knew his lie and Gaspare's.

"Yes," he said. "I do think so."

"Well, that lie of mine—it was defied. And it had no more courage."

"I want you to tell me something," he said, quietly. "I want you to tell me what has happened to-day."

"To-day?"

"Yes. Something has happened either to-day or very recently—I am sure of it—that has stirred up within you this feeling of acute dissatisfaction. It was always there. But something has called it into the open. What has done that?"

Hermione hesitated.

"Perhaps you don't know," he said.

"I was wondering—yes, I do know. I must be truthful with myself—with you. I do know. But it seems so strange, so almost inexplicable, and even rather absurd."

"Truth often seems absurd."

"It was that boy, that diver for frutti di mare—Ruffo."

"The boy with the Arab eyes?"

"Yes. Of course I have seen many boys full of life and gayety and music. There are so many in Italy. But—well, I don't know—perhaps it was partly Vere."

"How do you mean?"

"Vere was so interested in him. It may have been that. Or perhaps it was something in his look and in his voice when he was singing. I don't really know what it was. But that boy made me feel—more horribly than I have ever felt before—that Vere is not enough. Emile, there is some hunger, so persistent, so peculiar, so intense, that one feels as if it must be satisfied eventually, as if it were impossible for it not to be satisfied. I think that human hunger for immortal life is like that, and I think my hunger for a son is like that. I know my hunger can never be satisfied. And yet it lives on in me just as if it knew more than I know, as if it knew that it could and must. After all these years I can't, no, I can't reconcile myself to the fact that Maurice was taken from me so utterly, that he died without stamping himself upon a son. It seems as if it couldn't be. And I feel to-day that I cannot bear that it is."

There were tears standing in her eyes. She had spoken with a force of feeling, with a depth of sincerity, that startled Artois, intimately as he knew her. Till this moment he had not quite realized the wonderful persistence of love in the hearts of certain women, and not only the persistence of love's existence, but of its existence undiminished, unabated by time.

"How am I to bear it?" she said, as he did not speak.

"I cannot tell. I am not worthy to know. And besides, I must say to you, Hermione, that one of the greatest mysteries in human life, at any rate to me, is this: how some human beings do bear the burdens laid upon them. Christ bore His cross. But there has only been, since the beginning of things, one Christ, and it is unthinkable that there can ever be another. But all those who are not Christ, how is it they bear what they do bear? It is easy to talk of bravery, the necessity for it in life. It is always very easy to talk. The thing that is impossible is to understand. How can you come to me to help you, my friend? And suppose I were to try. How could I try, except by saying that I think Vere is very worthy to be loved with all your love?"

"You love Vere, don't you, Emile?"

"Yes."

"And I do. You don't doubt that?"

"Never."

"After all I have said, the way I have spoken, you might."

"I do not doubt it for a moment."

"I wonder if there is any mother who would not, if I spoke to her as I have spoken to you to-day?"

"I think there is a great deal of untruth spoken of mother's love, a great deal of misconception about it, as there is about most very strange, and very wonderful and beautiful things. But are you so sure that if your husband had stamped himself upon a boy this force within you could have been satisfied?"

"I have believed so."

She was silent. Then she added, quietly, "I do believe so."

He did not speak, but sat looking down at the sea, which was full of dim color in the cave.

"I think you are doubting that it would have been so?" she said, at last.

"Yes, that is true. I am doubting."

"I wonder why?"

"I cannot help feeling that there is passion in you, such passion as could not be satisfied in any strict, maternal relationship."

"But I am old, dear Emile," she said, very simply.

"When I was standing by that window, looking at the mountains of Ischia, I was saying to myself, 'This is an old, tired world, suitable for me—and for you. We are in our right environment to-day.' I was saying that, Hermione, but was I believing it, really? I don't think I was. And I am ten years older than you, and I have been given a nature that was, I think, always older than yours could ever be."

"I wonder if that is so."

She looked at him very directly, even searchingly, not with eager curiosity, but with deep inquiry.

"You know, Emile," she added, "I tell you very much, but you tell me very little. Not that I wish to ask anything—no. I respect all your reserve. And about your work: you tell me all that. It is a great thing in my life, your work. Perhaps you don't realize how sometimes I live in the book that you are doing, almost as if I were writing it myself. But your inner life—"

"But I have been frankness itself with you," said Artois. "To no one have I ever said so much as to you."

"Yes, I know, about many things. But about emotion, love,—not friendship, the other love—do you get on without that? When you say your nature has always been older than mine, do you mean that it has always been harder to move by love, that it has had less need of love?"

"I think so. For many years in my life I think that work has filled the place love occupies in many, perhaps in most men's lives. Everything comes second to work. I know that, because if any one attempts to interfere with my work, or to usurp any of the time that should be given to it, any regard I may have for that person turns at once to irritation, almost to hatred."

"I have never done that?"

"You—no. Of course, I have been like other men. When I was young—well, Hermione, after all I am a Frenchman, and though I am of Normandy, still I passed many years in Paris, as you know."

"All that I understand. But the real thing? Such as I have known?"

"I have never broken my heart for any one, though I have known agitations. But even those were long ago. And since I was thirty-five I have never felt really dominated by any one. Before that time I occasionally passed under the yoke, I believe, like other men. Why do you fix your eyes on me like that?"

"I was wondering if you could ever pass under the yoke again."

"Honestly, I do not think so. I am not sure. When can one be certain that one will never be, or do, this or that? Surely,"—he smiled,—"you are not afraid for me?"

"I do not say that. But I think you have forces in you not fully exercised even by your work."

"Possibly. But there the years do really step in and count for something, even for much. There is no doubt that as the years increase, the man who cares at all for intellectual pleasures is able to care for them more, is able to substitute them, without keen regret, without wailing and gnashing of teeth, for certain other pleasures, to which, perhaps, formerly he clung. That is why the man who is mentally and bodily—you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"Has such an immense advantage in years of decline over the man who is merely a bodily man."

"I am sure that is true. But—"

"What is it?"

"The heart? What about that?"

"Perhaps there are some hearts that can fulfil themselves sufficiently in friendship."

As Artois said this his eyes rested upon Hermione with an expression in them that revealed much that he never spoke in words. She put out her hand, and took his, and pressed it, holding hers over it upon the oar.

"Emile," she said, "sometimes you make me feel unworthy and ungrateful because—because I still need, I dare to need more than I have been given. Without you I don't know how I should have faced it."

"Without me you would never have had to face it."

That was the cry that rose up perpetually in the heart of Artois, the cry that Hermione must never hear. He said to her now:

"Without you, Hermione, I should be dust in the dust of Africa!"

"Perhaps we each owe something to the other," she said. "It is blessed to have a debt to a friend."

"Would to God that I could pay all my debt to you!" Artois exclaimed.

Again the cavern took up his voice and threw it back to the sea in confused and hollow mutterings. They both looked up, as if some one were above them, warning them or rebuking them. At that instant they had the feeling that they were being watched. But there was only the empty gray sea about them, and over their heads the rugged, weary rock that had leaned over the sea for countless years.

"Hark!" said Artois, "it is telling me that my debt to you can never be paid: only in one way could it be partially discharged. If I could show you a path to happiness, the happiness you long for, and need, the passionate happiness of the heart that is giving where it rejoices to give—for your happiness must always be in generosity—I should have partially paid my debt to you. But that is impossible."

"I've made you sad to-day by my complaining," she said, with self-rebuke; "I'm sorry. You didn't realize?"

"How it was with you? No, not quite—I thought you were more at peace than you are."

"Till to-day I believe I was half deceived too."

"That singing boy, that—what is his name?"

"Ruffo."

"That Ruffo, I should like to run a knife into him under the left shoulder-blade. How dare he, a ragamuffin from some hovel of Naples, make you know that you are unhappy?"

"How strange it is what outside things, or people who have no connection with us or with our lives, can do to us unconsciously!" she said. "I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay, seen a hundred rowing their boats into the Pool—and just this one touches some chord, and all the strings of my soul quiver."

"Some people act upon us somewhat as nature does sometimes. And Vere paid the boy. There is another irony of unconsciousness. Vere, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, rewards your pain-giver. How we hide ourselves from those we love best and live with most intimately! You, her mother, are a stranger to Vere. Does not to-day prove it?"

"Ah, but Vere is not a stranger to me. That is where the mother has the advantage of the child."

Artois did not make any response to this remark. To cover his silence, perhaps, he grasped the oars more firmly and began to back the boat out of the cave. Both felt that it was no longer necessary to stay in this confessional of the rock.

As they came out under the grayness of the sky, Hermione, with a change of tone, said:

"And your friend? The Marchese—what is his name?"

"Isidoro Panacci."

"Tell me about him."

"He is a very perfect type of a complete Neapolitan of his class. He has scarcely travelled at all, except in Italy. Once he has been in Paris, where I met him, and once to Lucerne for a fortnight. Both his father and mother are Neapolitans. He is a charming fellow, utterly unintellectual, but quite clever; shrewd, sharp at reading character, marvellously able to take care of himself, and hold his own with anybody. A cat to fall on his feet! He is apparently born without any sense of fear, and with a profound belief in destiny. He can drive four-in-hand, swim for any number of hours without tiring, ride—well, as an Italian cavalry officer can ride, and that is not badly. His accomplishments? He can speak French—abominably, and pick out all imaginable tunes on the piano, putting instinctively quite tolerable basses. I don't think he ever reads anything, except the Giorno and the Mattino. He doesn't care for politics, and likes cards, but apparently not too much. They're no craze with him. He knows Naples inside out, and is as frank as a child that has never been punished."

"I should think he must be decidedly attractive?"

"Oh, he is. One great attraction he has—he appears to have no sense at all that difference of age can be a barrier between two men. He is twenty-four, and I am what I am. He is quite unaware that there is any gulf between us. In every way he treats me as if I were twenty-four."

"Is that refreshing or embarrassing?"

"I find it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's chum with all the good-will in the world."

Hermione could not help laughing, and Artois echoed her laugh.

"Merely talking about him has made you look years younger," she declared. "The influence of the day has lifted from you."

"It would not have fallen upon Isidoro, I think. And yet he is full of sentiment. He is a curious instance of a very common Neapolitan obsession."

"What is that?"

"He is entirely obsessed by woman. His life centres round woman. You observe I use the singular. I do that because it is so much more plural than the plural in this case. His life is passed in love-affairs, in a sort of chaos of amours."

"How strange that is!"

"You think so, my friend?"

"Yes. I never can understand how human beings can pass from love to love, as many of them do. I never could understand it, even before I—even before Sicily."

"You are not made to understand such a thing."

"But you do?"

"I? Well, perhaps. But the loves of men are not as your love."

"Yet his was," she answered. "And he was a true Southerner, despite his father.

"Yes, he was a true Southerner," Artois replied.

For once he was off his guard with her, and uttered his real thought of Maurice, not without a touch of the irony that was characteristic of him.

Immediately he had spoken he was aware of his indiscretion. But Hermione had not noticed it. He saw by her eyes that she was far away in Sicily. And when the boat slipped into the Saint's Pool, and Gaspare came to the water's edge to hold the prow while they got out, she rose from her seat slowly, and almost reluctantly, like one disturbed in a dream that she would fain continue.

"Have you seen the Signorina, Gaspare?" she asked him. "Has she been out?"

"No, Signora. She is still in the house."

"Still reading!" said Artois. "Vere must be quite a book-worm!"

"Will you stay to dinner, Emile?"

"Alas, I have promised the Marchesino Isidoro to dine with him. Give me a cup of tea a la Russe, and one of Ruffo's cigarettes, and then I must bid you adieu. I'll take the boat to the Antico Giuseppone, and then get another there as far as the gardens."

"One of Ruffo's cigarettes!" Hermione echoed, as they went up the steps. "That boy seems to have made himself one of the family already."

"Yet I wish, as I said in the cave, that I had put a knife into him under the left shoulder-blade—before this morning."

They spoke lightly. It seemed as if each desired for the moment to get away from their mood in the confessional of Virgil's Grotto, and from the sadness of the white and silent day.

As to Ruffo, about whom they jested, he was in sight of Naples, and not far from Mergellina, still rowing with tireless young arms, and singing to "Bella Napoli," with a strong resolve in his heart to return to the Saint's Pool on the first opportunity and dive for more cigarettes.

CHAPTER IV

At the Antico Giuseppone, Artois left the boat from the islet and, taking another, was rowed towards the public gardens of Naples, whose trees were faintly visible far off across the Bay. Usually he talked familiarly to any Neapolitan with whom he found himself, but to-day he was taciturn, and sat in the stern of the broad-bottomed craft looking towards the city in silence while the boatman plied his oars. The memory of his conversation with Hermione in the Grotto of Virgil, of her manner, the look in her eyes, the sound of her voice there, gave him food for thought that was deep and serious.

Although Artois had an authoritative, and often an ironical manner that frightened timid people, he was a man capable of much emotion and of great loyalty. He did not easily trust or easily love, but in those whose worth he had thoroughly proved he had a confidence as complete as that of a child. And where he placed his complete confidence he placed also his affection. The one went with the other almost as inevitably as the wave goes with the wind.

In their discussion about the emotion of the heart Artois had spoken the truth to Hermione. As he had grown older he had felt the influence of women less. The pleasures of sentiment had been gradually superceded in his nature—or so at least he honestly believed—by the purely intellectual pleasures. More and more completely and contentedly had he lived in his work, and in the life of preparation for it. This life could never be narrow, for Artois was a traveller, and studied many lands.

In the years that had elapsed since the tragedy in Sicily, when the husband of Hermione had met his death suddenly in the sea, almost in sight of the home of the girl he had betrayed, the fame of Artois had grown steadily. And he was jealous of his fame almost as a good woman is jealous of her honor. This jealousy had led him to a certain selfishness of which he was quite aware—even to a certain hardness such as he had hinted to Hermione. Those who strove, or seemed likely to strive to interrupt him in his work, he pushed out of his life. Even if they were charming women he got rid of them. And the fact that he did so proved to him, and not improbably to them, that he was more wrapped up in the gratification of the mind than in the gratification of the heart, or of the body. It was not that the charm of charming women had ceased to please him, but it seemed to have ceased really to fascinate him.

Long ago, before Hermione married, he had felt for her a warm and intimate friendship. He had even been jealous of Maurice. Without being at all in love, he had cared enough for Hermione to be jealous. Before her marriage he had looked forward in imagination down a vista of long years, and had seen her with a husband, then with children, always more definitely separated from himself.

And he had seen himself exceptionally alone, even almost miserably alone.

Then fate had spun tragedy into her web. He had nearly died in Africa, and had been nursed back to life by this friend of whom he had been jealous. And they had gone together to Sicily, to the husband whose memory Hermione still adored. And then had followed swiftly the murder, the murderer's departure to America, saved by the silence of Gaspare, and the journey of the bereaved woman to Italy, where Artois had left her and returned to France.

Once more Artois had his friend, released from the love of another man. But he wished it were not so. Hermione's generosity met with a full response of generosity from him. All his egotism and selfishness dropped from him then, shaken down like dead leaves by the tempest of a genuine emotion. His knowledge of her grief, his understanding of its depth, brought to him a sorrow that was keen, and even exquisitely painful. For a long while he was preoccupied by an intense desire to assuage it. He strove to do so by acting almost in defiance of his nature, by fostering deception. From the Abetone Hermione had written him letters, human documents—the tale of the suffering of a woman's heart. Many reserves she had from him and from every one. The most intimate agony was for her alone, and she kept it in her soul as the priest keeps the Sacred Host in its tabernacle. But some of her grief she showed in her letters, and some of her desire for comfort. And without any definite intention, she indicated to her subtle and devoted friend the only way in which he could console her.

For once, driven by his emotion, he took that way.

He allowed Hermione to believe that he agreed with her in the conception she had formed of her husband's love for her. It was difficult for him to do this, for he had an almost cruel passion for truth, and generally a clear insight into human character. Far less than many others would have condemned did he, in his mind, condemn the man who was dead for the sin against love that he had committed. He had understood Maurice as Hermione had not understood him, and knowledge is full of pardon. But though he could pardon easily he could not easily pretend. By pretending he sinned against himself, and helped his friend some steps along the way to peace. He thought he had helped her to go much farther along that way than she had gone. And he thought that Vere had helped her, too.

Now the hollow mutterings of the rock in Virgil's Grotto seemed to be in his heart, as he realized how permanent was the storm in Hermione's nature. Something for her he had done. And something—much more, no doubt—Vere had done. But how little it all was!

Their helplessness gave him a new understanding of woman.

Hermione had allowed him great privileges, had allowed him to protect her, had taken his advice. After Vere was born she had wished to go back again to Sicily. The house of the priest, where she had been so happy, and so sad, drew her. She longed for it. She desired to make it her home. He had fought against her in this matter, and had been aided by Gaspare.

There had been a subtle understanding, never expressed, between the boy and him.

Artois had played upon her intellect, had appealed, too, to her mother's heart.

He had not urged her to try to forget, but he had urged her not morbidly to remember, not to cherish and to foster the memory of the tragedy which had broken her life. To go back to that tiny home, solitary in its beautiful situation, in the changed circumstances which were hers, would be, he told her, to court and to summon sorrow. He was even cruel to be kind. When Hermione combated his view, assuring him that to her Monte Amato was like a sacred place, a place hallowed by memories of happiness, he recalled the despair in which that happiness had ended. With all the force at his command, and it was great, he drew the picture of the life that would be in comparison with the life that had been. And he told her finally that what she wished to do was morbid, was unworthy of her strength of character, was even wicked now that she was a mother. He brought before her mind those widows who make a cult of their dead. Would she be one of them? Would she steep a little child in such an atmosphere of memories, casting a young and tender mind backward into a cruel past instead of leading it forward into a joyous present? Maurice had been the very soul of happiness. Vere must be linked with the sunbeams. With his utmost subtlety Artois described and traced the effect upon a tiny and sensitive child of a mother's influence, whether for good or evil, until Hermione, who had a deep reverence for his knowledge of all phases of human nature, at last, almost in despite of the truth within her, of the interior voice which said to her, "With you and Vere it would not be so," caught alarm from his apparent alarm, drew distrust of herself from his apparent distrust of her.

Gaspare, too, played his part. When Hermione spoke to him of returning to the priest's house, almost wildly, and with the hot energy that bursts so readily up in Sicilians, he begged her not to go back to the maledetta casa in which his Padrone's dead body had lain. As he spoke a genuine fear of the cottage came upon him. All the latent superstition that dwells in the contadino was stirred as dust by a wind. In clouds it flew up about his mind. Fear looked out of his great eyes. Dread was eloquent in his gestures. And he, too, referred to the child, to the povera piccola bambina. It would cast ill-luck on the child to bring her up in a chamber of death. Her saint would forsake her. She too would die. The boy worked himself up into a fever. His face was white. Drops of sweat stood on his forehead.

He had set out to be deceptive—what he would have called un poco birbante, and he had even deceived himself. He knew that it would be dangerous for his Padrona to live again near Marechiaro. Any day a chance scrap of gossip might reach her ears. In time she would be certain almost to hear something of the dead Padrone's close acquaintance with the dwellers in the Casa delle Sirene. She would question him, perhaps. She would suspect something. She would inquire. She would search. She would find out the hideous truth. It was this fear which made him argue on the same side as Artois. But in doing so he caught another fear from his own words. He became really natural, really truthful in his fear. And—she scarcely knew why—Hermione was even more governed by him than by Artois. He had lived with them in the Casa del Prete, had been an intimate part of their life there. And he was Sicilian of the soil. The boy had a real power to move, to dominate her, which he did not then suspect.

Again and again he repeated those words, "La povera bambina—la povera piccola bambina." And at last Hermione was overcome.

"I won't go to Sicily," she said to Artois. "For if I went there I could only go to Monte Amato. I won't go until Vere is old enough to wish to go, to wish to see the house where her father and I were happy."

And she had never gone back. For Artois had not been satisfied with this early victory.

In returning from a tour in North America the following spring, when Vere was nearly two years old, he had paid a visit to Marechiaro, and, while there, had seen the contadino from whom Hermione had rented, and still rented, the house of the priest. The man was middle-aged, ignorant but shrewd, and very greedy. Artois made friends with him, and casually, over a glass of moscato, talked about his affairs and the land question in Sicily. The peasant became communicative and, of course, loud in his complaining. His land yielded nothing. The price of almonds had gone down. The lemon crop had been ruined by the storms. As to the vines—they were all devoured by the phylloxera, and he had no money to buy and plant vines from America. Artois hinted that he received a good rent from the English lady for the cottage on Monte Amato. The contadino acknowledged that he received a fair price for the cottage and the land about it; but the house, he declared, would go to rack and ruin with no one ever in it, and the land was lying idle, for the English lady would have everything left exactly as it had been when she lived there with her husband. Artois seized upon this hint of what was in the peasant's mind, and bemoaned with him his situation. The house ought to be occupied, the land all about it, up to the very door, and behind upon the sunny mountain-side, planted with American vines. If it belonged to him that was what he would do—plant American vines, and when the years of yielding came, give a good percentage on all the wine made and sold to the man who had tended the vineyard.

The peasant's love of money awoke. He only let the cottage to Hermione year by year, and had no contract with her extending beyond a twelve-months' lease. Before Artois left Marechiaro the tender treachery was arranged. When the year's lease was up, the contadino wrote to her declining to renew it. She answered, protesting, offering more money. But it was all in vain. The man replied that he had already let the cottage and the land around it to a grower of vines for a long term of years, and that he was getting double the annual price she offered.

Hermione was indignant and bitterly distressed. When this letter reached her she was at Fiesole with Vere in a villa which she had taken. She would probably have started at once for Sicily; but Vere was just then ill with some infantile complaint, and could not be left. Artois, who was in Rome, and had received from her the news of this carefully arranged disaster, offered to go to Sicily on her behalf—and actually went. He returned to tell her that the house of the priest was already occupied by contadini, and all the land up to the very door in process of being dug up and planted with vines. It was useless to make any further offer. The thing was done.

Hermione said nothing, but Artois saw in her eyes how keenly she was suffering, and turned his own eyes away. He was only trying to preserve her from greater unhappiness, the agony of ever finding out the truth; but he felt guilty at that moment, and as if he had been cruel to the woman who roused all his tenderness, all his protective instinct.

"I shall not go back to Marechiaro now," Hermione said. "I shall not go back even to see the grave. I could never feel that anything of his spirit lingered there. But I did feel, I should have felt again, as if something of him still loved that little house on the mountain, still stayed among the oak-trees. It seemed to me that when I took Vere to the Casa del Prete she would have learned to know something of her father there that she could never have learned to know in another place. But now—no, I shall not go back. If I did I should even lose my memories, perhaps, and I could not bear that."

And she had not returned. Gaspare went to Marechiaro sometimes, to see his family and his friends. He visited the grave and saw that it was properly kept. But Hermione remained in Italy. For some time she lived near Florence, first at Fiesole, later at Bellosguardo. When the summer heat came she took a villa at the Abetone. Or she spent some months with Vere beside the sea. As the girl grew older she developed a passion for the sea, and seemed to care little for the fascination of the pine forests. Hermione, noting this, gave up going to the Abetone and took a house by the sea for the whole summer. Two years they were at Santa Margherita, one year at Sorrento.

Then, sailing one evening on the sea towards Bagnoli, they saw the house on the islet beyond the Pool of San Francesco. Vere was enchanted by it.

"To live in it," she exclaimed, "would be almost like living in the sea!"

Hermione, too, was fascinated by its situation, the loneliness, the wildness, yet the radiant cheerfulness of it. She made inquiries, found that it was owned by a Neapolitan who scarcely ever went there, and eventually succeeded in getting it on a long lease. For two years now she and Vere had spent the summer there.

Artois had noticed that since Hermione had been in the Casa del Mare an old desire had begun to revive in her. She spoke more frequently of Sicily. Often she stood on the rock and looked across the sea, and he knew that she was thinking of those beloved coasts—of the Ionian waters, of the blossoming almond-trees among the olives and the rocks, of the scarlet geraniums glowing among the thorny cactus, of the giant watercourses leading up into the mountains. A hunger was awake in her, now that she had a home so near the enchanted island.

He realized it. But he was no longer much afraid. So many years had passed that even if Hermione revisited Marechiaro he believed there would be little or no danger now of her ever learning the truth. It had never been known in the village, and if it had been suspected, all the suspicions must have long ago died down. He had been successful in his protection. He was thankful for that. It was the one thing he had been able to do for the friend who had done so much for him.

The tragedy had occurred because of him. Because of him all knowledge of it had been kept from Hermione, and would now be kept from her forever—because of him and Gaspare.

This he had been able to do. But how powerless he was, and how powerless was Vere!

Now he looked vaguely at the villas of Posilipo, and he realized this thoroughly.

Something for her he had done, and something Vere had done. But how little it all was!

To-day a new light had been thrown upon Hermione, and he realized what she was as he had never realized it before. No, she was right. She could never live fully in a girl child—she was not made to do that. Why had he ever thought, hoped that perhaps it might be so, that perhaps Vere might some day completely and happily fill her life? Long ago he had encouraged her to work, to write. Misled by her keen intelligence, her enthusiasm, her sincerity and vitality, by the passion that was in her, the great heart, the power of feeling, the power of criticising and inspiring another which she had freely shown to him, Artois had believed—as he had once said to her in London—that she might be an artist, but that she preferred to be simply a woman. But he found it was not so. Hermione had not the peculiar gift of the writer. She could feel, but she could not arrange. She could discern, but she could not expose. A flood of words came to her, but not the inevitable word. She could not take that exquisite leap from the known into the unknown which genius can take with the certainty of alighting on firm ground. In short, she was not formed and endowed to be an artist. About such matters Artois knew only how to be sincere. He was sincere with his friend, and she thanked him for being so.

One possible life was taken from Hermione, the life of the artist who lives in the life of the work.

There remained the life in Vere.

To-day Artois knew from Hermione's own lips that she could not live completely in her child, and he felt that he had been blind as men are often blind about women, are blind because they are secretly selfish. The man lives for himself, but he thinks it natural, even distinctively womanly, that women should live for others—for him, for some other man, for their children. What man finds his life in his child? But the woman—she surely ought to, and without difficulty. Hermione had been sincere to-day, and Artois knew his blindness, and knew his secret selfishness.

The gray was lifting a little over Naples, the distant shadowy form of Vesuvius was becoming clearer, more firm in outline. But the boatman rowed slowly, influenced by the scirocco.

How, then, was Hermione to live? How was she to find happiness or peace? It was a problem which he debated with an ardor that had in it something of passion. And he began to wonder how it would have been if he had acted differently, if he had allowed her to find out what he suspected to be the exact truth of the dead man. Long ago he had saved her from suffering. But by doing so had he not dedicated her, not to a greater, but to a longer suffering? He might have defiled a beautiful memory. He must have done so had he acted differently. But if he had defiled it, might not Hermione have been the subject of a great revulsion? Horror can kill, but it can also cure. It can surely root out love. But from such a heart as Hermione's?

Despite all his understanding of women, Artois felt at a loss to-day. He could not make up his mind what would have been the effect upon Hermione if she had learned that her husband had betrayed her.

Presently he left that subject and came to Vere.

When he did this he was conscious at once of a change within him. His tenderness and pity for Hermione were replaced by another tenderness and pity. And these were wholly for Vere. Hermione was suffering because of Maurice. But Vere was surely suffering, subconsciously, because of Hermione.

There were two links in the chain of suffering, that between Maurice and Hermione, and that between Hermione and Vere.

For a moment he felt as if Vere were bereaved, were motherless. The sensation passed directly he realized the exaggeration in his mind. But he still felt as if the girl were deprived of something which she ought to possess, which, till now, he had thought she did possess. It seemed to him that Vere stood quite outside of her mother's life, instead of in it, in its centre, its core; and he pitied the child, almost as he pitied other children from time to time, children to whom their parents were indifferent. And yet Hermione loved Vere, and Vere could not know what he had only known completely to-day—that the mother often felt lonely with the child.

Vere did not know that, but surely some day she would find it out.

Artois knew her character well, knew that she was very sensitive, very passionate, quick to feel and quick to understand. He discovered in her qualities inherited both from her father and her mother, attributes both English and Sicilian. In appearance she resembled her father. She had "thrown back" to the Sicilian ancestor, as he had. She had the Southern eyes, the Southern grace, the Southern vivacity and warmth that had made him so attractive. But Artois divined a certain stubbornness in Vere that had been lacking in the dead man, a stubbornness that took its rise not in stupidity but in a secret consciousness of force.

Vere, Artois thought, might be violent, but would not be fickle. She had a loyalty in her that was Sicilian in its fervor, a sense of gratitude such as the contadini have, although by many it is denied to them; a quick and lively temper, but a disposition that responded to joy, to brightness, to gayety, to sunlight, with a swiftness, almost a fierceness, that was entirely un-English.

Her father had been the dancing Faun. She had not, could never have his gift of thoughtlessness. For she had intellect, derived from Hermione, and an old truthfulness that was certainly not Sicilian. Often there were what Artois called "Northern Lights" in her sincerity. The strains in her, united, made, he thought, a fascinating blend. But as yet she was undeveloped—an interesting, a charming child, but only a child. In many ways she was young for her age. Highly intelligent, she was anything rather than "knowing." Her innocence was like clear water in a spring. The graciousness of youth was hers to the full.

As Artois thought of it he was conscious, as of a new thing, of the wonderful beauty of such innocent youth.

It was horrible to connect it with suffering. And yet that link in the chain did exist. Vere had not something that surely she ought to have, and, without consciously missing it, she must sometimes subtly, perhaps vaguely, be aware that there was a lack in her life. Her mother gave her great love. But she was not to her mother what a son would have been. And the love that is mingled with regret has surely something shadowy in it.

Maurice Delarey had been as the embodiment of joy. It was strange that from the fount of joy sorrow was thrown up. But so it was. From him sorrow had come. From him sorrow might still come, even for Vere.

In the white and silent day Artois again felt the stirring of intuition, as he had felt it long ago. But now he roused himself, and resolutely, almost angrily, detached his mind from its excursions towards the future.

"Do you often think of to-morrow?" he suddenly said to the boatman, breaking from his silence.

"Signore?"

"Do you often wonder what is going to happen to-morrow, what you will do, whether you will be happy or sad?"

The man threw up his head.

"No, Signore. Whatever comes is destiny. If I have food to-day it is enough for me. Why should I bother about to-morrow's maccheroni?"

Artois smiled. The boat was close in now to the platform of stone that projected beneath the wall of the Marina.

As he stepped out he gave the boatman a generous buonamano.

"You are quite right, comrade," he said. "It is the greatest mistake in the world to bother about to-morrow's maccheroni."

CHAPTER V

Three days after Artois' conversation with Hermione in the Grotto of Virgil the Marchesino Isidoro Panacci came smiling into his friend's apartments in the Hotel Royal des Etrangers. He was smartly dressed in the palest possible shade of gray, with a bright pink tie, pink socks, brown shoes of the rather boat-like shape affected by many young Neopolitans, and a round straw hat, with a small brim, that was set slightly on the side of his curly head. In his mouth was a cigarette, and in his buttonhole a pink carnation. He took Artois' hand with his left hand, squeezed it affectionately, murmured "Caro Emilio," and sat down in an easy attitude on the sofa, putting his hat and stick on a table near by.

It was quite evident that he had come for no special reason. He had just dropped in, as he did whenever he felt inclined, to gossip with "Caro Emilio," and it never occurred to him that possibly he might be interrupting an important piece of work. The Marchesino could not realize work. He knew his friend published books. He even saw him sometimes actually engaged in writing them, pen in hand. But he was sure anybody would far rather sit and chatter with him, or hear him play a valse on the piano, or a bit of the "Boheme," than bend over a table all by himself. And Artois always welcomed him. He liked him. But it was not only that which made him complaisant. Doro was a type, and a singularly perfect one.

Now Artois laid down his pen, and pulled forward an arm-chair opposite to the sofa.

"Mon Dieu, Doro! How fresh you look, like a fish just pulled out of the sea!"

The Marchesino showed his teeth in a smile which also shone in his round and boyish eyes.

"I have just come out of the sea. Papa and I have been bathing at the Eldorado. We swam round the Castello until we were opposite your windows, and sang 'Funiculi, funicula!' in the water, to serenade you. Why didn't you hear us? Papa has a splendid voice, almost like Tamagno's in the gramophone, when he sings the 'Addio' from 'Otello.' Of course we kept a little out at sea. Papa is so easily recognized by his red mustaches. But still you might have heard us."

"I did."

"Then why didn't you come unto the balcony, amico mio?"

"Because I thought you were street singers."

"Davvero? Papa would be angry. And he is in a bad temper to-day anyhow."

"Why?"

"Well, I believe Gilda Mai is going to bring a causa against Viviano. Of course he won't marry her, and she never expected he could. Why, she used to be a milliner in the Toledo. I remember it perfectly, and now Sigismondo—But it's really Gilda that has made papa angry. You see, he has paid twice for me, once four thousand lire, and the other time three thousand five hundred. And then he has lost a lot at Lotto lately. He has no luck. And then he, too, was in a row yesterday evening."

"The Marchese?"

"Yes, in the Chiaia. He slapped Signora Merani's face twice before every one."

"Diavolo! What! a lady?"

"Well, if you like to call her so," returned Doro, negligently. "Her husband is an impiegato of the Post-office, or something of the kind."

"But why should the Marchese slap her face in the Chiaia?"

"Because she provoked him. They took a flat in the house my father owns in the Strada Chiatamone. After a time they got behind with the rent. He let them stay on for six months without paying, and then he turned them out. What should he do?" Doro began to gesticulate. He held his right hand up on a level with his face, with the fingers all drawn together and pressed against the thumb, and moved it violently backwards and forwards, bringing it close to the bridge of his nose, then throwing it out towards Artois. "What else, I say? Was he to give his beautiful rooms to them for nothing? And she with a face like—have you, I ask you, Emilio, have you seen her teeth?"

"I have never seen the Signora in my life!"

"You have never seen her teeth? Dio Mio!" He opened his two hands, and, lifting his arms, shook them loosely above his head, shutting his eyes for an instant as if to ward off some dreadful vision. "They are like the keys of a piano from Bordicelli's! Basta!" He dropped his hands and opened his eyes. "Yesterday papa was walking in the Chiaia. He met Signori Merani, and she began to abuse him. She had a red parasol. She shook it at him! She called him vigliacco—papa, a Panacci, dei Duchi di Vedrano! The parasol—it was a bright red, it infuriated papa. He told the Signora to stop. She knows his temper. Every one in Naples knows our tempers, every one! I, Viviano, even Sigismondo, we are all the same, we are all exactly like papa. If we are insulted we cannot control ourselves. You know it, Emilio!"

"I am perfectly certain of it," said Artois. "I am positive you none of you can."

"It does not matter whether it is a man or a woman. We must do something with our hands. We have got to. Papa told the Signora he should strike her at once unless she put down the red parasol and was silent. What did she do, the imbecile? She stuck out her face like this,"—he thrust his face forward with the right cheek turned towards Artois—"and said, 'Strike me! strike me!' Papa obeyed her. Poom! Poom! He gave her a smack on each cheek before every one. 'You want education!' he said to her. 'And I shall give it you.' And now she may bring a processo too. But did you really think we were street singers?" He threw himself back, took the cigarette from his mouth, and laughed. Then he caught hold of his blond mustache with both hands, gave it an upward twist, at the same time pouting his big lips, and added:

"We shall bring a causa against you for that!"

"No, Doro, you and I must never quarrel. By the way, though, I want to see you angry. Every one talks of the Panacci temper, but when I am with you I always see you smiling or laughing. As to the Marchese, he is as lively as a boy. Viviano—"

"Oh, Viviano is a buffone. Have you ever seen him imitate a monkey from whom another monkey has snatched a nut?"

"No."

"It is like this—"

With extraordinary suddenness he distorted his whole face into the likeness of an angry ape, hunching his shoulders and uttering fierce simian cries.

"No, I can't do it."

With equal suddenness and self-possession he became his smiling self again.

"Viviano has studied in the monkey-house. And the monk looking the other way when he passes along the Marina where the women are bathing in the summer! He shall do that for you on Sunday afternoon when you come to Capodimonte. It makes even mamma die of laughing, and you know how religious she is. But then, of course, men—that does not matter. Religion is for women, and they understand that quite well."

The Marchesino never made any pretence of piety. One virtue he had in the fullest abundance. He was perfectly sincere with those whom he considered his friends. That there could be any need for hypocrisy never occurred to him.

"Mamma would hate it if we were saints," he continued.

"I am sure the Marchesa can be under no apprehension on that score," said Artois.

"No, I don't think so," returned the Marchesino, quite seriously.

He had a sense of humor, but it did not always serve him. Occasionally it was fitful, and when summoned by irony remained at a distance.

"It is true, Emilio, you have never seen me angry," he continued, reverting to the remark of Artois; "you ought to. Till you have seen a Panacci angry you do not really know him. With you, of course, I could never be angry—never, never. You are my friend, my comrade. To you I tell everything."

A sudden remembrance seemed to come to him. Evidently a new thought had started into his active mind, for his face suddenly changed, and became serious, even sentimental.

"What is it?" asked Artois.

"To-day, just now in the sea, I have seen a girl—Madonna! Emilio, she had a little nose that was perfect—perfect. How she was simpatica! What a beautiful girl!"

His whole face assumed a melting expression, and he pursed his lips in the form of a kiss.

"She was in the sea, too?" asked Artois.

"No. If she had been! But I was with papa. It was just after we had been serenading you. She had heard us, I am sure, for she was laughing. I dived under the boat in which she was. I did all my tricks for her. I did the mermaid and the seal. She was delighted. She never took her eyes from me. As to papa—she never glanced at him. Poor papa! He was angry. She had her mother with her, I think—a Signora, tall, flat, ugly, but she was simpatica, too. She had nice eyes, and when I did the seal she could not help laughing, though I think she was rather sad."

"What sort of boat were they in?" Artois asked, with sudden interest.

"A white boat with a green line."

"And they were coming from the direction of Posilipo?"

"Ma si! Emilio, do you know them? Do you know the perfect little nose?"

The Marchesino laid one hand eagerly on the arm of his friend.

"I believe you do! I am sure of it! The mother—she is flat as a Carabiniere, and quite old, but with nice eyes, sympathetic, intelligent. And the girl is a little brown—from the sun—with eyes full of fun and fire, dark eyes. She may be Italian, and yet—there is something English, too. But she is not blonde, she is not cold. And when she laughs! Her teeth are not like the keys of a piano from Bordicelli's. And she is full of passion, of flame, of sentiment, as I am. And she is young, perhaps sixteen. Do you know her? Present me, Emilio! I have presented you to all my friends."

"Mio caro, you have made me your debtor for life."

"It isn't true!"

"Indeed it is true. But I do not know who these ladies are. They may be Italians. They may be tourists. Perhaps to-morrow they will have left Naples. Or they may come from Sorrento, Capri. How can I tell who they are?"

The Marchesino suddenly changed. His ardor vanished. His gesticulating hands fell to his sides. His expressive face grew melancholy.

"Of course. How can you tell? Directly I was out of the sea and dressed, I went to Santa Lucia. I examined every boat, but the white boat with the green line was not there, Basta!"

He lit a fresh cigarette and was silent for a moment. Then he said:

"Emilio caro, will you come out with me to-night?"

"With pleasure."

"In the boat. There will be a moon. We will dine at the Antico Giuseppone."

"So far off as that?" Artois said, rather abruptly.

"Why not? To-day I hate the town. I want tranquility. At the Antico Giuseppone there will be scarcely any one. It is early in the season. And afterwards we will fish for sarde, or saraglie. Take me away from Naples, Emilio; take me away! For to-night, if I stay—well, I feel that I shall not be santo."

Artois burst into his big roaring laugh.

"And why do you want to be santo to-night?" he asked.

"The beautiful girl! I wish to keep her memory, if only for one night."

"Very well, then. We will fish, and you shall be a saint."

"Caro Emilio! Perhaps Viviano will come, too. But I think he will be with Lidia. She is singing to-night at the Teatro Nuovo. Be ready at half-past seven. I will call for you. And now I shall leave you."

He got up, went over to a mirror, carefully arranged his tie, and put on his straw hat at exactly the most impudent angle.

"I shall leave you to write your book while I meet papa at the villa. Do you know why papa is so careful to be always at the villa at four o'clock just now?"

"No!"

"Nor does mamma! If she did! Povera mamma! But she can always go to Mass. A rivederci, Emilio."

He moved his hat a little more to one side and went out, swinging his walking-stick gently to and fro in a manner that was pensive and almost sentimental.

CHAPTER VI

The Marchesino Panacci was generally very sincere with his friends, and the boyish expression in his eyes was not altogether deceptive, for despite his wide knowledge of certain aspects of life, not wholly admirable, there was really something of the simplicity of a child—of a child that could be very naughty—in his disposition. But if he could be naïve he could also be mischievous and even subtle, and he was very swift in grasping a situation, very sharp in reading character, very cunning in the pursuit of his pleasure, very adroit in deception, if he thought that publicity of pursuit would be likely to lead to the frustration of his purpose.

He had seen at once that Artois either knew, or suspected, who were the occupants of the white boat with the green line, and he had also seen that, influenced perhaps by one of those second thoughts which lead men into caution, Artois desired to conceal his knowledge, or suspicion. Instantly the Marchesino had, therefore, dropped the subject, and as instantly he had devised a little plan to clear the matter up.

The Marchesino knew that when Artois had arrived in Naples he had had no friends in the town or neighborhood. But he also knew that recently an Englishwoman, an old friend of the novelist, had come upon the scene, that she was living somewhere not far off, and that Artois had been to visit her once or twice by sea. Artois had spoken of her very casually, and the Marchesino's interest in her had not been awakened. He was not an inquisitive man by nature, and was always very busy with his own pursuit of pleasure. But he remembered now that once he had seen his friend being rowed in the direction of Posilipo, and that in the evening of the same day Artois had mentioned having been to visit his English friend. This fact had suggested to the Marchesino that if his suspicion were correct, and the ladies in the white boat with the green line were this English friend and a daughter, they probably lived in some villa as easily reached by sea as by land. Such villas are more numerous towards the point of the Capo di Posilipo than nearer Naples, as the high road, after the Mergellina, mounts the hill and diverges farther and farther from the sea. The Antico Giuseppone is a small waterside ristorante at the point of the Capo di Posilipo, a little below the Villa Rosebery.

The Marchesino's suggestion of a dinner there that evening had been prompted by the desire to draw his friend into the neighborhood of his charmer of the sea. Once there he might either find some pretext for making her acquaintance through Artois—if Artois did know her—or, if that were impossible, he might at least find out where she lived. By the manner of Artois when the Antico Giuseppone was mentioned, he knew at once that he was playing his cards well. The occupants of the white boat were known to the novelist. They did live somewhere near the Antico Giuseppone. And certainly Artois had no desire to bring about his—the Marchesino's—acquaintance with them.

That this was so, neither surprised nor seriously vexed the Marchesino. He knew a good deal of his friend's character, knew that Artois, despite his geniality and friendliness, was often reserved—even with him. During their short intimacy he had certainly told Artois a great deal more about his affairs with women than had been told to him in return. This fact was borne in upon him now. But he did not feel angry. A careless good-nature was an essential part of his character. He did not feel angry at his friend's secrecy, but he did feel mischievous. His lively desire to know the girl with "the perfect little nose" was backed up now by another desire—to teach "Caro Emilio" that it was better to meet complete frankness with complete frankness.

He had strolled out of his friend's room pensively, acting the melancholy youth who had lost all hope of succeeding in his desire; but directly the door was shut his manner changed. Disregarding the lift, he ran lightly down the stairs, made his way swiftly by the revolving door into the street, crossed it, and walked towards the harbor of Santa Lucia, where quantities of pleasure-boats lie waiting for hire, and the boatmen are gathered in knots smoking and gossiping, or are strolling singly up and down near the water's edge, keeping a sharp look-out for possible customers.

As the Marchesino turned on the bridge that leads towards Castel dell' Ovo one of these boatmen met him and saluted him.

"Good-day, Giuseppe," said the Marchesino, addressing him familiarly with a broad Neapolitan accent.

"Good-day, Signorino Marchesino," replied the man. "Do you want a boat? I will take you for—"

The Marchesino drew out his cigarette case.

"I don't want a boat. But perhaps you can tell me something."

"What is it, Signorino Marchesino?" said the man, looking eagerly at the cigarette case which was now open, and which displayed two tempting rows of fat Egyptian cigarettes reposing side by side.

"Do you know a boat—white with a green line—which sometimes comes into the harbor from the direction of Posilipo? It was here this afternoon, or it passed here. I don't know whether it went on to the Arsenal."

"White with a green line?" said the man. "That might be—who was there in it, Signorino Marchesino?"

"Two ladies, one old and one very young. The young lady—"

"Those must be the ladies from the island," interrupted the man. "The English ladies who come in the summer to the Casa del Mare as they call it, on the island close to the Grotto of Virgilio by San Francesco's Pool. They were here this afternoon, but they're gone back. Their boat is white with a green line, Signorino Marchesino."

"Grazie, Giuseppe," said the Marchesino, with an immovable countenance. "Do you smoke cigarettes?'

"Signorino Marchesino, I do when I have any soldi to buy them with."

"Take these."

The Marchesino emptied one side of his cigarette case into the boatman's hand, called a hired carriage, and drove off towards the Villa—the horse going at a frantic trot, while the coachman, holding a rein in each hand, ejaculated, "A—ah!" every ten seconds, in a voice that was fiercely hortatory.

Artois, from his window, saw the carriage rattle past, and saw his friend leaning back in it, with alert eyes, to scan every woman passing by. He stood on the balcony for a moment till the noise of the wheels on the stone pavement died away. When he returned to his writing-table the mood for work was gone. He sat down in his chair. He took up his pen. But he found himself thinking of two people, the extraordinary difference between whom was the cause of his now linking them together in his mind. He found himself thinking of the Marchesino and of Vere.

Not for a moment did he doubt the identity of the two women in the white boat. They were Hermione and Vere. The Marchesino had read him rightly, but Artois was not aware of it. His friend had deceived him, as almost any sharp-witted Neapolitan can deceive even a clever forestiere. Certainly he did not particularly wish to introduce his friend to Vere. Yet now he was thinking of the two in connection, and not without amusement. What would they be like together? How would Vere's divine innocence receive the amiable seductions of the Marchesino? Artois, in fancy, could see his friend Doro for once completely disarmed by a child. Vere's innocence did not spring from folly, but was backed up by excellent brains. It was that fact which made it so beautiful. The innocence and the brains together might well read Doro a pretty little lesson. And Vere after the lesson—would she be changed? Would she lose by giving, even if the gift were a lesson?

Artois had certainly felt that his instinct told him not to do what Doro wanted. He had been moved, he supposed now, by a protective sentiment. Vere was delicious as she was. And Doro—he was delightful as he was. The girl was enchanting in her ignorance. The youth—to Artois the Marchesino seemed almost a boy, indeed, often quite a boy—was admirable in his precocity. He embodied Naples, its gay furberia, and yet that was hardly the word—perhaps rather one should say its sunny naughtiness, its reckless devotion to life purged of thought. And Vere—what did she embody? Not Sicily, though she was in some ways so Sicilian. Not England; certainly not that!

Suddenly Artois was conscious that he knew Doro much better than he knew Vere. He remembered the statement of an Austrian psychologist, that men are far more mysterious than women, and shook his head over it now. He felt strongly the mystery that lay hidden deep down in the innocence of Vere, in the innocence of every girl-child of Vere's age who had brains, temperament and perfect purity. What a marvellous combination they made! He imagined the clear flame of them burning in the night of the world of men. Vere must be happy.

When he said this to himself he knew that, perhaps for the first time, he was despairing of something that he ardently desired. He was transferring a wish, that was something like a prayer in the heart of one who had seldom prayed. He was giving up hope for Hermione and fastening hope on Vere. For a moment that seemed like treachery, like an abandoning of Hermione. Since their interview on the sea Artois had felt that, for Hermione, all possibility of real happiness was over. She could not detach her love. It had been fastened irrevocably on Maurice. It was now fastened irrevocably on Maurice's memory. Long ago, had she, while he was alive, found out what he had done, her passion for him might have died, and in the course of years she might have been able to love again. But now it was surely too late. She had lived with her memory too long. It was her blessing—to remember, to recall, how love had blessed her life for a time. And if that memory were desecrated now she would be as one wrecked in the storm of life. Yet with that memory how she suffered!

What could he do for her? His chivalry must exercise itself. He must remain in the lists, if only to fight for Hermione in Vere. And the Marchesino? Artois seemed to divine that he might be an enemy in certain circumstances.

A warmth of sentiment, not very common in Artois, generated within him by such thoughts as these, thoughts that detained him from work, still glowed in his heart when evening fell and the Marchesino came gayly in to take him out upon the sea.

"There's a little wind, Emilio," he said, as they got into the boat in the harbor of Santa Lucia; "we can sail to the Antico Giuseppone. And after dinner we'll fish for sarde. Isn't it warm? One could sleep out on such a night."

They had two men with them. When they got beyond the breakwater the sail was set, the Marchesino took the helm, and the boat slipped through the smooth sea, rounded the rocks on which the old fort stands to stare at Capri, radiant now as a magic isle in the curiously ethereal light of evening, and headed for the distant point of land which hid Ischia from their eyes. The freedom of the Bay of Naples was granted them—the freedom of the sea. As they ran out into the open water, and Artois saw the round gray eyes of the Marchesino dancing to the merry music of a complete bodily pleasure, he felt like a man escaping. He looked back at the city almost as at a sad life over, and despite his deep and persistent interest in men he understood the joy of the hermit who casts them from him and escapes into the wilds. The radiance of the Bay, one of the most radiant of all the inlets of the sea, bold and glaring in the brilliant daytime, becomes exquisitely delicate towards night. Vesuvius, its fiery watcher, looks like a kindly guardian, until perhaps the darkness shows the flame upon its flanks, the flame bursting forth from the mouth it opens to the sky; and the coast-line by Sorrento, the lifted crest of Capri, even the hill of Posilipo, appear romantic and enticing, calling lands holding wonderful pleasures for men, joys in their rocks and trees, joys in their dim recesses, joys and soft realities fulfilling every dream upon their coasts washed by the whispering waves.

The eyes of the Marchesino were dancing with physical pleasure. Artois wondered how much he felt the beauty of the evening, and how. His friend evidently saw the question in his eyes, for he said:

"The man who knows not Naples knows not pleasure."

"Is that a Neapolitan saying?" asked Artois.

"Yes, and it is true. There is no town like Naples for pleasure. Even your Paris, Emilio, with all its theatres, its cocottes, its restaurants—no, it is not Naples. No wonder the forestiere come here. In Naples they are free. They can do what they will. They know we shall not mind. We are never shocked."

"And do you think we are easily shocked in Paris?"

"No, but it is not the same. You have not Vesuvius there. You have not the sea, you have not the sun."

Artois began laughingly to protest against the last statement, but the Marchesino would not have it.

"No, no, it shines—I know that,—but it is not the sun we have here."

He spoke to the seamen in the Neapolitan dialect. They were brown, muscular fellows. In their eyes were the extraordinary boldness and directness of the sea. Neither of them looked gay. Many of the Neapolitans who are much upon the sea have serious, even grave faces. These were intensely, almost overpoweringly male. They seemed to partake of the essence of the elements of nature, as if blood of the sea ran in their veins, as if they were hot with the grim and inner fires of the sun. When they spoke their faces showed a certain changefulness that denoted intelligence, but never lost the look of force, of an almost tense masculinity ready to battle, perpetually alive to hold its own.

The Marchesino was also very masculine, but in a different way and more consciously than they were. He was not cultured, but such civilization as he had endowed him with a power to catch the moods of others not possessed by these men, in whom persistence was more visible than adroitness, unless indeed any question of money was to the fore.

"We shall get to the Giuseppone by eight, Emilio," the Marchesino said, dropping his conversation with the men, which had been about the best hour and place for their fishing. "Are you hungry?"

"I shall be," said Artois. "This wind brings an appetite with it. How well you steer!"

The Marchesino nodded carelessly.

As the boat drew ever nearer to the point, running swiftly before the light breeze, its occupants were silent. Artois was watching the evening, with the eyes of a lover of nature, but also with the eyes of one who takes notes. The Marchesino seemed to be intent on his occupation of pilot. As to the two sailors, they sat in the accustomed calm and staring silence of seafaring men, with wide eyes looking out over the element that ministered to their wants. They saw it differently, perhaps, from Artois, to whom it gave now an intense aesthetic pleasure, differently from the Marchesino, to whom it was just a path to possible excitement, possible gratification of a new and dancing desire. They connected it with strange superstitions, with gifts, with deprivations, with death. Familiar and mysterious it was purely to them as to all seamen, like a woman possessed whose soul is far away.

Just as the clocks of Posilipo were striking eight the Marchesino steered the boat into the quay of the Antico Guiseppone.

Although it was early in the season a few deal tables were set out by the waterside, and a swarthy waiter, with huge mustaches and a napkin over his arm, came delicately over the stones to ask their wishes.

"Will you let me order dinner, Emilio?" said the Marchesino: "I know what they do best here."

Artois agreed, and while the waiter shuffled to carry out the Marchesino's directions the two friends strolled near the edge of the sea.

The breeze had been kindly. Having served them well it was now dying down to its repose, leaving the evening that was near to night profoundly calm. As Artois walked along the quay he felt the approach of calm like the approach of a potentate, serene in the vast consciousness of power. Peace was invading the sea, irresistible peace. The night was at hand. Already Naples uncoiled its chain of lamps along the Bay. In the gardens of Posilipo the lights of the houses gleamed. Opposite, but very far off across the sea, shone the tiny flames of the houses of Portici, of Torre del Greco, of Torre Annunziata, of Castellamare. Against the gathering darkness Vesuvius belched slowly soft clouds of rose-colored vapor, which went up like a menace into the dim vault of the sky. The sea was without waves. The boats by the wharf, where the road ascends past the villa Rosebery to the village of Posilipo, scarcely moved. Near them, in a group, lounging against the wall and talking rapidly, stood the two sailors from Naples with the boatmen of the Guiseppone. Oil lamps glimmered upon two or three of the deal tables, round one of which was gathered a party consisting of seven large women, three children, and two very thin middle-aged men with bright eyes, all of whom were eating oysters. Farther on, from a small arbor that gave access to a fisherman's house, which seemed to be constructed partially in a cave of the rock, and which was gained by a steep and crumbling stairway of stone, a mother called shrilly to some half-naked little boys who were fishing with tiny hand-nets in the sea. By the table which was destined to the Marchesino and Artois three ambulant musicians were hovering, holding in their broad and dirty hands two shabby mandolins and a guitar. In the distance a cook with a white cap on his head and bare arms was visible, as he moved to and fro in the lighted kitchen of the old ristorante, preparing a "zuppa di pesce" for the gentlemen from Naples.

"Che bella notte!" said the Marchesino, suddenly.

His voice sounded sentimental. He twisted his mustaches and added:

"Emilio, we ought to have brought two beautiful women with us to-night. What are the moon and the sea to men without beautiful women?"

"And the fishing?" said Artois.

"To the devil with the fishing," replied the young man. "Ecco! Our dinner is ready, with thanks to the Madonna!"

They sat down, one on each side of the small table, with a smoking lamp between them.

"I have ordered vino bianco," said the Marchesino, who still looked sentimental. "Cameriere, take away the lamp. Put it on the next table. Va bene. We are going to have 'zuppa di pesce,' gamberi and veal cutlets. The wine is Capri. Now then," he added, with sudden violence and the coarsest imaginable Neapolitan accent, "if you fellows play 'Santa Lucia,' 'Napoli Bella,' or 'Sole mio' you'll have my knife in you. I am not an Inglese. I am a Neapolitan. Remember that!"

He proved it with a string of gutter words and oaths, at which the musicians smiled with pleasure. Then, turning again to Artois, he continued:

"If one doesn't tell them they think one is an imbecile. Emilio caro, do you not love to see the moon with a beautiful girl?"

His curious assumption that Artois and he were contemporaries because they were friends, and his apparently absolute blindness to the fact that a man of sixty and a man of twenty-four are hardly likely to regard the other sex with an exactly similar enthusiasm, always secretly entertained the novelist, who made it his business with this friend to be accommodating, and who seldom, if ever, showed himself authoritative, or revealed any part of his real inner self.

"Ma si!" he replied; "the night and the moon are made for love."

"Everything is made for love," returned the Marchesino. "Take plenty of soaked bread, Emilio. They know how to make this zuppa here. Everything is made for love.—Look! There is a boat coming with women in it!"

At a short distance from the shore a rowing boat was visible; and from it now came shrill sounds of very common voices, followed by shouts of male laughter.

"Perhaps they are beautiful," said the Marchesino, at once on the alert.

The boat drew in to the quay, and from it there sprang, with much noise and many gesticulations, two over-dressed women—probably, indeed almost certainly, canzonettiste—and the two large young men, whose brown fingers and whose chests gleamed with false diamonds. As they passed the table where the two friends were sitting, the Marchesino raked the women with his bold gray eyes. One of them was large and artificially blonde, with a spreading bust, immense hips, a small waist, and a quantity of pale dyed hair, on which was perched a bright blue hat. The other was fiercely dark, with masses of coarse black hair, big, blatant eyes that looked quite black in the dim lamplight, and a figure that suggested a self-conscious snake. Both were young. They returned the Marchesino's stare with vigorous impudence as they swung by.

"What sympathetic creatures!" he murmured. "They are two angels. I believe I have seen one of them at the Margherita. What was her name—Maria Leoni, I fancy."

He looked enviously at the young men. The arrival of the lobster distracted his attention for the moment; but it was obvious that the appearance of these women had increased the feeling of sentimentality already generated in him by the softness and stillness of the night.

The three musicians, rendered greedy rather than inspired by the presence of more clients, now began to pluck a lively street tune from their instruments; and the waiter, whose mustaches seemed if possible bigger now that night was truly come, poured the white wine into the glasses with the air of one making a libation.

As the Marchesino ate, he frequently looked towards the party at the neighboring table. He was evidently filled with envy of the two men whose jewels glittered as they gesticulated with their big brown hands. But presently their pleasure and success recalled to him something which he had momentarily forgotten, the reason why he had planned this expedition. He was in pursuit. The recollection cheered him up, restored to him the strength of his manhood, put him right with himself. The envy and the almost sickly sentimentality vanished from him, and he broke into the usual gay conversation which seldom failed him, either by day or night.

It was past nine before they had finished their coffee. The two boatmen had been regaled and had drunk a bottle of wine, and the moon was rising and making the oil lamps of the Guiseppone look pitiful. From the table where the canzonettiste were established came peals of laughter, which obviously upset the seven large and respectable women who had been eating oysters, and who now sat staring heavily at the gay revellers, while the two thin middle-aged men with bright eyes began to look furtively cheerful, and even rather younger than they were. The musicians passed round a small leaden tray for soldi, and the waiter brought the Marchesino the bill, and looked inquiringly at Artois, aware that he at least was not a Neapolitan. Artois gave him something and satisfied the musicians, while the Marchesino disputed the bill, not because he minded paying, but merely to prove that he was a Neapolitan and not an imbecile. The matter was settled at last, and they went towards the boat; the Marchesino casting many backward glances towards the two angels, who, with their lovers, were becoming riotous in their gayety as the moon came up.

"Are we going out into the Bay?" said Artois, as they stepped into the boat, and were pushed off.

"Where is the best fishing-ground?" asked the Marchesino of the elder of the two men.

"Towards the islet, Signorino Marchesino," he replied at once, looking his interlocutor full in the face with steady eyes, but remaining perfectly grave.

Artois glanced at the man sharply. For the first time it occurred to him that possibly his friend had arranged this expedition with a purpose other than that which he had put forward. It was not the fisherman's voice which had made Artois wonder, but the voice of the Marchesino.

"There are generally plenty of sarde round the islet," continued the fisherman, "but if the Signori would not be too tired it would be best to stay out the night. We shall get many more fish towards morning, and we can run the boat into the Pool of San Francesco, and have some sleep there, if the Signori like. We others generally take a nap there, and go to work further on in the night. But of course it is as the Signori prefer."

"They want to keep us out all night to get more pay," said the Marchesino to Artois, in bad French.

He had divined the suspicion that had suddenly risen up in his friend, and was resolved to lay it to rest, without, however, abandoning his purpose, which had become much more ardent with the coming of the night. The voices of the laughing women were ringing in his ears. He felt adventurous. The youth in him was rioting, and he was longing to be gay, as the men with those women were being gay.

"What do you think, Emilio caro?" he asked.

Then before Artois could reply, he said:

"After all, what do a few soldi matter? Who could sleep in a room on such a night? It might be August, when one bathes at midnight, and sings canzoni till dawn. Let us do as he says. Let us rest in the—what is the pool?" he asked of the fishermen, pretending not to know the name.

"The pool of San Francesco, Signorino Marchesino."

"Pool of San Francesco. I remember now. That is the place where all the fishermen along the coast towards Nisida go to sleep. I have slept there many times when I was a boy, and so has Viviano. To-night shall we do as the fishermen, Emilio?"

There was no pressure in his careless voice. His eyes for the moment looked so simple, though as eager as a child's.

"Anything you like, mon ami," said Artois.

He did not want to go to San Francesco's Pool with the Marchesino, but he did not wish to seem reluctant to go. And he said to himself now that his interior hesitation was absurd. Night had fallen. By the time they reached the Pool the inmates of the Case del Mare would probably be asleep. Even if they were not, what did it matter? The boat would lie among the vessels of the fishermen. The Marchesino and he would share the fishermen's repose. And even if Hermione and Vere should chance to be out of doors they would not see him, or, if they did, would not recognize him in the night.

His slight uneasiness, prompted by a vague idea that the Marchesino was secretly mischievous, had possibly some plan in his mind connected with the islet, was surely without foundation.

He told himself so as the fisherman laid hold of their oars and set the boat's prow towards the point of land which conceals the small harbor of the Villa Rosebery.

The shrill voices of the two singers died away from their ears, but lingered in the memory of the Marchesino, as the silence of the sea took the boat to itself, the sea silence and the magic of the moon.

He turned his face towards the silver, beyond which, hidden as yet, was the islet where dwelt the child he meant to know.

CHAPTER VII

Although Hermione had told Artois that she could not find complete rest and happiness in her child, that she could not live again in Vere fully and intensely as she had lived once, as she still had it in her surely to live, she and Vere were in a singularly close relationship. They had never yet been separated for more than a few days. Vere had not been to school, and much of her education had been undertaken by her mother. In Florence she had been to classes and lectures. She had had lessons in languages, French, German, and Italian, in music and drawing. But Hermione had been her only permanent teacher, and until her sixteenth birthday she had never been enthusiastic about anything without carrying her enthusiasm to her mother, for sympathy, explanation, or encouragement.

Sorrow had not quenched the elan of Hermione's nature. What she had told Artois had been true—she was not a finished woman, nor would she ever be, so long as she was alive and conscious. Her hunger for love, her passionate remembrance of the past, her incapacity to sink herself in any one since her husband's death, her persistent, though concealed, worship of his memory, all these things proved her vitality. Artois was right when he said that she was a force. There was something in her that was red-hot, although she was now a middle-aged woman. She needed much more than most people, because she had much more than most people have to give.

Her failure to express herself in an art had been a tragedy. From this tragedy she turned, not with bitterness, but perhaps with an almost fiercer energy, to Vere. Her intellect, released from fruitless toil, was running loose demanding some employment. She sought that employment in developing the powers of her child. Vere was not specially studious. Such an out-of-door temperament as hers could never belong to a bookworm or a recluse. But she was naturally clever, as her father had not been, and she was enthusiastic not only in pleasure but in work. Long ago Hermione, trying with loving anxiety to educate her boyish husband, to make him understand certain subtleties of her own, had found herself frustrated. When she made such attempts with Vere she was met half way. The girl understood with swiftness even those things with which she was not specially in sympathy. Her father's mind had slipped away, ever so gracefully, from all which it did not love. Vere's could grasp even an unloved subject. There was mental grit in her—Artois knew it. In all her work until her sixteenth year Vere had consulted her mother. Nothing of her child till then was ever hidden from Hermione, except those things which the human being cannot reveal, and sometimes scarcely knows of. The child drew very much from her mother, responded to her enthusiasm, yet preserved instinctively, and quite without self-consciousness, her own individuality.

Artois had noticed this, and this had led him to say that Vere also was a force.

But when she was sixteen Vere woke up to something. Until now no one but herself knew to what. Sometimes she shut herself up alone in her room for long periods. When she came out she looked lazy, her mother thought, and she liked to go then to some nook of the rocks and sit alone, or to push a boat out into the centre of the Saint's Pool, and lie in it with her hands clasped behind her head looking up at the passing clouds or at the radiance of the blue.

Hermione knew how fond Vere was of reading, and supposed that this love was increasing as the child grew older. She sometimes felt a little lonely, but she was unselfish. Vere's freedom was quite innocent. She, the mother, would not seek to interfere with it. Soon after dinner on the evening of the Marchesino's expedition with Artois, Vere had got up from the sofa, on which she had been sitting with a book of Rossetti's poems in her hand, had gone over to one of the windows, and had stood for two or three minutes looking out over the sea. Then she had turned round, come up to her mother and kissed her tenderly—more tenderly, Hermione thought, even than usual.

"Good-night, Madre mia," she had said.

And then, without another word, she had gone swiftly out of the room.

After Vere had gone the room seemed very silent. In the evening, if they stayed in the house, they usually sat in Hermione's room up-stairs. They had been sitting there to-night. The shutters were not closed. The window that faced the sea towards Capri was open. A little moonlight began to mingle subtly with the light from the two lamps, to make it whiter, cleaner, suggestive of outdoor things and large spaces. Hermione had been reading when Vere was reading. She did not read now Vere was gone. Laying down her book she sat listening to the silence, realizing the world without. Almost at her feet was the sea, before her a wide-stretching expanse, behind her, confronted by the desolate rocks, the hollow and mysterious caverns. In the night, the Saint, unwearied, watched his Pool. Not very far off, yet delightfully remote, lay Naples with its furious activities, its gayeties, its intensities of sin, of misery, of pleasure. In the Galleria, tourists from the hotels and from the ships were wandering rather vaguely, watched and followed by newspaper sellers, by touts, by greedy, pale-faced boys, and old, worn-out men, all hungry for money and indifferent how it was gained. Along the Marina, with its huge serpent of lights, the street singers and players were making their nightly pilgrimage, pausing, wherever they saw a lighted window or a dark figure on a balcony, to play and sing the tunes of which they were weary long ago. On the wall, high above the sea, were dotted the dilettante fishermen with their long rods and lines. And below, before each stone staircase that descended to the water, was a waiting boat, and in the moonlight rose up the loud cry of "Barca! Barca!" to attract the attention of any casual passer-by.

And here, on this more truly sea-like sea, distant from the great crowd and from the thronging houses, the real fishermen who live by the sea were alert and at work, or were plunged in the quiet sleep that is a preparation for long hours of nocturnal wakefulness.

Hermione thought of it all, was aware of it, felt it, as she sat there opposite to the open window. Then she looked over to her writing-table, on which stood a large photograph of her dead husband, then to the sofa where Vere had been. She saw the volume of Rossetti lying beside the cushion that still showed a shallow dent where the child's head had been resting.

And then she shut her eyes, and asked her imagination to take her away for a moment, over the sea to Messina, and along the curving shore, and up by winding paths to a mountain, and into a little room in a tiny, whitewashed house, not the house of the sea, but of the priest. It still stood there, and the terrace was still before it. And the olive-trees rustled, perhaps, just now in the wind beneath the stars.

Yes, she was there. Lucrezia and Gaspare were in bed. But she and Maurice were sitting in the straw chairs on each side of the table, facing the open French window and the flight of shallow steps that led down to the terrace.

Faintly she heard the whisper of the sea about the islet, but she would not let it hinder her imagination: she translated it by means of her imagination into the whisper of the wind low down there, in the ravine among the trees. And that act made her think of the ravine, seemed presently to set her in the ravine. She was there in the night with Gaspare. They were hurrying down towards the sea. He was behind her, and she could hear his footsteps—longing to go faster. But she was breathless, her heart was beating, there was terror in her soul. What was that? A rattle of stones in the darkness, and then an old voice muttering "Benedicite!"

She opened her eyes and moved suddenly, like one intolerably stirred. What a foe the imagination can be—what a foe! She got up and went to the window. She must drive away that memory of the ravine, of all that followed after. Often she lingered with it, but to-night, somehow, she could not, she dared not. She was less brave than usual to-night.

She leaned out of the window.

"Am I a fool?"

That was what she was saying to herself. And she was comparing herself now with other people, other women. Did she know one who could not uproot an old memory, who could suffer, and desire, and internally weep, after more than sixteen years?

"I suppose it is preposterous."

She deliberately chose that ugly word to describe her own condition of soul. But instantly it seemed to her as if far down in that soul something rose up and answered:

"No, it is not. It is beautiful. It is divine. It is more—it is due. He gave you the greatest gift. He gave you what the whole world is always seeking; even in blindness, even in ignorance, even in terrible vice. He gave you love. How should you forget him?"

Far away on the sea that was faintly silvered by the moon there was a black speck. It was, or seemed from the distance to be, motionless. Hermione's eyes were attracted to it, and again her imagination carried her to Sicily. She stood on the shore by the inlet, she saw the boat coming in from the open sea. Then it stopped midway—like that boat.

She heard Gaspare furiously weeping.

But the boat moved, and the sound that was in her imagination died away, and she said to herself, "All that was long ago."

The boat out there was no doubt occupied by Neapolitan fishermen, and she was here on the islet in the Sea of Naples, and Sicily was far away across the moonlit waters. As to Gaspare—she was sure he was not weeping, faithful though he was to the memory of the dead Padrone.

And Vere? Hermione wondered what Vere was doing. She felt sure, though she did not know why, that Vere had not gone to bed. She realized to-night that her child was growing up rapidly, was passing from the stage of childhood to the stage of girlhood, was on the threshold of all the mysterious experiences that life holds for those who have ardent temperaments and eager interests, and passionate desires and fearless hearts.

To-night Hermione felt very strongly the difference between the father and the daughter. There was a gravity in Vere, a firmness that Maurice had lacked. Full of life and warmth as she was, she was not the pure spirit of joy that he had been in those first days in Sicily. She was not irresponsible. She was more keenly aware of others, of just how they were feeling, of just how they were thinking, than Maurice had been.

Vere was very individual.

With that thought there came to Hermione a deeper sense of loneliness. She was conscious now in this moment, as she had never been conscious before, of the independence of her child's character. The knowledge of this independence seemed to come upon her suddenly—she could not tell why; and she saw Vere apart from her, detached, like a column in a lonely place.

Vere must not escape from her. She must accompany her child step by step. She must not be left alone. She had told Emile that she could not live again in Vere. And that was true. Vere was not enough. But Vere was very much. Without Vere, what would her life be?

A wave of melancholy flowed over her to-night, a tide come from she knew not where. Making an effort to stem it, she recalled her happiness with Maurice after that day of the Tarantella. How groundless had really been her melancholy then! She had imagined him escaping from her, but he had remained with her, and loved her. He had been good to her until the end, tender and faithful. If she had ever had a rival, that rival had been Sicily. Always her imagination was her torturer.

Her failure in art had been a tragedy because of this. If she could have set her imagination free in an art she would have been far safer than she was. Emile Artois was really lonelier than she, for he had not a child. But his art surely saved him securely from her sense of desolation. And then he was a man, and men must need far less than women do. Hermione felt that it was so. She thought of Emile in his most helpless moment, in that period when he was ill in Kairouan before she came. Even then she believed that he could not have felt quite so much alone as she did now; for men never long to be taken care of as women do. And yet she was well, in this tranquil house which was her own—with Vere, her child, and Gaspare, her devoted servant.

As mentally she recounted her benefits, the strength there was in her arose, protesting. She called herself harsh names: egoist, craven, faineant. But it was no use to attack herself. In the deeps of her poor, eager, passionate, hungry woman's nature something wept, and needed, and could not be comforted, and could not be schooled. It complained as one feeble, but really it must be strong; for it was pitilessly persistent in its grieving. It had a strange endurance. Life, the passing of the years, could not change it, could not still it. Those eternal hungers of which Hermione had spoken to Artois—they must have their meaning. Somewhere, surely, there are the happy hunting-grounds, dreamed of by the red man—there are the Elysian Fields where the souls that have longed and suffered will find the ultimate peace.

There came a tap at the door.

Hermione started up from the cushion against which she had pressed her head, and opened her eyes, instinctively laying her hand on Vere's volume of Rossetti, and pretending to read it.

"Avanti!" she said.

The door opened and Gaspare appeared. Hermione felt an immediate sensation of comfort.

"Gaspare," she said, "what is it? I thought you were in bed."

"Ha bisogna Lei?" he said.

It was a most familiar phrase to Hermione. It had been often on Gaspare's lips when he was a boy in Sicily, and she had always loved it, feeling as if it sprang from a nature pleasantly ready to do anything in her service. But to-night it had an almost startling appropriateness, breaking in as if in direct response to her gnawing hunger of the heart. As she looked at Gaspare, standing by the door in his dark-blue clothes, with an earnest expression on his strong, handsome face, she felt as if he must have come just then because he was conscious that she had so much need of help and consolation. And she could not answer "no" to his simple question.

"Come in, Gaspare," she said, "and shut the door. I'm all alone. I should like to have a little talk with you."

He obeyed her, shut the door gently, and came up to her with the comfortable confidence of one safe in his welcome, desired not merely as a servant but as a friend by his Padrona.

"Did you want to say anything particular, Gaspare?" Hermione asked him. "Here—take a cigarette."

She gave him one. He took it gently, twitching his nose as he did so. This was a little trick he had when he was pleased.

"You can smoke it here, if you like."

"Grazie, Signora."

He lit it gravely and took a whiff. Then he said:

"The Signorina is outside."

"Is she?"

Hermione looked towards the window.

"It is a lovely night."

"Si, Signora."

He took another whiff, and turned his great eyes here and there, looking about the room. Hermione began to wonder what he had to say to her. She was certain that he had come to her for some reason other than just to ask if she had need of him.

"It does the Signorina good to get a breath of air before she goes to bed," Hermione added, after a moment of silence. "It makes her sleep."

"Si, Signora."

He still stood calmly beside her, but now he looked at her with the odd directness which had been characteristic of him as a boy, and which he had not lost as a man.

"The Signorina is getting quite big, Signora," he said. "Have you noticed? Per Dio! In Sicily, if the Signorina was a Sicilian, the giovinotti would be asking to marry her."

"Ah, but, Gaspare, the Signorina is not a Sicilian," she said. "She is English, you know, and English girls do not generally think of such things till they are much older than Sicilians."

"But, Signora," said Gaspare, with the bluntness which in him was never rudeness, but merely the sincerity which he considered due to his Padrona—due also to himself, "my Padrone was like a real Sicilian, and the Signorina is his daughter. She must be like a Sicilian too, by force."

"Your Padrone, yes, he was a real Sicilian," Hermione said softly. "But, well, the Signorina has much more English blood in her veins than Sicilian. She has only a little Sicilian blood."

"But the Signorina thinks she is almost a Sicilian. She wishes to be a Sicilian."

"How do you know that, Gaspare?" she asked, smiling a little at his firmness and persistence.

"The Signorina said so the other day to the giovinotto who had the cigarettes, Signora. I talked to him, and he told me. He said the Signorina had said to him that she was partly a Sicilian, and that he had said 'no,' that she was English. And when he said that—he said to me—the Signorina was quite angry. He could see that she was angry by her face."

"I suppose that is the Sicilian blood, Gaspare. There is some in the Signorina's veins, of course. And then, you know, both her father and I loved your country. I think the Signorina must often long to see Sicily."

"Does she say so?" asked Gaspare, looking rather less calm.

"She has not lately. I think she is very happy here. Don't you?"

"Si, Signora. But the Signorina is growing up now, and she is a little Sicilian anyhow, Signora."

He paused, looking steadily at his Padrona.

"What is it, Gaspare? What do you want to say to me?"

"Signora, perhaps you will say it is not my business, but in my country we do not let girls go about by themselves after they are sixteen. We know it is better not. Ecco!"

Hermione had some difficulty in not smiling. But she knew that if she smiled he might be offended. So she kept her countenance and said:

"What do you mean, Gaspare? The Signorina is nearly always with me."

"No, Signora. The Signorina can go wherever she likes. She can speak to any one she pleases. She is free as a boy is free."

"Certainly she is free. I wish her to be free."

"Va bene, Signora, va bene."

A cloud came over his face, and he moved as if to go. But Hermione stopped him.

"Wait a minute, Gaspare. I want you to understand. I like your care for the Signorina. You know I trust you and depend on you more than on almost any one. But you must remember that I am English, and in England, you know, things in some ways are very different from what they are in Sicily. Any English girl would be allowed the freedom of the Signorina."

"Why?"

"Why not? What harm does it do? The Signorina does not go to Naples alone."

"Per Dio!" he interrupted, in a tone almost of horror.

"Of course I should never allow that. But here on the island—why, what could happen to her here? Come, Gaspare, tell me what it is you are thinking of. You haven't told me yet. I knew directly you came in that you had something you wanted to say. What is it?"

"I know it is not my business," he said. "And I should never speak to the Signorina, but—"

"Well, Gaspare?"

"Signora, all sorts of people come here to the island—men from Naples. We do not know them. We cannot tell who they are. And they can all see the Signorina. And they can even talk to her."

"The fishermen, you mean?"

"Any one who comes in a boat."

"Well, but scarcely any one ever comes but the fishermen. You know that."

"Oh, it was all very well when the Signorina was a little girl, a child, Signora," he said, almost hotly. "But now it is different. It is quite different."

Suddenly Hermione understood. She remembered what Vere had said about Gaspare being jealous. He must certainly be thinking of the boy-diver, of Ruffo.

"You think the Signorina oughtn't to talk to the fishermen?" she said.

"What do we know of the fishermen of Naples, Signora? We are not Neapolitans. We are strangers here. We do not know their habits. We do not know what they think. They are different from us. If we were in Sicily! I am a Sicilian. I can tell. But when men come from Naples saying they are Sicilians, how can I tell whether they are ruffiani or not?"

Gaspare's inner thought stood revealed.

"I see, Gaspare," Hermione said, quietly. "You think I should not have let the Signorina talk to that boy the other day. But I saw him myself, and I gave the Signorina leave to take him some cigarettes. And he dived for her. She told me all about it. She always tells me everything."

"I do not doubt the Signorina," said Gaspare. "But I thought it was my duty to tell you what I thought, Signora. Why should people come here saying they are of my country, saying they are Sicilians, and talking as the Neapolitans talk?"

"Well, but at the time, you didn't doubt that boy was what he said he was, did you?"

"Signora, I did not know. I could not know. But since then I have been thinking."

"Well, Gaspare, you are quite right to tell me. I prefer that. I have much faith in you, and always shall have. But we must not say anything like this to the Signorina. She would not understand what we meant."

"No, Signora. The Signorina is too good."

"She would not understand, and I think she would be hurt"—Hermione used the word "offesa,"—"as you would be if you fancied I thought something strange about you."

"Si, Signora."

"Good-night, Gaspare."

"Good-night, Signora. Buon riposo."

He moved towards the door. When he reached it he stopped and added:

"I am going to bed, Signora."

"Go. Sleep well."

"Grazie, Signora. The Signorina is still outside, I am sure."

"She goes out for a minute nearly every evening, Gaspare. She likes the air and to look at the sea."

"Si, Signora; in a minute I shall go to bed. Buon riposo."

And he went out.

When he had gone Hermione remained at first where she was. But Gaspare had effectually changed her mood, had driven away what she chose to call her egoism, had concentrated all her thoughts on Vere. He had never before spoken like this about the child. It was a sudden waking up on his part to the fact that Vere was growing up to womanhood.

When he chose, Gaspare could always, or nearly always, make his Padrona catch his mood, there was something so definite about him that he made an impression. And, though he was easily inclined to be suspicious of those whom he did not know well, Hermione knew him to be both intelligent and shrewd, especially about those for whom he had affection. She wondered now whether it were possible that Gaspare saw, understood, or even divined intuitively, more clearly than she did—she, a mother!

It was surely very unlikely.

She remembered that Gaspare had a jealous nature, like most of his countrymen.

Nevertheless he had suddenly made the islet seem different to her. She had thought of it as remote, as pleasantly far away from Naples, isolated in the quiet sea. But it was very easy to reach from Naples, and, as Gaspare had said, what did they know, or understand, of the Neapolitans, they who were strangers in the land?

She wondered whether Vere was still outside. To-night she certainly envisaged Vere newly. Never till to-night had she thought of her as anything but a child; as characteristic, as ardent, as determined sometimes, perhaps as forceful even, but always with a child's mind behind it all.

But to the people of the South Vere was already a woman—even to Gaspare, who had held her in his arms when she was in long clothes. At least Hermione supposed so now, after what Gaspare had said about the giovinotti, who, in Sicily, would have been wishing to marry Vere, had she been Sicilian. And perhaps even the mind of Vere was more grown-up than her mother had been ready to suppose.

The mother was conscious of a slight but distinct uneasiness. It was vague. Had she been asked to explain it she could not, perhaps, have done so.

Presently, after a minute or two of hesitation, she went to the window that faced north, opened it, and stood by, listening. It was from the sea on this side that the fishermen who lived in the Mergellina, and in the town of Naples, came to the islet. It was from this direction that Ruffo had come three days ago.

Evidently Gaspare had been turning over the boy's acquaintance with Vere in his mind all that time, disapproving of it, secretly condemning Hermione for having allowed it. No, not that; Hermione felt that he was quite incapable of condemning her. But he was a watchdog who did not bark, but who was ready to bite all those who ventured to approach his two mistresses unless he was sure of their credentials. And of this boy's, Ruffo's, he was not sure.

Hermione recalled the boy; his brown healthiness, his laughing eyes and lips, his strong young body, his careless happy voice. And she found herself instinctively listening by the window to hear that voice again.

Now, as she looked out, the loveliness of the night appealed to her strongly, and she felt sure that Vere must be still outside, somewhere under the moon.

Just beneath the window was the narrow terrace, on to which she had stepped out, obedient to Vere's call, three days ago. Perhaps Vere was there, or in the garden beyond. She extinguished the lamp. She went to her bedroom to get a lace shawl, which she put over her head and drew round her shoulders like a mantilla. Then she looked into Vere's room, and found it empty.

A moment later she was on the terrace bathed in the radiance of the moon.

CHAPTER VIII

Vere was outside under the stars. When she had said good-night and had slipped away, it was with the desire to be alone, to see no one, to speak with no one till next morning. But the desires of the young change quickly, and Vere's presently changed.

She came out of the house, and passing over the bridge that connected together the two cliffs of which the islet was composed, reached the limit of the islet. At the edge of the precipice was a seat, and there she sat down. For some time she rested motionless, absorbing the beauty and the silence of the night. She was looking towards Ischia. She wished to look that way, to forget all about Naples, the great city which lay behind her.

Here were the ancient caves darkening with their mystery the silver wonder of the sea. Here the venerable shore stretched towards lands she did not know. They called to the leaping desires of her heart as the city did not call. They carried her away.

Often, from this seat, on dark and moonless nights, she had watched the fishermen's torches flaring below her in the blackness, and had thrilled at the mystery of their occupation, and had imagined them lifting from the sea strange and wonderful treasures, that must change the current of their lives: pearls such as had never before been given to the breasts of women, caskets that had lain for years beneath the waters, bottles in which were stoppered up magicians who, released, came forth in smoke, as in the Eastern story.

Once she had spoken of this last imagination to Gaspare, and had seen his face suddenly change and look excited, vivid, and then sad. She had asked him why he looked like that, and, after a moment of hesitation, he had told her how, long ago, before she was born, his Padrone had read to him such a tale as they lay together upon a mountain side in Sicily. Vere had eagerly questioned him, and he, speaking with vehemence in the heat of his recollection, had brought before her a picture of that scene in his simple life; had shown her how he lay, and how the Padrone lay, he listening, the Padrone, book in hand, reading about the "mago africano." He had even told Vere of their conversation afterwards, and how he had said that he would always be free, that he would never be "stoppered up," like the "mago africano." And when she had wondered at his memory growing still more excited he had told her many other things of which his Padrone and he had talked together, and had made her feel the life of the past on Monte Amato as no cultured person, she believed, could ever have made her feel it. But when she had sought to question him about her father's death he had become silent, and she had seen that it would be impossible to make him obey her and tell her all the details that she longed to know.

To-night Vere could see no fishermen at work. The silver of the sea below her was unbroken by the black forms of gliding boats, the silence was unbroken by calling voices. And to-night she was glad that it was so; for she was in the mood to be quite alone. As she sat there very still she seemed to herself to be drawing nearer to the sea, and drawing the sea to her. Indeed, she was making some such imaginative attempt as her mother was making in the house—to become, in fancy at least, one with something outside of her, to be fused with the sea, as her mother desired to be fused with her. But Vere's endeavor was not tragic, like her mother's, but was almost tenderly happy. She thought she felt the sea responding to her as she responded to the sea. And she was very glad in that thought.

Presently she began to wonder about the fishermen.

How did they feel about the sea? To her the sea was romantic and personal. Was it romantic and personal to them? They were romantic to her because of their connection with the sea, which had imprinted upon them something of itself, showed forth in them, by means of them, something surely of its own character; but probably, almost certainly, she supposed, they were unconscious of this. They lived by the sea. Perhaps they thought of it as of a vast money-bag, into which they dipped their hands to get enough to live by. Or perhaps they thought of it as an enemy, against which they lived in perpetual war, from which they wrung, as it were at the sword's point, a poor and precarious booty.

As she sat thinking about this Vere began to change in her desire, to wish there were some fishermen out to-night about the islet, and that she could have speech of them. She would like to find out from one of them how they regarded the sea.

She smiled as she imagined a conversation between herself and some strong, brown, wild Neapolitan, she questioning and he replying. How he would misunderstand her! He would probably think her mad. And yet sometimes the men of the sea in their roughness are imaginative. They are superstitious. But a man—no, she could not question a man. Her mind went to the boy diver, Ruffo. She had often thought about Ruffo during the last three days. She had expected to see him again. He had said nothing about returning to the islet, but she had felt sure he would return, if only in the hope of being given some more cigarettes. Boys in his position, she knew well, do not get a present of Khali Targa cigarettes every day of the week. How happy he had looked when he was smoking them! She remembered exactly the expression of his brown face now, as she sat watching the empty, moonlit sea. It was not greedy. It was voluptuous. She remembered seeing somewhere a picture of some Sultan of the East reclining on a divan and smoking a chibouk. She thought Ruffo had looked rather like the Sultan, serenely secure of all earthly enjoyment. At that moment the Pool of San Francesco had stood to the boy for the Paradise of Mahomet.

But Ruffo had not come again.

Each morning Vere had listened for his voice, had looked down upon the sea for his boat, but all in vain. On the third day she had felt almost angry with him unreasonably. But then she remembered that he was not his own master, not the owner of the boat. Of course, he could not do what he liked. If he could—well, then he would have come back. She was positive of that.

If he ever did come back, she said to herself now, she would question him about the sea. She would get at his thoughts about the sea, at his feelings. She wondered if they could possibly be at all like hers. It was unlikely, she supposed. They two were so very different. And yet—!

She smiled to herself again, imagining question and answer with Ruffo. He would not think her mad, even if she puzzled him. They understood each other. Even her mother had said that they seemed to be in sympathy. And that was true. Difference of rank need not, indeed cannot, destroy the magic chain if it exists, cannot prevent its links from being forged. She knew that her mother was in sympathy with Gaspare, and Gaspare with her mother. So there was no reason why she should not be in sympathy with Ruffo.

If he were here to-night she would begin at once to talk to him about the sea. But of course he would never come at night to the islet.

Vere knew that the Neapolitan fishermen usually keep each to his own special branch of the common profession. By this time of night, no doubt, Ruffo was in his home at the Mergellina, sitting in the midst of his family, or was strolling with lively companions of his own age, or, perhaps, was fast asleep in bed.

Vere felt that it would be horrible to go to bed on such a night, to shut herself in from the moon and the sea. The fishermen who slept in the shelter of the Saint's Pool were enviable. They had the stars above them, the waters about them, the gentle winds to caress them as they lay in the very midst of romance.

She wondered whether there were any boats in the Saint's Pool to-night. She had not been to see. A few steps and she could look over. She got up and went back to the bridge, treading softly because she was thinking of repose. There she stopped and looked down. She saw two boats on the far side of the Pool almost at the feet of the Saint. The men in them must be lying down, for Vere could see only the boats, looking black, and filled with a confused blackness—of sails probably, and sleeping men. The rest of the pool was empty, part of it bright with the radiance of the moon, part of it shading away to the mysterious dimness of still water at night under the lee of cliffs.

For some time the girl stood, watching. Just at that moment her active brain almost ceased to work, stilled by the reverie that is born of certain night visions. Without these motionless boats the Pool of the Saint would have been calm. With them, its stillness seemed almost ineffably profound. The hint of life bound in the cores of sleep, prisoner to rest, deepened Nature's impression and sent Vere into reverie. There were no trees here. No birds sang, for although it was the month of the nightingales, none ever came to sing to San Francesco. No insects chirped or hummed. All was stark and almost fearfully still as in a world abandoned; and the light fell on the old faces of the rocks faintly, as if it feared to show the ravages made in them by the storms of the long ages they had confronted and defied.

Vere had a sensation of sinking very slowly down into a gulf, as she stood there, not falling, but sinking, down into some world of quiet things, farther and farther down, leaving all the sounds of life far up in light above her. And descent was exquisite, easy and natural, and, indeed, inevitable. Nothing called her from below. For where she was going there were no voices. Yet she felt that at last there would be something to receive her; mystical stillness, mystical peace.

A silky sound—far off—checked that imaginative descent that seemed so physical, first merely arrested it, then, always silky, but growing louder, took her swiftly and softly back to the summit she had left. Now she was conscious again of herself and of the night. She was listening. The sound that had broken her reverie was the gentle sweep of big-bladed oars through the calm sea. As she knew this she saw, away to the right, a black shadow stealing across the silver waste beyond the islet. It pushed its way to the water at her very feet, and chose that as its anchorage.

The figure of the rower stood up straight and black for a moment, looking lonely in the night.

Vere could not see his face, but she knew at once that he was Ruffo. Her inclination was to bend down with the soft cry of "Pescator!" which she had sent to him on the sunny morning of their meeting. She checked it, why she scarcely knew, in obedience to some imperious prompting of her nature. But she kept her eyes on him. And they were full of will. She was willing him not to lie down in the bottom of the boat and sleep. She knew that he and his companions must have come to the pool at that hour to rest. There were three other men in the boat. Two had been sitting on the gunwale of it, and now lay down. The third, who was in the bows, exchanged some words with the rower, who replied. Vere could hear the sound of their voices, but not what they said. The conversation continued for two or three minutes, while Ruffo was taking in the oars and laying them one on each side of the boat. When he had done this he stretched up his arms to their full length above his head, and a loud noise of a prolonged yawn came up to Vere, and nearly made her laugh. Long as it was, it seemed to her to end abruptly. The arms dropped down.

She felt sure he had seen her watching, and stayed quite still, wondering what he was going to do. Perhaps he would tell the other man. She found herself quickly hoping that he would not. That she was there ought to be their little secret.

All this that was passing through her mind was utterly foreign to any coquetry. Vere had no more feeling of sex in regard to Ruffo than she would have had if she had been a boy herself. The sympathy she felt with him was otherwise founded, deep down in mysteries beyond the mysteries of sex.

Again Ruffo and the man who had not lain down spoke together. But the man did not look up to Vere. He must have looked if his attention had been drawn to the fact that she was there—a little spy upon the men of the sea, considering them from her eminence.

Ruffo had not told. She was glad.

Presently the man moved from his place in the bows. She saw him lift a leg to get over into the stern, treading carefully in order not to trample on his sleeping companions. Then his black figure seemed to shut up like a telescope. He had become one with the dimness in the boat, was no longer detached from it. Only Ruffo was still detached. Was he going to sleep, too?

A certain tenseness came into Vere's body. She kept her eyes, which she had opened very wide, fixed upon the black figure. It remained standing. The head moved. He was certainly looking up. She realized that he was not sleepy, despite that yawn,—that he would like to speak to her—to let her know that he knew she was there.

Perhaps he did not dare to—or, not that, perhaps fishermen's etiquette, already enshrined in his nature, did not permit him to come ashore. The boat was so close to the land that he could step on to it easily.

She leaned down.

"Pescator!"

It was scarcely more than a whisper. But the night was so intensely still that he heard it. Or, if not that, he felt it. His shadow—so it seemed in the shadow of the cliff—flitted out of the boat and disappeared.

He was coming—to have that talk about the sea.

CHAPTER IX

"Buona sera, Signorina."

"Buona sera, Ruffo."

She did not feign surprise when he came up to her.

"So you fish at night?" she said. "I thought the divers for frutti di mare did not do that."

"Signorina, I have been taken into the boat of Mandano Giuseppe."

He spoke rather proudly, and evidently thought she would know of whom he was telling her. "I fish for sarde now."

"Is that better for you?"

"Si, Signorina, of course."

"I am glad of that."

"Si, Signorina."

He stood beside her quite at his ease. To-night he had on a cap, but it was pushed well off his brow, and showed plenty of his thick, dark hair.

"When did you see me?" she asked.

"Almost directly, Signorina."

"And what made you look up?"

"Signorina?"

"Why did you look up directly?"

"Non lo so, Signorina."

"I think it was because I made you feel that I was there," she said. "I think you obey me without knowing it. You did the same the other day."

"Perhaps, Signorina."

"Have you smoked all the cigarettes?"

She saw him smile, showing his teeth.

"Si, Signorina, long ago. I smoked them the same day."

"You shouldn't. It is bad for a boy, and you are younger than I am, you know."

The smile grew wider.

"What are you laughing at?"

"I don't know, Signorina."

"Do you think it is funny to be younger than I am?"

"Si, Signorina."

"I suppose you feel quite as if you were a man?"

"If I could not work as well as a man Giuseppe would not have taken me into his boat. But of course with a lady it is all different. A lady does not have to work. Poor women get old very soon, Signorina."

"Your mother, is she old?"

"My mamma! I don't know. Yes, I suppose she is rather old."

He seemed to be considering.

"Si, Signorina, my mamma is rather old. But then she has had a lot of trouble, my poor mamma!"

"I am sorry. Is she like you?"

"I don't know, Signorina; I have never thought about it. What does it matter?"

"It may not matter, but such things are interesting sometimes."

"Are they, Signorina?"

Then, evidently with a polite desire to please her and carry on the conversation in the direction indicated by her, he added:

"And are you like your Signora Madre, Signorina?"

Vere felt inclined to smile, but she answered, quite seriously.

"I don't believe I am. My mother is very tall, much taller than I am, and not so dark. My eyes are much darker than hers and quite different."

"I think you have the eyes of a Sicilian, Signorina."

Again Vere was conscious of a simple effort on the part of the boy to be gallant. And he had a good memory too. He had not forgotten her three-days'-old claim to Sicilian blood. The night mitigated the blunders of his temperament, it seemed. Vere could not help being pleased. There was something in her that ever turned towards the Sicily she had never seen. And this boy had not seen Sicily either.

"Isn't it odd that you and I have never seen Sicily?" she said, "and that both our mothers have? And mine is all English, you know."

"My mamma would be very glad to kiss the hand of your Signora Mother," replied Ruffo. "I told her about the kind ladies who gave me cigarettes, and that the Signorina had never seen her father. When she heard that the Signorina was born after her father was dead, and that her father had died in Sicily, she said—my poor mamma!—'If ever I see the Signorina's mother, I shall kiss her hand. She was a widow before she was a mother; may the Madonna comfort her.' My mamma spoke just like that, Signorina. And then she cried for a long time. But when Patrigno came in she stopped crying at once."

"Did she? Why was that?"

"I don't know, Signorina."

Vere was silent for a moment. Then she said:

"Is your Patrigno kind to you, Ruffo?"

The boy looked at her, then swiftly looked away.

"Kind enough, Signorina," he answered.

Then they both kept silence. They were standing side by side thus, looking down rather vaguely at the Saint's pool, when another boat floated gently into it, going over to the far side, where already lay the two boats at the feet of San Francesco. Vere saw it with indifference. She was accustomed to the advent of the fishermen at this hour. Ruffo stared at it for a moment with a critical inquiring gaze. The boat drew up near the land and stopped. There was a faint murmur of voices, then silence again.

The Marchesino had told the two sailors that they could have an hour or two of sleep before beginning to fish.

The men lay down, shut their eyes, and seemed to sleep at once. But Artois and the Marchesino, lounging on a pile of rugs deftly arranged in the bottom of the stern of the boat, smoked their cigars in a silence laid upon them by the night silence of the Pool. Neither of them had as yet caught sight of the figures of Vere and Ruffo, which were becoming more clearly relieved as the moon rose and brought a larger world within its radiance, of its light. Artois was satisfied that the members of the Casa del Mare were in bed. As they approached the house he had seen no light from its windows. The silence about the islet was profound, and gave him the impression of being in the very heart of the night. And this impression lasted, and so tricked his mind that he forgot that the hour was not really late. He lay back, lazily smoking his cigar, and drinking in the stark beauty round about him, a beauty delicately and mysteriously fashioned by the night, which, as by a miracle, had laid hold of bareness and barren ugliness, and turned them to its exquisite purposes, shrinking from no material in its certainty of its own power to transform.

The Marchesino, too, lay back, with his great, gray eyes staring about him. While the feelings of his friend had moved towards satisfaction, his had undergone a less pleasant change. His plan seemed to be going awry, and he began to think of himself as of a fool. What had he anticipated? What had he expected of this expedition? He had been, as usual, politely waiting on destiny. He had come to the islet in the hope that Destiny would meet him there and treat him with every kindness and hospitality, forestalling his desires. But lo! He was abandoned in a boat among a lot of taciturn men, while the object of all his thoughts and pains, his plots and hopes, was, doubtless, hermetically sealed in the home on the cliff above him.

Several Neapolitan words, familiar in street circles, ran through his mind, but did not issue from his lips, and his face remained perfectly calm—almost seraphic in expression.

Out of the corners of his eyes he stole a glance at "caro Emilio." He wished his friend would follow the example of the men and go to sleep. He wanted to feel himself alone in wakefulness and unobserved. For he was not resigned to an empty fate. The voices of the laughing women at the Antico Giuseppone still rang through his memory. He was adventurous by nature. What he would do if Emilio would only slumber he did not know. But it was certain he would do something. The islet, dark and distinct in outline beneath the moon, summoned him. Was he a Neapolitan and not beneath her window? It was absurd. And he was not at all accustomed to control himself or to fight his own impulses. For the moment "caro Emilio" became "maledetto Emilio" in his mind. Sleepless as Providence, Emilio reclined there. A slightly distracted look came into the Marchesino's eyes as he glanced away from his friend and stared once more at the islet, which he longed so ardently to invade.

This time he saw the figures of Vere and Ruffo above him in the moonlight, which now sharply relieved them. He gazed. And as he gazed they moved away from the bridge, going towards the seat where Vere had been before she had seen Ruffo.

Vere had on a white dress.

The heart of the Marchesino leaped. He was sure it was the girl of the white boat. Then the inhabitants of the house on the islet were not asleep, were not even in bed. They—she at least, and that was all he cared for—were out enjoying the moon and the sea. How favorable was the night! But who was with her?

The Marchesino had very keen eyes. And now he used them with almost fierce intensity. But Ruffo was on the far side of Vere. It was not possible to discern more than that he was male, and taller than the girl in the white dress.

Jealousy leaped up in the Marchesino, that quick and almost frivolous jealousy which, in the Southerner, can so easily deepen into the deadliness that leads to crime. Not for a moment did he doubt that the man with Vere was a lover. This was a blow which, somehow, he had not expected. The girl in the white boat had looked enchantingly young. When he had played the seal for her she had laughed like a child. He—even he, who believed in no one's simplicity, made sceptical by his own naughtiness so early developed towards a fine maturity!—had not expected anything like this. And these English, who pride themselves upon their propriety, their stiffness, their cold respectability! These English misses!

"Ouf!"

It was out of the Marchesino's mouth before he was aware of it, an exclamation of cynical disgust.

"What's the matter, amico mio?" said Artois, in a low voice.

"Niente!" said the Marchesino, recollecting himself. "Are not you going to sleep?"

"Yes," said Artois, throwing away his cigar end. "I am. And you?"

"I too!"

The Marchesino was surprised by his friend's reply. He did not understand the desire of Artois not to have his sense of the romance of their situation broken in upon by conversation just then. The romance of women was not with Artois, but the romance of Nature was. He wanted to keep it. And now he settled himself a little lower in the boat, under the shadow of its side, and seemed to be giving himself to sleep.

The Marchesino thanked the Madonna, and made his little pretence of slumber too, but he kept his head above the gunwale, leaning it on his arm with a supporting cushion beneath; and though he really did shut both his eyes for a short time, to deceive caro Emilio, he very soon opened them again, and gazed towards the islet. He could not see the two figures now. Rage seized him. First the two men at the Antico Giuseppone, and now this man on the islet! Every one was companioned. Every one was enjoying the night as it was meant to be enjoyed. He—he alone was the sport of "il maledetto destino." He longed to commit some act of violence. Then he glanced cautiously round without moving.

The two sailors were sleeping. He could hear their regular and rather loud breathing. Artois lay quite still. The Marchesino turned his body very carefully so that he might see the face of his friend. As he did so Artois, who had been looking straight up at the stars, shut his eyes, and simulated sleep. His suspicion of Doro, that this expedition had been undertaken with some hidden motive, was suddenly renewed by this sly and furtive movement, which certainly suggested purpose and the desire to conceal it.

So caro Emilio slept very peacefully, and breathed with the calm regularity of a sucking child. But in this sleep of a child he was presently aware that the boat was moving—in fact was being very adroitly moved. Though his eyes were shut he felt the moonlight leave his face presently, and knew they were taken by the shadow of the islet. Then the boat stopped.

A moment later Artois was aware that the boat contained three people instead of four.

The Marchesino had left it to take a little stroll on shore.

Artois lay still. He knew how light is the slumber of seamen in a boat with the wide airs about them, and felt sure that the sailors must have been waked by the tour of the boat across the Pool. Yet they had not moved, and they continued apparently to sleep. He guessed that a glance from their "Padrone" had advised them not to wake. And this was the truth.

At the first movement of the boat both the men had looked up and had received their message from the Marchesino's expressive eyes. They realized at once that he had some design which he wished to keep from the knowledge of his friend, the forestiere. Of course it must be connected with a woman. They were not particularly curious. They had always lived in Naples, and knew their aristocracy. So they merely returned the Marchesino's glance with one of comprehension and composed themselves once more to repose.

The Marchesino did not come back, and presently Artois lifted himself up a little, and looked out.

The boat was right under the lee of the islet, almost touching the shore, but the sea was so perfectly still that it scarcely moved, and was not in any danger of striking against the rock. The sailors had seen that, too, before they slept again.

Artois sat quite up. He wondered a good deal what his friend was doing. One thing was certain—he was trespassing. The islet belonged to Hermione, and no one had any right to be upon it without her invitation. Artois had that right, and was now considering whether or not he should use it, follow the Marchesino and tell him—what he had not told him—that the owner of the islet was the English friend of whom he had spoken.

For Artois the romance of the night in which he had been revelling was now thoroughly disturbed. He looked again towards the two sailors, suspecting their sleep. Then he got up quietly, and stepped out of the boat onto the shore. His doing so gave a slight impetus to the boat, which floated out a little way into the Pool. But the men in it seemed to sleep on.

Artois stood still for a moment at the edge of the sea. His great limbs were cramped, and he stretched them. Then he went slowly towards the steps. He reached the plateau before the Casa del Mare. The Marchesino was not there. He looked up at the house. As he did so the front door opened and Hermione came out, wrapped in a white lace shawl.

"Emile?" she said, stopping with her hand on the door. "Why—how extraordinary!"

She came to him.

"Have you come to pay us a nocturnal visit, or—there's nothing the matter?"

"No," he said.

For perhaps the first time in his life he felt embarrassed with Hermione. He took her hand.

"I don't believe you meant me to know you were here," she said, guided by the extraordinary intuition of woman.

"To tell the truth," he answered, "I did not expect to see you. I thought you were all in bed."

"Oh no. I have been on the terrace and in the garden. Vere is out somewhere. I was just going to look for her."

There was a distinct question in her prominent eyes as she fixed them on him.

"No, I haven't seen Vere," he said, answering it.

"Are you alone?" she asked, abruptly.

"No. You remember my mentioning my friend, the Marchesino Panacci? Well, he is with me. We were going to fish. The fishermen suggested our sleeping in the Saint's Pool for an hour or two first. I found Doro gone and came to look for him."

There was still a faint embarrassment in his manner.

"I believe you have seen him," he added. "He was bathing the other day when you were passing in the boat,—I think it was you. Did you see a young man who did some tricks in the water?"

"Oh yes, an impudent young creature. He pretended to be a porpoise and a seal. He made us laugh. Vere was delighted with him. Is that your friend? Where can he be?"

"Where is Vere?" said Artois.

Their eyes met, and suddenly his embarrassment passed away.

"You don't mean that—?"

"My friend, you know what these Neapolitans are. Doro came back from his bathe raving about Vere. I did not tell him I knew her. I think—I am sure he has guessed it, and much more. Let us go and find him. It seems you are to know him. E il destino."

"You don't want me to know him?" she said, as they turned away from the house.

"I don't know that there is any real reason why you should not. But my instinct was against the acquaintance. Where can Vere be? Does she often come out alone at night?"

"Very often. Ah! There she is, beyond the bridge, and—is that the Marchesino Panacci with her? Why—no, it's—"

"It is Ruffo," Artois said.

Vere and the boy were standing near the edge of the cliff and talking earnestly together, but as Hermione and Artois came towards them they turned round as if moved by a mutual impulse. Ruffo took off his cap and Vere cried out:

"Monsieur Emile!"

She came up to him quickly. He noticed that her face looked extraordinarily alive, that her dark eyes were fiery with expression.

"Good-evening, Vere," he said.

He took her small hand.

"Buona sera, Ruffo," he added.

He looked from one to the other, and saw the perfect simplicity of both.

"Tell me, Vere," he said. "Have you seen any one on the islet to-night?"

"Yes, just now. Why? What made you think so?"

"Well?"

"A man—a gentleman came. I told him he was trespassing."

Artois smiled. Ruffo stood by, his cap in his hand, looking attentively at Vere, who had spoken in French. She glanced at him, and suddenly broke into Italian.

"He was that absurd boy we saw in the sea, Madre, the other day, who pretended to be a seal, and made me laugh. He reminded me of it, and asked me if I didn't recognize him."

"What did you say?"

"I said 'No' and 'Good-night.'"

"And did he go?" asked Artois.

"No, he would not go. I don't know what he wanted. He looked quite odd, as if he were feeling angry inside, and didn't wish to show it. And he began trying to talk. But as I didn't really know him—after all, laughing at a man because he pretends to be a seal is scarcely knowing him, is it, Monsieur Emile?"

"No," he said, smiling at her smile.

"I said 'good-night' again in such a way that he had to go."

"And so he went!" said Artois.

"Yes. Do you know him, Monsieur Emile?"

"Yes. He came with me to-night."

A little look of penitence came into the girl's face.

"Oh, I am sorry."

"Why should you be?"

"Well, he began saying something about knowing friends of mine, or—I didn't really listen very much, because Ruffo was telling me all about the sea—and I thought it was all nonsense. He was absurdly complimentary first, you see! and so, when he began about friends, I only said 'good-night' again. And—and I'm really afraid I turned my back upon him. And now he's a friend of yours. Monsieur Emile! I am sorry!"

Already the Marchesino had had that lesson of which Artois had thought in Naples. Artois laughed aloud.

"It doesn't matter, Vere. My friend is not too sensitive."

"Buona sera, Signorina! Buona sera, Signora! Buon riposo!"

It was Ruffo preparing to go, feeling that he scarcely belonged to this company, although he looked in no way shy, and had been smiling broadly at Vere's narrative of the discomfiture of the Marchesino.

"Ruffo," said Hermione, "you must wait a moment."

"Si, Signora?"

"I am going to give you a few more cigarettes."

Vere sent a silent but brilliant "Thank you" to her mother. They all walked towards the house.

Vere and her mother were in front, Artois and Ruffo behind. Artois looked very closely and even curiously at the boy.

"Have I ever seen you before?" he asked, as they came to the bridge.

"Signore?"

"Not the other morning. But have we ever met in Naples?"

"I have seen you pass by sometimes at the Mergellina, Signore."

"That must be it then!" Artois thought, "I have seen you there without consciously noticing you."

"You live there?" he said.

"Si, Signore; I live with my mamma and my Patrigno."

"Your Patrigno," Artois said, merely to continue the conversation. "Then your father is dead?"

"Si, Signore, my Babbo is dead."

They were on the plateau now, before the house.

"If you will wait a moment, Ruffo, I will fetch the cigarettes," said Hermione.

"Let me go, Madre," said Vere, eagerly.

"Very well, dear."

The girl ran into the house. As she disappeared they heard a quick step, and the Marchesino came hurrying up from the sea. He took off his hat when he saw Hermione, and stopped.

"I was looking for you, Emilio."

He kept his hat in his hand. Evidently he had recovered completely from his lesson. He looked gay and handsome. Artois realized how very completely the young rascal's desires were being fulfilled. But of course the introduction must be made. He made it quietly.

"Marchese Isidoro Panacci—Mrs. Delarey."

The Marchesino bent and kissed Hermione's hand. As he did so Vere came out of the house, her hands full of Khali Targa cigarettes, her face eager at the thought of giving pleasure to Ruffo.

"This is my daughter, Vere," Hermione said. "Vere, this is the Marchese Isidoro Panacci, a friend of Monsieur Emile's."

The Marchesino went to kiss Vere's hand, but she said:

"I'm very sorry—look!"

She showed him that they were full of cigarettes, and so escaped from the little ceremony. For those watching it was impossible to know whether she wished to avoid the formal salutation of the young man's lips or not.

"Here, Ruffo!" she said. She went up to the boy. "Put your hands together."

Ruffo gladly obeyed. He curved his brown hands into a cup, and Vere filled this cup with the big cigarettes, while Hermione, Artois, and the Marchesino looked on; each one of them with a fixed attention which—surely—the action scarcely merited. But there was something about those two, Vere and the boy, which held the eyes and the mind.

"Good-night, Ruffo. You must carry them to the boat. They'll be crushed if you put them into your trousers-pocket."

"Si, Signorina!"

He waited a moment. He wanted to salute them, but did not know how to. That was evident. His expressive eyes, his whole face told it to them.

Artois suddenly set his lips together in his beard. For an instant it seemed to him that the years had rolled back, that he was in London, in Caminiti's restaurant, that he saw Maurice Delarey, with the reverential expression on his face that had been so pleasing. Yes, the boy Ruffo looked like him in that moment, as he stood there, wishing to do his devoir, to be polite, but not knowing how to.

"Never mind, Ruffo," It was Vere's voice. "We understand! Or—shall I?" A laughing look came into her face. She went up to the boy and, with a delicious, childish charm and delicacy, that quite removed the action from impertinence, she took his cap off. "There!" She put it gently back on his dark hair. "Now you've been polite to us. Buona notte!"

"Buona notte, Signorina."

The boy ran off, half laughing, and carrying carefully the cigarettes in his hands still held together like a cup.

Hermione and Artois were smiling. Artois felt something for Vere just then that he could hardly have explained, master though he was of explanation of the feelings of man. It seemed to him that all the purity, and the beauty, and the whimsical unselfconsciousness, and the touchingness of youth that is divine, appeared in that little, almost comic action of the girl. He loved her for the action, because she was able to perform it just like that. And something in him, suddenly adored youth in a way that seemed new to his heart.

"Well," said Hermione, when Ruffo had disappeared. "Will you come in? I'm afraid all the servants are in bed, but—"

"No, indeed it is too late," Artois said.

Without being aware of it he spoke with an authority that was almost stern.

"We must be off to our fishing," he added. "Good-night. Good-night, Vere."

"Good-night, Signora."

The Marchesino bowed, with his hat in his hand. He kissed Hermione's hand again, but he did not try to take Vere's.

"Good-night," Hermione said.

A glance at Artois had told her much that he was thinking.

"Good-night, Monsieur Emile," said Vere. "Good-night, Marchese. Buona pesca!"

She turned and followed her mother into the house.

"Che simpatica!"

It was the Marchesino's voice, breathing the words through a sigh: "Che simpatica Signorina!" Then an idea seemed to occur to him, and he looked at his friend reproachfully. "And you knew the girl with the perfect little nose, Emilio—all the time you knew her!"

"And all the time you knew I knew her!" retorted Artois.

They looked at each other in the eyes and burst out laughing.

"Emilio, you are the devil! I will never forgive you. You do not trust me."

"Caro amico, I do trust you—always to fall in love with every girl you meet. But"—and his voice changed—"the Signorina is a child. Remember that, Doro."

They were going down the steps to the sea. Almost as Artois spoke they reached the bottom, and saw their boat floating in the moonlight nearly in the centre of the Pool. The Marchesino stood still.

"My dear Emilio," he said, staring at Artois with his great round eyes, "you make me wonder whether you know women."

Artois felt amused.

"Really?" he said.

"Really! And yet you write books."

"Writing books does not always prove that one knows much. But explain to me."

They began to stroll on the narrow space at the sea edge. Close by lay the boat to which Ruffo belonged. The boy was already in it, and they saw him strike a match and light one of the cigarettes. Then he lay back at his ease, smoking, and staring up at the moon.

"A girl of sixteen is not a child, and I am sure the Signorina is sixteen. But that is not all. Emilio, you do not know the Signorina."

Artois repressed a smile. The Marchesino was perfectly in earnest.

"And you—do you know the Signorina?" Artois asked.

"Certainly I know her," returned the Marchesino with gravity.

They reached Ruffo's boat. As they did so, the Marchesino glanced at it with a certain knowing impudence that was peculiarly Neapolitan.

"When I came to the top of the islet the Signorina was with that boy," the Marchesino continued.

"Well?" said Artois.

"Oh, you need not be angry, Emilio caro."

"I am not angry," said Artois.

Nor was he. It is useless to be angry with racial characteristics, racial points of view. He knew that well. The Marchesino stared at him.

"No, I see you are not."

"The Signorina was with that boy. She has talked to him before. He has dived for her. He has sung for her! She has given him cigarettes, taken from her mother's box, with her mother's consent. Everything the Signorina does her mother knows and approves of. You saw the Signora send the Signorina for more cigarettes to give the boy to-night. Ebbene?"

"Ebbene. They are English!"

And he laughed.

"Madre mia!"

He laughed again, seized his mustaches, twisted them, and went on.

"They are English, but for all that the Signorina is a woman. And as to that boy—"

"Perhaps he is a man."

"Certainly he is. Dio mio, the boy at least is a Neapolitan."

"No, he isn't."

"He is not?"

"He's a Sicilian."

"How do you know?"

"I was here the other day when he was diving for frutti di mare."

"I have seen him at the Mergellina ever since he was a child."

"He says he is a Sicilian."

"Boys like that say anything if they can get something by it. Perhaps he thought you liked the Sicilians better than the Neapolitans. But anyhow—Sicilian or Neapolitan, it is all one! He is a Southerner, and at fifteen a Southerner is already a man. I was."

"I know it. But you were proving to me that the Signorina is a woman. The fact that she, an English girl, is good friends with the fisher boy does not prove it."

"Ah, well!"

The Marchesino hesitated.

"I had seen the Signorina before I came to meet you at the house."

"Had you?"

"Didn't you know it?"

"Yes, I did."

"I knew she told you."

"What?"

"She told you! she told you! She is birbante. She is a woman, for she pretended as only a woman can pretend."

"What did she pretend?"

"That she was not pleased at my coming, at my finding out where she lived, and seeking her. Why, Emilio, even when I was in the sea, when I was doing the seal, I could read the Signorina's character. She showed me from the boat that she wanted me to come, that she wished to know me. Ah, che simpatica! Che simpatica ragazza!"

The Marchesino looked once more at Ruffo.

"Come here a minute!" he said, in a low voice, not wishing to wake the still sleeping fishermen.

The boy jumped lightly out and came to them. When he stood still the Marchesino said, in his broadest Neapolitan:

"Now then, tell me the truth! I'm a Neapolitan, not a forestiere. You've seen me for years at the Mergellina."

"Si, Signore."

"You're a Napolitano."

"No, Signore. I am a Sicilian."

There was a sound of pride in the boy's voice.

"I am quite sure he speaks the truth," Artois said, in French.

"Why do you come here?" asked the Marchesino.

"Signore, I come to fish."

"For cigarettes?"

"No, Signore, for sarde. Buona notte, Signore."

He turned away from them with decision, and went back to his boat.

"He is a Sicilian," said Artois. "I would swear to it."

"Why? Hark at his accent."

"He is a Sicilian!"

"But why are you so sure?"

Artois only said:

"Are you going to fish?"

"Emilio, I cannot fish to-night. My soul is above such work as fishing. It is indeed. Let us go back to Naples."

"Va bene."

Artois was secretly glad. He, too, had no mind—or was it no heart?—for fishing that night, after the episode of the islet. They hailed the sailors, who were really asleep this time, and were soon far out on the path of the moonlight setting their course towards Naples.

CHAPTER X

On the following morning Hermione and Vere went for an excursion to Capri. They were absent from the island for three nights. When they returned they found a card lying upon the table in the little hall—"Marchese Isidoro Panacci di Torno"—and Gaspare told them that it had been left by a Signore, who had called on the day of their departure, and had seemed very disappointed to hear that they were gone.

"I do not know this Signore," Gaspare added, rather grimly.

Vere laughed, and suddenly made her eyes look very round, and staring, and impudent.

"He's like that, Gaspare," she said.

"Vere!" said her mother.

Then she added to Gaspare:

"The Marchese is a friend of Don Emilio's. Ah! and here is a letter from Don Emilio."

It was lying beside the Marchese's card with some other letters. Hermione opened it first, and read that Artois had been unexpectedly called away to Paris on business, but intended to return to Naples as soon as possible, and to spend the whole summer on the Bay.

"I feel specially that this summer I should like to be near you," he wrote. "I hope you wish it."

At the end of the letter there was an allusion to the Marchesino, "that gay and admirably characteristic Neapolitan product, the Toledo incarnate."

There was not a word of Vere.

Hermione read the letter aloud to Vere, who was standing beside her, evidently hoping to hear it. When she had finished, Vere said:

"I am glad Monsieur Emile will be here all the summer."

"Yes."

"But why specially this summer, Madre?"

"I am not sure what he means by that," Hermione answered.

But she remembered the conversation in the Grotto of Virgil, and wondered if her friend thought she needed the comfort of his presence.

"Well, Madre?"

Vere's bright eyes were fixed upon her mother.

"Well, Vere? What is it?"

"Is there no message for me from Monsieur Emile?"

"No, Vere."

"How forgetful of him! But never mind!" She went upstairs, looking disappointed.

Hermione re-read the letter. She wondered, perhaps more than Vere, why there was no message for the child. The child—she was still calling Vere that in her mind, even after the night conversation with Gaspare. Two or three times she re-read that sentence, "I feel specially that this summer I should like to be near you," and considered it; but she finally put the letter away with a strong feeling that most of its meaning lay between the lines, and that she had not, perhaps, the power to interpret it.

Vere had said that Emile was forgetful. He might be many things, but forgetful he was not. One of his most characteristic qualities was his exceptionally sharp consciousness of himself and of others. Hermione knew that he was incapable of writing to her and forgetting Vere while he was doing so.

She did not exactly know why, but the result upon her of this letter was a certain sense of depression, a slight and vague foreboding. And yet she was glad, she was even thankful, to know that her friend, was going to spend the summer on the Bay. She blamed herself for her melancholy, telling herself that there was nothing in the words of Artois to make her feel sad. Yet she continued to feel sad, to feel as if some grievous change were at hand, as if she had returned to the island to confront some untoward fate. It was very absurd of her. She told herself that.

The excursion to Capri had been a cheerful one. She had enjoyed it. But all the time she had been watching Vere, studying her, as she had not watched and studied her before. Something had suddenly made her feel unaccustomed to Vere. It might be the words of Gaspare, the expression in the round eyes of the Marchesino, or something new, or newly apparent, in Vere. She did not know. But she did know that now the omission of Artois to mention Vere in his letter seemed to add to the novelty of the child for her.

That seemed strange, yet it was a fact. How absolutely mysterious are many of the currents of our being, Hermione thought. They flow far off in subterranean channels, unseen by us, and scarcely ever realized, but governing, carrying our lives along upon their deeps towards the appointed end.

Gaspare saw that his Padrona was not quite as usual, and looked at her with large-eyed inquiry, but did not at first say anything. After tea, however, when Hermione was sitting alone in the little garden with a book, he said to her bluntly:

"Che ha Lei?"

Hermione put the book down in her lap.

"That is just what I don't know, Gaspare."

"Perhaps you are not well."

"But I believe I am, perfectly well. You know I am always well. I never even have fever. And you have that sometimes."

He continued to look at her searchingly.

"You have something."

He said it firmly, almost as if he were supplying her with information which she needed and had lacked.

Hermione made a sound that was like a little laugh, behind which there was no mirth.

"I don't know what it is."

Then, after a pause, she added that phrase which is so often upon Sicilian lips:

"Ma forse e il destino."

Gaspare moved his head once as if in acquiescence.

"When we are young, Signora," he said, "we do what we want, but we have to want it. And we think we are very free. And when we are old we don't feel to want anything, but we have to do things just the same. Signora, we are not free. It is all destiny."

And again he moved his head solemnly, making his liquid brown eyes look more enormous than usual.

"It is all destiny," Hermione repeated, almost dreamily.

Just then she felt that it was so—that each human being, and she most of all, was in the grasp of an inflexible, of an almost fierce guide, who chose the paths, and turned the feet of each traveller, reluctant or not, into the path the will of the guide had selected. And now, still dreamily, she wondered whether she would ever try to rebel if the path selected for her were one that she hated or feared, one that led into any horror of darkness, or any horror of too great light. For light, too, can be terrible, a sudden great light that shines pitilessly upon one's own soul. She was of those who possess force and impulse, and she knew it. She knew, too, that these are often rebellious. But to-day it seemed to her that she might believe so much in destiny, be so entirely certain of the inflexible purpose and power of the guide, that her intellect might forbid her to rebel, because of rebellion's fore-ordained inutility. Nevertheless, she supposed that if it was her instinct to rebel, she would do so at the psychological moment, even against the dictates of her intellect.

Gaspare remained beside her quietly. He often stood near her after they had been talking together, and calmly shared the silence with her. She liked that. It gave her an impression of his perfect confidence in her, his perfect ease in her company.

"Don't you ever think that you can put a knife into destiny, Gaspare," she asked him presently, using an image he would be likely to understand, "as you might put a knife into a man who tried to force you to do something you didn't wish to do?"

"Signora, what would be the use? The knife is no good against Destiny, nor the revolver either. And I have the permesso to carry one," he added, with a smile, as if he realized that he was being whimsical.

"Well, then, we must just hope that Destiny will be very kind to us, be a friend to us, a true comrade. I shall hope that and so must you."

"Si, Signora."

He realized that the conversation was finished, and went quietly away.

Hermione kept the letter of Artois. When he came back to the Bay she wanted to show it to him, to ask him to read for her the meaning between its lines. She put it away in her writing-table drawer, and then resolved to forget the peculiar and disagreeable effect it had made upon her.

A fortnight passed away before Artois' return. June came in upon the Bay, bringing with it a more vivid life in the environs of Naples. As the heat of the sun increased the vitality of the human motes that danced in its beams seemed to increase also, to become more blatant, more persistent. The wild oleander was in flower. The thorny cactus put forth upon the rim of its grotesque leaves pale yellow blossoms to rival the red geraniums that throng about it insolently in Italy. In the streets of the city ragged boys ran by crying, "Fragole!" and holding aloft the shallow baskets in which the rosy fruit made splashes of happy color. The carters wore bright carnations above their dusty ears. The children exposed their bare limbs to the sun, and were proud when they were given morsels of ice wrapped up in vine leaves to suck in the intervals of their endless dances and their play. On the hill of Posilipo the Venetian blinds of the houses, in the gardens clouded by the rounded dusk of the great stone pines, were thrust back, the windows were thrown open, the glad sun-rays fell upon the cool paved floors, over which few feet had trodden since the last summer died. Loud was the call of "Aqua!" along the roads where there were buildings, and all the lemons of Italy seemed to be set forth in bowers to please the eyes with their sharp, yet soothing color, and tempt the lips with their poignant juice. Already in the Galleria, an "avviso" was prominently displayed, stating that Ferdinando Bucci, the famous maker of Sicilian ice-creams, had arrived from Palermo for the season. In the Piazza del Plebiscito, hundreds of chairs were ranged before the bandstand, and before the kiosk where the women sing on the nights of summer near the Caffe Turco. The "Margherita" was shutting up. The "Eldorado" was opening. And all along the sea, from the vegetable gardens protected by brushwood hedges on the outskirts of the city towards Portici, to the balconies of the "Mascotte," under the hill of Posilipo, the wooden bathing establishments were creeping out into the shallow waters, and displaying proudly to the passers-by above their names: "Stabilimento Elena," "Stabilimento Donn' Anna," "Stabilimento delle Sirene," "Il piccolo Paradiso."

And all along the sea by night there was music.

From the Piazza before the Palace the band of the Caffe Gambrinus sent forth its lusty valses. The posturing women of the wooden kiosk caught up the chain of sound, and flung it on with their shrill voices down the hill towards Santa Lucia, where, by the waterside and the crowding white yachts, the itinerant musicians took it into the keeping of their guitars, their mandolins, their squeaky fiddles, and their hot and tremulous voices. The "Valse Bleu," "Santa Lucia," "Addio, mia bella Napoli," "La Frangese," "Sole Mio," "Marechiaro," "Carolina," "La Ciociara"; with the chain of lights the chain of songs was woven round the bay; from the Eldorado, past the Hotel de Vesuve, the Hotel Royal, the Victoria, to the tree-shaded alleys of the Villa Nazionale, to the Mergellina, where the naked urchins of the fisherfolk took their evening bath among the resting boats, to the "Scoglio di Frisio," and upwards to the Ristorante della Stella, and downwards again to the Ristorante del Mare, and so away to the point, to the Antico Giuseppone.

Long and brilliant was the chain of lamps, and long and ardent was the chain of melodies melting one into the other, and stretching to the wide darkness of the night and to the great stillness of the sea. The night was alive with music, with the voices that beat like hearts over-charged with sentimental longings.

But at the point where stood the Antico Giuseppone the lights and the songs died out. And beyond there was the mystery, the stillness of the sea.

And there, beyond the chain of lights, the chain of melodies, the islet lay in its delicate isolation; nevertheless, it, too, was surely not unaware of the coming of summer. For even here, Nature ran up her flag to honor her new festival. High up above the rock on the mainland opposite there was a golden glory of ginestra, the broom plant, an expanse of gold so brilliant, so daring in these bare surroundings, that Vere said, when she saw it:

"There is something cruel even in beauty, Madre. Do you like successful audacity?"

"I think I used to when I was your age," said Hermione. "Anything audacious was attractive to me then. But now I sometimes see through it too easily, and want something quieter and a little more mysterious."

"The difference between the Marchesino and Monsieur Emile?" said the girl, with a little laugh.

Hermione laughed, too.

"Do you think Monsieur Emile mysterious?" she asked.

"Yes—certainly. Don't you?"

"I have known him so intimately for so many years."

"Well, but that does not change him. Does it?"

"No. But it may make him appear very differently to me from the way in which he shows himself to others."

"I think if I knew Monsieur Emile for centuries I should always wonder about him."

"What is it in Emile that makes you wonder?" asked her mother, with a real curiosity.

"The same thing that makes me wonder when I look at a sleepy lion."

"You call Emile sleepy!" said Hermione.

"Oh, not his intellect, Madre! Of course that is horribly, horribly wide awake."

And Vere ran off to her room, or the garden, or the Saint's Pool—who knew where?—leaving her mother to say to herself, as she had already said to herself in these last days of the growing summer, "When I said that to Emile, what a fool I was!" She was thinking of her statement that there was nothing in her child that was hidden from her. As if in answer to that statement, Vere was unconsciously showing to her day by day the folly of it. Emile had said nothing. Hermione remembered that, and realized that his silence had been caused by his disagreement. But why had he not told her she was mistaken? Perhaps because she had just been laying bare to him the pain that was in her heart. Her call had been for sympathy, not merely for truth. She wondered whether she was a coward. Since they had returned from Capri the season and Vere had surely changed. Then, and always afterwards, Hermione thought of those three days in Capri as a definite barrier, a dividing line between two periods. Already, while in Capri, she had begun to watch her child in a new way. But that was, perhaps, because of an uneasiness, partly nervous, within herself. In Capri she might have been imagining. Now she was not imagining, she was realizing.

Over the sea came to the islet the intensity of summer. Their world was changing. And in this changing world Vere was beginning to show forth more clearly than before her movement onward—whither?

As yet the girl herself was unconscious of her mother's new watchfulness. She was happy in the coming of summer, and in her happiness was quite at ease, like a kitten that stretches itself luxuriously in the sun. To Vere the world never seemed quite awake till the summer came. Only in the hot sunshine did there glow the truthfulness and the fulness of life. She shared it with the ginestra. She saw and felt a certain cruelty in the gold, but she did not fear or condemn it, or wish it away. For she was very young, and though she spoke of cruelty she did not really understand it. In it there was force, and force already appealed to the girl as few things did. As, long ago, her father had gloried in the coming of summer to the South, she gloried in it now. She looked across the Pool of the Saint to the flood of yellow that was like sunlight given a body upon the cliff opposite, and her soul revelled within her, and her heart rose up and danced, alone, and yet as if in a glad company of dancers, all of whom were friends. Her brain, too, sprang to the alert. The sun increased the feeling of intelligence within her.

And then she thought of her room, of the hours she passed shut in there, and she was torn by opposing impulses.

But she told no one of them. Vere could keep her secrets although she was a girl.

How the sea welcomed the summer! To many this home on the island would have seemed an arid, inhospitable place, desolate and lost amid a cruel world of cliffs and waters. It was not so to Vere. For she entered into the life of the sea. She knew all its phases, as one may know all the moods of a person loved. She knew when she would find it intensely calm, at early morning and when the evening approached. At a certain hour, with a curious regularity, the breeze came, generally from Ischia, and turned it to vivacity. A temper that was almost frivolous then possessed it, and it broke into gayeties like a child's. The waves were small, but they were impertinently lively. They made a turmoil such as urchins make at play. Heedless of reverence, but not consciously impious, they flung themselves at the feet of San Francesco, casting up a tiny tribute of spray into the sun.

Then Vere thought that the Saint looked down with pleasure at them, as a good old man looks at a crowd of laughing children who have run against him in the street, remembering his own youth. For even the Saints were young! And, after that, surely the waves were a little less boisterous. She thought she noted a greater calm. But perhaps it was only that the breeze was dying down as the afternoon wore on.

She often sat and wondered which she loved best—the calm that lay upon the sea at dawn, or the calm that was the prelude to the night. Silvery were these dawns of the summer days. Here and there the waters gleamed like the scales of some lovely fish. Mysterious lights, like those in the breast of the opal, shone in the breast of the sea, stirred, surely travelled as if endowed with life, then sank away to the far-off kingdoms that man may never look on. Those dawns drew away the girl's soul as if she were led by angels, or, like Peter, walked upon the deep at some divine command. She felt that though her body was on the islet the vital part of her, the real "I," was free to roam across the great expanse that lay flat and still and delicately mysterious to the limits of eternity.

She had strange encounters there, the soul of her, as she went towards the East.

The evening calm was different. There was, Vere thought, less of heaven about it, but perhaps more of the wonder of this world. And this made her feel as if she had been nearer to heaven at her birth than she would be at her death. She knew nothing of the defilements of life. Her purity of mind was very perfect; but, taking a parable from Nature, she applied it imaginatively to Man, and she saw him covered with dust because of his journey through the world. Poor man!

And then she pitied herself too. But that passed. For if the sea at evening held most of the wonder of this world, it was worth the holding. Barely would she substitute the heavenly mysteries for it. The fishermen's boats were dreams upon a dream. Each sail was akin to a miracle. A voice that called across the water from a distance brought tears to Vere's eyes when the magic was at its fullest. For it seemed to mean all things that were tender, all things that were wistful, all things that trembled with hope—that trembled with love.

With summer Vere could give herself up to the sea, and not only imaginatively but by a bodily act.

Every day, and sometimes twice a day, she put on her bathing-dress in the Casa del Mare, threw a thin cloak over her, and ran down to the edge of the sea, where Gaspare was waiting with the boat. Hermione did not bathe. It did not suit her now. And Gaspare was Vere's invariable companion. He had superintended her bathing when she was little. He had taught her to swim. And with no one else would he ever trust his Padroncina when she gave herself to the sea. Sometimes he would row her out to a reef of rocks in the open water not too many yards from the island, and she would dive from them. Sometimes, if it was very hot, he would take her to the Grotto of Virgil. Sometimes they went far out to sea, and then, like her father in the Ionian Sea before the Casa delle Sirene, Vere would swim away and imagine that this was her mode of travel, that she was journeying alone to some distant land, or that she had been taken by the sea forever.

But very soon she would be sure to hear the soft splash of oars following her, and, looking back, would see the large, attentive eyes of the faithful Gaspare cautiously watching her dark head. Then she would lift up one hand, and call to him to go, and say she did not want him, that she wished to be alone, smiling and yet imperious. He only followed quietly and inflexibly. She would dive. She would swim under water. She would swim her fastest, as if really anxious to escape him. It was a game between them now. But always he was there, intent upon her safety.

Vere did not know the memories within Gaspare that made him such a guardian to the child of the Padrone he had loved; but she loved him secretly for his watchfulness, even though now and then she longed to be quite alone with the sea. And this she never was when bathing, for Hermione had exacted a promise from her not to go to bathe without Gaspare. In former days Vere had once or twice begun to protest against this prohibition, but something in her mother's eyes had stopped her. And she had remembered:

"Father was drowned in the sea."

Then, understanding something of what was in her mother's heart, she threw eager arms about her, and anxiously promised to be good.

One afternoon of the summer, towards the middle of June, she prolonged her bathe in the Grotto of Virgil until Gaspare used his authority, and insisted on her coming out of the water.

"One minute more, Gaspare! Only another minute!"

"Ma Signorina!"

She dived. She came up.

"Ma veramente Signorina!"

She dived again.

Gaspare waited. He was standing up in the boat with the oars in his hands, ready to make a dash at his Padroncina directly she reappeared, but she was wily, and came up behind the boat with a shrill cry that startled him. He looked round reproachfully over his shoulder.

"Signorina," he said, turning the boat round, "you are like a wicked baby to-day."

"What is it, Gaspare?" she asked, this time letting him come towards her.

"I say that you are like a wicked baby. And only the other day I was saying to the Signora—"

"What were you saying?"

She swam to the boat and got in.

"What?" she repeated, sitting down on the gunwale, while he began to row towards the islet.

"I was saying that you are nearly a woman now."

Vere seemed extraordinarily thin and young as she sat there in her dripping bathing-dress, with her small, bare feet distilling drops into the bottom of the boat, and her two hands, looking drowned, holding lightly to the wood on each side of her. Even Gaspare, as he spoke, was struck by this, and by the intensely youthful expression in the eyes that now regarded him curiously.

"Really, Gaspare?"

Vere asked the question quite seriously.

"Si, Signorina."

"A woman!"

She looked down, as if considering herself. Her wet face had become thoughtful, and for a moment she said nothing.

"And what did mother say?" she asked, looking up again. "But I know. I am sure she laughed at you."

Gaspare looked rather offended. His expressive face, which always showed what he was feeling, became almost stern, and he began to row faster than before.

"Why should the Signora laugh? Am I an imbecile, Signorina?"

"You?"

She hastened to correct the impression she had made.

"Why, Gaspare, you are our Providence!"

"Va bene, but—"

"I only meant that I am sure Madre wouldn't agree with you. She thinks me quite a child. I know that."

She spoke with conviction, nodding her head.

"Perhaps the Signora does not see."

Vere smiled.

"Gaspare, I believe you are horribly sharp," she said. "I often think you notice everything. You are birbante, I am half afraid of you."

Gaspare smiled, too. He had quite recovered his good humor. It pleased him mightily to fancy he had seen what the Padrona had not seen.

"I am a man, Signorina," he observed, quietly. "And I do not speak till I know. Why should I? And I was at your baptism. When we came back to the house I put five lire on the bed to bring you luck, although you were not a Catholic. But it is just the same. Your Saint will take care of you."

"Well, but if I am almost a woman—what then, Gaspare?"

"Signorina?"

"Mustn't I play about any more? Mustn't I do just what I feel inclined to, as I did in the grotto just now?"

"Three is no harm in that, Signorina. I was only joking then. But—"

He hesitated, looking at her firmly with his unfaltering gaze.

"But what? I believe you want to scold me about something. I am sure you do."

"No, Signorina, never! But women cannot talk to everybody, as children can. Nobody thinks anything of what children say. People only laugh and say 'Ecco, it's a baby talking.' But when we are older it is all different. People pay attention to us. We are of more importance then."

He did not mention Ruffo. He was too delicate to do that, for instinctively he understood how childish his Padroncina still was. And, at that moment, Vere did not think of Ruffo. She wondered a little what Gaspare was thinking. That there was some special thought behind his words, prompting them, she knew. But she did not ask him what it was, for already they were at the islet, and she must run in, and put on her clothes. Gaspare put her cloak carefully over her shoulders, and she hurried lightly up the steps and into her room. Her mother was not in the house. She had gone to Naples that day to see some poor people in whom she was interested. So Vere was alone. She took off her bathing-dress, and began to put on her things rather slowly. Her whole body was deliciously lulled by its long contact with the sea. She felt gloriously calm and gloriously healthy just then, but her mind was working vigorously though quietly.

A woman! The word sounded a little solemn and heavy, and, somehow, dreadfully respectable. And she thought of her recent behavior in the Grotto, and laughed aloud. She was so very slim, too. The word woman suggested to her some one more bulky than she was. But all that was absurd, of course. She was thinking very frivolously to-day.

She put on her dress and fastened it. At the age of sixteen she had put up her hair, but now it was still wet, and she had left it streaming over her shoulders. In a moment she was going out onto the cliff to let the sun dry it thoroughly. The sun was so much better than any towel. With her hair down she really looked like a child, whatever Gaspare thought. She said that to herself, standing for a moment before the glass. Vere was almost as divinely free from self-consciousness as her father had been. But the conversation in the boat had made her think of herself very seriously, and now she considered herself, not without keen interest.

"I am certainly not a wicked baby," she said to herself. "But I don't think I look at all like a woman."

Her dark eyes met the eyes in the glass and smiled.

"And yet I shall be seventeen quite soon. What can have made Gaspare talk like that to Madre? I wonder what he said exactly. And then that about 'women cannot talk to everybody as children can.' Now what—?"

Ruffo came into her mind.

"Ah!" she said, aloud.

The figure in the glass made a little gesture. It threw up its hand.

"That's it! That's it! Gaspare thinks—"

"Signorina! Signorina!"

Gaspare's voice was speaking outside the door. And now there came a firm knock. Vere turned round, rather startled. She had been very much absorbed by her colloquy.

"What is it, Gaspare?"

"Signorina, there's a boat coming in from Naples with Don Emilio in it."

"Don Emilio! He's come back! Oh!" There was a pause. Then she cried out, "Capital! Capital!"

She ran to the door and opened it.

"Just think of Don Emilio's being back already, Gaspare. But Madre! She will be sorry."

"Signorina?"

"Why? What's the matter?"

"Are you coming out like that?"

"What?—Oh, you mean my hair?"

"Si, Signorina."

"Gaspare, you ought to have been a lady's maid! Go and bring in Don Emilio to Madre's room. And—wait—you're not to tell him Madre is away. Now mind!"

"Va bene, Signorina."

He went away.

"Shall I put up my hair?"

Vere went again to the glass, and stood considering herself.

"For Monsieur Emile! No, it's too absurd! Gaspare really is… I sha'n't!"

And she ran out just as she was to meet Artois.

CHAPTER XI

When she reached her mother's sitting-room Artois was already there speaking to Gaspare by a window. He turned rather quickly as Vere came in, and exclaimed:

"Vere! Why—"

"Oh!" she cried, "Gaspare hasn't gone!"

A look almost of dread, half pretence but with some reality in it, too, came into her face.

"Gaspare, forgive me! I was in such a hurry. And it is only Don Emilio!"

Her voice was coaxing. Gaspare looked at his Padroncina with an attempt at reprobation; but his nose twitched, and though he tried to compress his lips they began to stretch themselves in a smile.

"Signorina! Signorina!" he exclaimed. "Madonna!"

On that exclamation he went out, trying to make his back look condemnatory.

"Only Don Emilio!" Artois repeated.

Vere went to him, and took and held his hand for a moment.

"Yes—only! That's my little compliment. Madre would say of you. 'He's such an old shoe!' Such compliments come from the heart, you know."

She still held his hand.

"I should have to put my hair up for anybody else. And Gaspare wanted me to for you."

Artois was looking rather grave and tired. She noticed that now, and dropped his hand and moved towards a bell.

"Tea!" she said, "all alone with me—for a treat!"

"Isn't your mother in?"

"No. She's gone to Naples. I'm very, very sorry. Make the best of it, Monsieur Emile, for the sake of my amour propre. I said I was sorry—but that was only for you, and Madre."

Artois smiled.

"Is an old shoe a worthy object of gross flattery?" he said.

"No."

"Then—"

"Don't be cantankerous, and don't be subtle, because I've been bathing."

"I notice that."

"And I feel so calm and delicious. Tea, please, Giulia."

The plump, dark woman who had opened the door smiled and retreated.

"So calm and so delicious, Monsieur Emile, and as if I were made of friendliness from top to toe."

"The all-the-world feeling. I know."

He sat down, rather heavily.

"You are tired. When did you come?"

"I arrived this morning. It was hot travelling, and I shared my compartment in the wagon-lit with a German gentleman very far advanced in several unaesthetic ailments. Basta! Thank Heaven for this. Calm and delicious!"

His large, piercing eyes were fixed upon Vere.

"And about twelve," he added, "or twelve-and-a-half."

"I?"

"Yes, you. I am not speaking of myself, though I believe I am calm also."

"I am a woman—practically."

"Practically?"

"Yes; isn't that the word people always put in when they mean 'that's a lie'?"

"You mean you aren't a woman! This afternoon I must agree with you."

"It's the sea! But just now, when you were coming, I was looking at myself in the glass and saying, 'You're a woman'—solemnly, you know, as if it was a dreadful truth."

Artois had sat down on a sofa. He leaned back now with his hands behind his head. He still looked at Vere, and, as he did so, he heard the faint whisper of the sea.

"Child of nature," he said—"call yourself that. It covers any age, and it's blessedly true."

Giulia came in at this moment with tea. She smiled again broadly on Artois, and received and returned his greeting with the comfortable and unembarrassed friendliness of the Italian race. As she went out she was still smiling.

"Addio to the German gentleman with the unaesthetic ailments!" said Artois.

An almost boyish sensation of sheer happiness invaded him. It made him feel splendidly, untalkative. And he felt for a moment, too, as if his intellect lay down to sleep.

"Cara Giulia!" he added, after a rapturous silence.

"What?"

"Carissima Giulia!"

"Yes, Giulia is—"

"They all are, and the island, and the house upon it, and this clear yellow tea, and this brown toast, and this butter from Lombardy. They all are."

"I believe you are feeling good all over, Monsieur Emile."

"San Gennaro knows I am."

He drank some tea, and ate some toast, spreading the butter upon it with voluptuous deliberation.

"Then I'm sure he's pleased."

"Paris, hateful Paris!"

"Oh, but that's abusive. A person who feels good all over should not say that."

"You are right, Vere. But when are you not right? You ought always to wear your hair down, mon enfant, and always to have just been bathing."

"And you ought always to have just been travelling."

"It is true that a dreadful past can be a blessing as well as a curse. It is profoundly true. Why have I never realized that before?"

"If I am twelve and a half, I think you are about—about—"

"For the love of the sea make it under twenty, Vere."

"Nineteen, then."

"Were you going to make it under twenty?"

"Yes, I was."

"I don't believe you. Yes, I do, I do! You are an artist. You realize that truth is a question of feeling, not a question of fact. You penetrate beneath the gray hairs as the prosaic never do. This butter is delicious! And to think that there have been moments when I have feared butter, when I have kept an eye upon a corpulent future. Give me some more, plenty more."

Vere stretched out her hand to the tea-table, but it shook. She drew it back, and burst into a peal of laughter.

"What are you laughing at?" said Artois, with burlesque majesty.

"At you. What's the matter with you, Monsieur Emile? How can you be so foolish?"

She lay back in her chair, with her hair streaming about her, and her thin body quivered, as if the sense of fun within her were striving to break through its prison walls.

"This," said Artois, "this is sheer impertinence. I venture to inquire for butter, and—"

"To inquire! One, two, three, four—five pats of butter right in front of you! And you inquire—!"

Artois suddenly sent out a loud roar to join her childish treble.

The tea had swept away his previous sensation of fatigue, even the happy stolidity that had succeeded it for an instant. He felt full of life and gayety, and a challenging mental activity. A similar challenging activity, he thought, shone in the eyes of the girl opposite to him.

"Thank God I can still be foolish!" he exclaimed. "And thank God that there are people in the world devoid of humor. My German friend was without humor. Only that fact enabled me to endure his prodigious collection of ailments. But for the heat I might even have revelled in them. He was asthmatic, without humor; dyspeptic, without humor. He had a bad cold in the head, without humor, and got up into the top berth with two rheumatic legs and a crick in the back, without humor. Had he seen the fun of himself, the fun would have meant much less to me."

"You cruel person!"

"There is often cruelty in humor—perhaps not in yours, though, yet."

"Why do you say—yet, like that?"

"The hair is such a kindly veil that I doubt the existence of cruelty behind it."

He spoke with a sort of almost tender and paternal gentleness.

"I don't believe you could ever be really cruel, Monsieur Emile."

"Why not?"

"I think you are too intelligent."

"Why should that prevent me?"

"Isn't cruelty stupid, unimaginative?"

"Often. But it can be brilliant, artful, intellectual, full of imagination. It can be religious. It can be passionate. It can be splendid. It can be almost everything."

"Splendid!"

"Like Napoleon's cruelty to France. But why should I educate you in abominable knowledge?"

"Oh," said the girl, thrusting forward her firm little chin, "I have no faith in mere ignorance."

"Yet it does a great deal for those who are not ignorant."

"How?"

"It shows them how pretty, how beautiful even, sometimes, was the place from which they started for their journey through the world."

Vere was silent for a moment. The sparkle of fun had died out of her eyes, which had become dark with the steadier fires of imagination. The strands of her thick hair, falling down on each side of her oval face, gave to it a whimsically mediaeval look, suggestive of legend. Her long-fingered, delicate, but strong little hands were clasped in her lap, and did not move. It was evident that she was thinking deeply.

"I believe I know," she said, at last. "Yes, that was my thought, or almost."

"When?"

She hesitated, looking at him, not altogether doubtfully, but with a shadow of reserve, which might easily, he fancied, grow deeper, or fade entirely away. He saw the resolve to speak come quietly into her mind.

"You know, Monsieur Emile, I love watching the sea," she said, rather slowly and carefully. "Especially at dawn, and in the evening before it is dark. And it always seems to me as if at dawn it is more heavenly than it is after the day has happened, though it is so very lovely then. And sometimes that has made me feel that our dawn is our most beautiful time—as if we were nearest the truth then. And, of course, that is when we are most ignorant, isn't it? So I suppose I have been thinking a little bit like you. Haven't I?"

She asked it earnestly. Artois had never heard her speak quite like this before, with a curious deliberation that was nevertheless without self-consciousness. Before he could answer she added, abruptly, as if correcting, or even almost condemning herself:

"I can put it much better than that. I have."

Artois leaned forward. Something, he did not quite know what, made him feel suddenly a deep interest in what Vere said—a strong curiosity even.

"You have put it much better?" he said.

Vere suddenly looked conscious. A faint wave of red went over her face and down to her small neck. Her hands moved and parted. She seemed half ashamed of something for a minute.

"Madre doesn't know," she murmured, as if she were giving him a reason for something. "It isn't interesting," she added. "Except, of course, to me."

Artois was watching her.

"I think you really want to tell me," he said now.

"Oh yes, in a way I do. I have been half wanting to for a long time—but only half."

"And now?"

She looked at him, but almost instantly looked down again, with a sort of shyness he had never seen in her before. And her eyes had been full of a strange and beautiful sensitiveness.

"Never mind, Vere," he said quickly, obedient to those eyes, and responding to their delicate subtlety. "We all have our righteous secrets, and should all respect the righteous secrets of others."

"Yes, I think we should. And I know you would be the very last, at least Madre and you, to—I think I'm being rather absurd, really." The last words were said with a sudden change of tone to determination, as if Vere were taking herself to task. "I'm making a lot of almost nothing. You see, if I am a woman, as Gaspare is making out, I'm at any rate a very young one, am I not?"

"The youngest that exists."

As he said that Artois thought, "Mon Dieu! If the Marchesino could only see her now!"

"If humor is cruel, Monsieur Emile," Vere continued, "you will laugh at me. For I am sure, if I tell you—and I know now I'm going to—you will think this fuss is as ridiculous as the German's cold in the head, and poor legs, and all. I wrote that about the sea."

She said the last sentence with a sort of childish defiance.

"Wait," said Artois. "Now I begin to understand."

"What?"

"All those hours spent in your room. Your mother thought you were reading."

"No," she said, still rather defiantly; "I've been writing that, and other things—about the sea."

"How? In prose?"

"No. That's the worst of it, I suppose."

And again the faint wave of color went over her face to her neck.

"Do you really feel so criminal? Then what ought I to feel?"

"You? Now that is really cruel!" she cried, getting up quickly, almost as if she meant to hurry away.

But she only stood there in front of him, near the window.

"Never mind!" she said. "Only you remember that Madre tried. She had never said much about it to me. But now and then from just a word I know that she feels bad, that she wishes very much she could do something. Only the other day she said to me, 'We have the instinct, men the vocabulary.' She was meaning that you had. She even told me to ask you something that I had asked her, and she said, 'I feel all the things that he can explain.' And there was something in her voice that hurt me—for her. And Madre is so clever. Isn't she clever?"

"Yes."

"And if Madre can't do things, you can imagine that I feel rather absurd now that I'm telling you."

"Yes, being just as you are, Vere, I can quite imagine that you do. But we can have sweet feelings of absurdity that only arise from something moral within us, a moral delicacy. However, would you like me to look at what you have been writing about the sea?"

"Yes, if you can do it quite seriously."

"I could not do it in any other way."

"Then—thank you."

She went out of the room, not without a sort of simple dignity that was utterly removed from conceit or pretentiousness.

What a strange end, this, to their laughter!

Vere was away several minutes, during which at first Artois sat quite still, leaning back, with his great frame stretched out, and his hands once more behind his head. His intellect was certainly very much awake now, and he was setting a guard upon it, to watch it carefully, lest it should be ruthless, even with Vere. And was he not setting also another guard to watch the softness of his nature, lest it should betray him into foolish kindness?

Yet, after a minute, he said to himself that he was wasting his time in both these proceedings. For Vere's eyes were surely a touchstone to discover honesty. There is something merciless in the purity of untarnished youth. What can it not divine at moments?

Artois poured out another cup of tea and drank it, considering the little funny situation. Vere and he with a secret from Hermione shared between them! Vere submitting verses to his judgment! He remembered Hermione's half-concealed tragedy, which, of course, had been patent to him in its uttermost nakedness. Even Vere had guessed something of it. Do we ever really hide anything from every one? And yet each one breathes mystery too. The assertive man is the last of fools. Of that at least Artois just then felt certain.

If Vere should really have talent! He did not expect it, although he had said that there was intellectual force in the girl. There was intellectual force in Hermione, but she could not create. And Vere! He smiled as he thought of her rush into the room with her hair streaming down, of her shrieks of laughter over his absurdity. But she was full of changes.

The door opened, and Vere came in holding some manuscript in her hand. She had done up her hair while she had been away. When Artois saw that he heaved himself up from the sofa.

"I must smoke," he said.

"Oh yes. I'll get the Khali Targas."

"No. I must have a pipe. And you prefer that, I know."

"Generally, but—you do look dreadfully as if you meant business when you are smoking a pipe."

"I do mean business now."

He took his pipe from his pocket, filled it and lit it.

"Now then, Vere!" he said.

She came to sit down on the sofa.

He sat down beside her.

CHAPTER XII

More than an hour had passed. To Vere it had seemed like five minutes. Her cheeks were hotly flushed. Her eyes shone. With hands that were slightly trembling she gathered together her manuscripts, and carefully arranged them in a neat packet and put a piece of ribbon round them, tying it in a little bow. Meanwhile Artois, standing up, was knocking the shreds of tobacco out of his pipe against the chimney-piece into his hand. He carried them over to the window, dropped them out, then stood for a minute looking at the sea.

"The evening calm is coming, Vere," he said, "bringing with it the wonder of this world."

"Yes."

He heard a soft sigh behind him, and turned round.

"Why was that? Has dejection set in, then?"

"No, no."

"You know the Latin saying: 'Festina lente'? If you want to understand how slowly you must hasten, look at me."

He had been going to add, "Look at these gray hairs," but he did not. Just then he felt suddenly an invincible reluctance to call Vere's attention to the signs of age apparent in him.

"I spoke to you about the admirable incentive of ambition," he continued, after a moment. "But you must understand that I meant the ambition for perfection, not at all the ambition for celebrity. The satisfaction of the former may be a deep and exquisite joy—the partial satisfaction, for I suppose it can never be anything more than that. But the satisfaction of the other will certainly be Dead-sea fruit—fruit of the sea unlike that brought up by Ruffo, without lasting savor, without any real value. One should never live for that."

The last words he spoke as if to himself, almost like a warning addressed to himself.

"I don't believe I ever should," Vere said quickly. "I never thought of such a thing."

"The thought will come, though, inevitably."

"How dreadful it must be to know so much about human nature as you do!"

"And yet how little I really know!"

There came up a distant cry from the sea. Vere started.

"There is Madre! Of course, Monsieur Emile, I don't want—but you understand!"

She hurried out of the room, carrying the packet with her.

Artois felt that the girl was strongly excited. She was revealing more of herself to him, this little Vere whom he had known, and not known, ever since she had been a baby. The gradual revelation interested him intensely—so intensely that in him, too, there was excitement now. So many truths go to make up the whole round truth of every human soul. Hermione saw some of these truths of Vere, Gaspare others, perhaps; he again others. And even Ruffo and the Marchesino—he put the Marchesino most definitely last—even they saw still other truths of Vere, he supposed.

To whom did she reveal the most? The mother ought to know most, and during the years of childhood had doubtless known most. But those years were nearly over. Certainly Vere was approaching, or was on, the threshold of the second period of her life.

And she and he had a secret from Hermione. This secret was a very innocent one. Still, of course, it had the two attributes that belong to every secret: of drawing together those who share it, of setting apart from them those who know it not. And there was another secret, too, connected with it, and known only to Artois: the fact that the child, Vere, possessed the very small but quite definite beginnings, the seed, as it were, of something that had been denied to the mother, Hermione.

"Emile, you have come back! I am glad!"

Hermione came into the room with her eager manner and rather slow gait, holding out both her hands, her hot face and prominent eyes showing forth with ardor the sincerity of her surprise and pleasure.

"Gaspare told me. I nearly gave him a hug. You know his sly look when he has something delightful up his sleeve for one! Bless you!"

She shook both his hands.

"And I had come back in such bad spirits! But now—"

She took off her hat and put it on a table.

"Why were you in bad spirits, my friend?"

"I had been with Madame Alliani, seeing something of the intense misery and wickedness of Naples. I have seen a girl—such a tragedy! What devils men can be in these Southern places! What hideous things they will do under the pretence of being driven by love! But—no, don't let us spoil your arrival. Where is Vere? I thought she was entertaining you."

"We have been having tea together. She has this moment gone out of the room."

"Oh!"

She seemed to expect some further explanation. As he gave none she sat down.

"Wasn't she very surprised to see you?"

"I think she was. She had just been bathing, and came running in with her hair all about her, looking like an Undine with a dash of Sicilian blood in her. Here she is!"

"Are you pleased, Madre? You poor, hot Madre!"

Vere sat down by her mother and put one arm round her. Subtly she was trying to make up to her mother for the little secret she was keeping from her for a time.

"Are you very, very pleased?"

"Yes, I think I am."

"Think! You mischievous Madre!"

Hermione laughed.

"But I feel almost jealous of you two sitting here in the cool, and having a quiet tea and a lovely talk while—Never mind. Here is my tea. And there's another thing. Oh, Emile, I do wish I had known you would arrive to-day!"

"Why specially?"

"I've committed an unusual crime. I've made—actually—an engagement for this evening."

Artois and Vere held up their hands in exaggerated surprise.

"Are you mad, my dear Hermione?" asked Artois.

"I believe I am. It's dangerous to go to Naples. I met a young man."

"The Marchesino!" cried Vere. "The Marchesino! I see him in your eye, Madre."

"C'est cela!" said Artois, "and you mean to say—!"

"That I accepted an invitation to dine with him to-night, at nine, at the Scoglio di Frisio. There! Why did I? I have no idea. I was hot from a horrible vicolo. He was cool from the sea. What chance had I against him? And then he is through and through Neapolitan, and gives no quarter to a woman, even when she is 'una vecchia.'"

As she finished Hermione broke into a laugh, evidently at some recollection.

"Doro made his eyes very round. I can see that," said Artois.

"Like this!" cried Vere.

And suddenly there appeared in her face a reminiscence of the face of the Marchesino.

"Vere, you must not! Some day you will do it by accident when he is here."

"Is he coming here?"

"In a launch to fetch me—us."

"Am I invited?" said Vere. "What fun!"

"I could not get out of it," Hermione said to Artois. "But now I insist on your staying here till the Marchesino comes. Then he will ask you, and we shall be a quartet."

"I will stay," said Artois, with a sudden return of his authoritative manner.

"It seems that I am woefully ignorant of the Bay," continued Hermione. "I have never dined at Frisio's. Everybody goes there at least once. Everybody has been there. Emperors, kings, queens, writers, singers, politicians, generals—they all eat fish at Frisio's."

"It's true."

"You have done it?"

"Yes. The Padrone is worth knowing. He—but to-night you will know him. Yes, Frisio's is characteristic. Vere will be amused."

With a light tone he hid a faint chagrin.

"What fun!" repeated Vere. "If I had diamonds I should put them on."

She too was hiding something, one sentiment with another very different. But her youth came to her aid, and very soon the second excitement really took the place of the first, and she was joyously alive to the prospect of a novel gayety.

"I must not eat anything more," said Hermione. "I believe the Marchesino is ordering something marvellous for us, all the treasures of the sea. We must be up to the mark. He really is a good fellow."

"Yes," said Artois. "He is. I have a genuine liking for him."

He said it with obvious sincerity.

"I am going," said Vere. "I must think about clothes. And I must undo my hair again and get Maria to dry it thoroughly, or I shall look frightening."

She went out quickly, her eyes sparkling.

"Vere is delighted," said Hermione.

"Yes, indeed she is."

"And you are not. Would you rather avoid the Marchesino to-night, Emile, and not come with us? Perhaps I am selfish. I would so very much rather have you with us."

"If Doro asks me I shall certainly come. It's true that I wish you were not engaged to-night—I should have enjoyed a quiet evening here. But we shall have many quiet, happy evenings together this summer, I hope."

"I wonder if we shall?" said Hermione, slowly.

"You—why?"

"I don't know. Oh, I am absurd, probably. One has such strange ideas, houses based on sand, or on air, or perhaps on nothing at all."

She got up, went to her writing-table, opened a drawer, and took out of it a letter.

"Emile," she said, coming back to him with it in her hand, "would you like to explain this to me?"

"What is it?"

"The letter I found from you when I came back from Capri."

"But does it need explanation?"

"It seemed to me as if it did. Read it and see."

He took it from her, opened it and read it.

"Well?" he said.

"Isn't the real meaning between the lines?"

"If it is, cannot you decipher it?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Somehow it depressed me. Perhaps it was my mood just then. Was it?"

"Perhaps it was merely mine."

"But why—'I feel specially this summer I should like to be near you'? What does that mean exactly?"

"I did feel that."

"Why?"

"I don't think I can tell you now. I am not sure that I could even have told you at the time I wrote that letter."

She took it from him and put it away again in the drawer.

"Perhaps we shall both know later on," she said, quietly. "I believe we shall."

He did not say anything.

"I saw that boy, Ruffo, this afternoon," she said, after a moment of silence.

"Did you?" said Artois, with a change of tone, a greater animation. "I forgot to ask Vere about him. I suppose he has been to the island again while I have been away?"

"Not once. Poor boy, I find he has been ill. He has had fever. He was out to-day for the first time after it. We met him close to Mergellina. He was in a boat, but he looked very thin and pulled down. He seemed so delighted to see me. I was quite touched."

"Hasn't Vere been wondering very much why he did not come again?"

"She has never once mentioned him. Vere is a strange child sometimes."

"But you—haven't you spoken of him to her?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Vere's silence made you silent?"

"I suppose so. I must tell her. She likes the boy very much."

"What is it that attracts her to this boy, do you think?"

The question was ordinary enough, but there was a peculiar intonation in Artois' voice as he asked it, an intonation that awakened surprise in Hermione.

"I don't know. He is an attractive boy."

"You think so too?"

"Why, yes. What do you mean, Emile?"

"I was only wondering. The sea breeds a great many boys like Ruffo, you know. But they don't all get Khali Targa cigarettes given to them, for all that."

"That's true. I have never seen Vere pay any particular attention to the fishermen who come to the island. In a way she loves them all because they belong to the sea, she loves them as a décor. But Ruffo is different. I felt it myself."

"Did you?"

He looked at her, then looked out of the window and pulled his beard slowly.

"Yes. In my case, perhaps, the interest was roused partly by what Vere told me. The boy is a Sicilian, you see, and just Vere's age."

"Vere's interest perhaps comes from the same reason."

"Very likely it does."

Hermione spoke the last words without conviction. Perhaps they both felt that they were not talking very frankly—were not expressing their thoughts to each other with their accustomed sincerity. At any rate, Artois suddenly introduced another topic of conversation, the reason of his hurried visit to Paris, and for the next hour they discussed literary affairs with a gradually increasing vivacity and open-heartedness. The little difficulty between them—of which both had been sensitive and fully conscious—passed away, and when at length Hermione got up to go to her bedroom and change her dress for the evening, there was no cloud about them.

When Hermione had gone Artois took up a book, but he sat till the evening was falling and Giulia came smiling to light the lamp, without reading a word of it. Her entry roused him from his reverie, and he took out his watch. It was already past eight. The Marchesino would soon be coming. And then—the dinner at Frisio's!

He got up and moved about the room, picking up a book here and there, glancing at some pages, then putting it down. He felt restless and uneasy.

"I am tired from the journey," he thought. "Or—I wonder what the weather is this evening. The heat seems to have become suffocating since Hermione went away."

He went to one of the windows and looked out. Twilight was stealing over the sea, which was so calm that it resembled a huge sheet of steel. The sky over the island was clear. He turned and went to the opposite window. Above Ischia there was a great blackness like a pall. He stood looking at it for some minutes. His erring thoughts, which wandered like things fatigued that cannot rest, went to a mountain village in Sicily, through which he had once ridden at night during a terrific thunder-storm. In a sudden, fierce glare of lightning he had seen upon the great door of a gaunt Palazzo, which looked abandoned, a strip of black cloth. Above it were the words, "Lutto in famiglia."

That was years ago. Yet now he saw again the palace door, the strip of cloth soaked by the pouring rain, the dreary, almost sinister words which he had read by lightning:

"Lutto in famiglia."

He repeated them as he gazed at the blackness above Ischia.

"Monsieur Emile!"

"Vere!"

The girl came towards him, a white contrast to what he had been watching.

"I'm all ready. It seems so strange to be going out to a sort of party. I've had such a bother with my hair."

"You have conquered," he said. "Undine has disappeared."

"What?"

"Come quite close to the lamp."

She came obediently.

"Vere transformed!" he said. "I have seen three Veres to-day already. How many more will greet me to-night?"

She laughed gently, standing quite still. Her dress and her gloves were white, but she had on a small black hat, very French, and at the back of her hair there was a broad black ribbon tied in a big bow. This ribbon marked her exact age clearly, he thought.

"This is a new frock, and my very smartest," she said; "and you dared to abuse Paris!"

"Being a man. I must retract now. You are right, we cannot do without it. But—have you an umbrella?"

"An umbrella?"

She moved and laughed again, much more gayly.

"I am serious. Come here and look at Ischia."

She went with him quickly to the window.

"That blackness does look wicked. But it's a long way off."

"I think it is coming this way."

"Oh, but"—and she went to the opposite window—"the sky is perfectly clear towards Naples. And look how still the sea is."

"Too still. It is like steel."

"Hush! Listen!"

She held up her hand. They both heard a far-off sound of busy panting on the sea.

"That must be the launch!" she said.

Her eyes were gay and expectant. It was evident that she was in high spirits, that she was looking forward to this unusual gayety.

"Yes."

"Doesn't it sound in a hurry, as if the Marchesino was terribly afraid of being late?"

"Get your umbrella, Vere, and a waterproof. You will want them both."

At that moment Hermione came in.

"Madre, the launch is coming in a frightful hurry, and Monsieur Emile says we must take umbrellas."

"Surely it isn't going to rain?"

"There is a thunder-storm coming up from Ischia, I believe," said Artois.

"Then we will take our cloaks in case. It is fearfully hot. I thought so when I was dressing. No doubt the launch will have a cabin."

A siren hooted.

"That is the Marchesino saluting us!" cried Vere. "Come along, Madre! Maria! Maria!"

She ran out, calling for the cloaks.

"Do you like Vere's frock, Emile?" said Hermione, as they followed.

"Yes. She looks delicious—but quite like a little woman of the world."

"Ah, you like her best as the Island child. So do I. Oh, Emile!"

"What is it?"

"I can't help it. I hate Vere's growing up."

"Few things can remain unchanged for long. This sea will be unrecognizable before we return."

Gaspare met them on the landing with solemn eyes.

"There is going to be a great storm, Signora," he said. "It is coming from Ischia."

"So Don Emilio thinks. But we will take wraps, and we are going in a launch. It will be all right, Gaspare."

"Shall I come with you, Signora?"

"Well, Gaspare, you see it is the Marchese's launch—"

"If you would like me to come, I will ask the Signore Marchese."

"We'll see how much room there is."

"Si, Signora."

He went down to receive the launch.

"Emile," Hermione said, as he disappeared, "can you understand what a comfort to me Gaspare is? Ah, if people knew how women love those who are ready to protect them! It's quite absurd, but just because Gaspare said that, I'd fifty times rather have him with us than go without him."

"I understand. I love your watch-dog, too."

She touched his arm.

"No one could ever understand the merits of a watch-dog better than you. That's right, Maria; we shall be safer with these."

The Marchesino stood at the foot of the cliff, bare-headed, to receive them. He was in evening dress, what he called "smoking," with a flower in his button-hole, and a straw hat, and held a pair of white kid gloves in his hand. He looked in rapturous spirits, but ceremonial. When he caught sight of Artois on the steps behind Hermione and Vere, however, he could not repress an exclamation of "Emilio!"

He took Hermione's and Vere's hands, bowed over them and kissed them. Then he turned to his friend.

"Caro Emilio! You are back! You must come with us! You must dine at Frisio's."

"May I?" said Artois.

"You must. This is delightful. See, Madame," he added to Hermione, suddenly breaking into awful French, "we have the English flag! Your Jack! Voila, the great, the only Jack! I salute him! Let me help you!"

As Hermione stepped into the launch she said:

"I see there is plenty of room. I wonder if you would mind my taking my servant, Gaspare, to look after the cloaks and umbrellas. It seems absurd, but he says a storm is coming, and—"

"A storm!" cried the Marchesino. "Of course your Gaspare must come. Which is he?"

"There."

The Marchesino spoke to Gaspare in Italian, telling him to join the two sailors in the stern of the launch. A minute afterwards he went to him and gave him some cigarettes. Then he brought from the cabin two bouquets of flowers, and offered them to Hermione and Vere, who, with Artois, were settling themselves in the bows. The siren sounded. They were off, cutting swiftly through the oily sea.

"A storm, Signora. Cloaks and umbrellas!" said the Marchesino, shooting a glance of triumph at "Cara Emilio," whose presence to witness his success completed his enjoyment of it. "But it is a perfect night. Look at the sea. Signorina, let me put the cushion a little higher behind you. It is not right. You are not perfectly comfortable. And everything must be perfect for you to-night—everything." He arranged the cushion tenderly. "The weather, too! Why, where is the storm?"

"Over Ischia," said Artois.

"It will stay there. Ischia! It is a volcano. Anything terrible may happen there."

"And Vesuvius?" said Hermione, laughing.

The Marchesino threw up his chin.

"We are not going to Vesuvius. I know Naples, Signora, and I promise you fine weather. We shall take our coffee after dinner outside upon the terrace at the one and only Frisio's."

He chattered on gayly. His eyes were always on Vere, but he talked chiefly to Hermione, with the obvious intention of fascinating the mother in order that she might be favorably disposed towards him, and later on smile indulgently upon his flirtation with the daughter. His proceedings were carried on with a frankness that should have been disarming, and that evidently did disarm Hermione and Vere, who seemed to regard the Marchesino as a very lively boy. But Artois was almost immediately conscious of a secret irritation that threatened to spoil his evening.

The Marchesino was triumphant. Emilio had wished to prevent him from knowing these ladies. Why? Evidently because Emilio considered him dangerous. Now he knew the ladies. He was actually their host. And he meant to prove to Emilio how dangerous he could be. His eyes shot a lively defiance at his friend, then melted as they turned to Hermione, melted still more as they gazed with unwinking sentimentality into the eyes of Vere. He had no inward shyness to contend against, and was perfectly at his ease; and Artois perceived that his gayety and sheer animal spirits were communicating themselves to his companions. Vere said little, but she frequently laughed, and her face lit up with eager animation. And she, too, was quite at her ease. The direct, and desirous, glances of the Marchesino did not upset her innocent self-possession at all, although they began to upset the self-possession of Artois. As he sat, generally in silence, listening to the frivolous and cheerful chatter that never stopped, while the launch cut its way through the solemn, steel-like sea towards the lights of Posilipo. He felt that he was apart because he was clever, as if his cleverness caused loneliness.

They travelled fast. Soon the prow of the launch was directed to a darkness that lay below, and to the right of a line of brilliant lights that shone close to the sea; and a boy dressed in white, holding a swinging lantern, and standing, like a statue, in a small niche of rock almost flush with the water, hailed them, caught the gunwale of the launch with one hand, and brought it close in to the wall that towered above them.

"Do we get out here? But where do we go?" said Hermione.

"There is a staircase. Let me—"

The Marchesino was out in a moment and helped them all to land. He called to the sailors that he would send down food and wine to them and Gaspare. Then, piloted by the boy with the lantern, they walked up carefully through dark passages and over crumbling stairs, turned to the left, and came out upon a small terrace above the sea and facing the curving lamps of Naples. Just beyond was a long restaurant, lined with great windows on one side and with mirrors on the other, and blazing with light.

"Ecco!" cried the Marchesino. "Ecco lo Scoglio di Frisio! And here is the Padrone!" he added, as a small, bright-eyed man, with a military figure and fierce mustaches, came briskly forward to receive them.

CHAPTER XIII

The dinner, which was served at a table strewn with red carnations close to an open window, was a gay one, despite Artois. It could hardly have been otherwise with a host so complacent, so attentive, so self-possessed, so hilarious as the Marchesino. And the Padrone of the restaurant warmly seconded the efforts of the giver of the feast. He hovered perpetually, but always discreetly, near, watchfully directing the middle-aged waiters in their duties, smiling to show his teeth, stained with tobacco juice, or drawing delicately close to relate anecdotes connected with the menu.

The soup, a "zuppa di pesce alla marinara" remarkable for its beautiful red color, had been originally invented by the chef of Frisio's for the ex-Queen Natalie of Servia, who had deigned to come, heavily veiled, to lunch at the Scoglio, and had finally thrown off her veil and her incognito, and written her name in the visitors' book for all to see. The Macaroni a l'Imperatrice had been the favorite plat of the dead Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who used to visit Frisio's day after day, and who always demanded two things—an eruption of Vesuvius and "Funiculi, funicula!" William Ewart Gladstone had deigned to praise the "oeufs a la Gladstone," called henceforth by his name, when he walked over from the Villa Rendel to breakfast; and the delicious punch served before the dolce, and immediately after the "Pollo panato alla Frisio," had been lauded by the late Czar of all the Russias, who was drinking a glass of it—according to the solemn asseveration of the Padrone—when the telegram announcing the assassination of his father was put into his hand.

Names of very varied popular and great ones of the earth floated about the table. Here, it appeared, Mario Costa and Paolo Tosti had composed their most celebrated songs between one course and another. Here Zola and Tolstoy had written. Here Sarah Bernhardt had ordered a dozen bottles of famous old wine to be sent to the Avenue Pereire from the cellars of Frisio, and had fallen in love with a cat from Greece. Here Matilde Serao had penned a lasting testimony to the marital fidelity of her husband.

Everything—everything had happened here, just here, at Frisio's.

Seeing the amused interest of his guests, the Marchesino encouraged the Padrone to talk, called for his most noted wines, and demanded at dessert a jug of Asti Spumante, with snow in it, and strawberries floating on the top.

"You approve of Frisio's, Signorina?" he said, bending towards Vere. "You do not find your evening dull?"

The girl shook her head. A certain excitement was noticeable in her gayety—had been noticed by her mother all through the evening. It was really due to the afternoon's incident with Artois, succeeded by this unexpected festival, in which the lively homage of the Marchesino was mingled with the long procession of celebrated names introduced by the Padrone. Vere was secretly strung up, had been strung up even before she stepped into the launch. She felt very happy, but in her happiness there was something feverish, which was not customary to any mood of hers. She never drank wine, and had taken none to-night, yet as the evening wore on she was conscious of an effervescence, as if her brain were full of winking bubbles such as rise to the surface of champagne.

Her imagination was almost furiously alive, and as the Padrone talked, waving his hands and striking postures like those of a military dictator, she saw the dead Empress, with her fan before her face, nodding her head to the jig of "Funiculi, funicula," while she watched the red cloud from Vesuvius rising into the starry sky; she saw Sarah Bernhardt taking the Greek cat upon her knee; the newly made Czar reading the telegram with his glass of punch beside him; Tosti tracing lines of music; Gladstone watching the sea; and finally the gaunt figure and the long beard of Tolstoy bending over the book in which he wrote clearly so many years ago, "Vedi Napoli e poi mori."

"Monsieur Emile, you must write in the wonderful book of Frisio's," she exclaimed.

"We will all write, Signorina!" cried the Marchesino. "Bring the book, Signor Masella!"

The Padrone hastened away to fetch it, but Vere shook her head.

"No, no, we must not write! We are nobodies. Monsieur Emile is a great man. Only he is worthy of such a book. Isn't it so, Madre?"

Artois felt the color rising to his face at this unexpected remark of the girl. He had been distrait during the dinner, certainly neither brilliant nor amusing, despite his efforts to seem talkative and cheerful. A depression had weighed upon him, as it had weighed upon him in the launch during the voyage from the island. He had felt as if he were apart, even almost as if he were de trop. Had Vere noticed it? Was that the reason of this sudden and charming demonstration in his favor?

He looked across at her, longing to know. But she was arguing gayly with the Marchesino, who continued to insist that they must all write their names as a souvenir of the occasion.

"We are nobodies," she repeated.

"You dare to say that you are a nobody!" exclaimed the young man, looking at her with ardent eyes. "Ah, Signorina, you do wrong to drink no wine. In wine there is truth, they say. But you—you drink water, and then you say these dreadful things that are not—are not true. Emilio"—he suddenly appealed to Artois—"would not the Signorina honor any book by writing her name in it? I ask you if—"

"Marchese, don't be ridiculous!" said Vere, with sudden petulance. "Don't ask Monsieur Emile absurd questions!"

"But he thinks as I do. Emilio, is it not so? Is it not an honor for any book to have the Signorina's name?"

He spoke emphatically and looked really in earnest. Artois felt as if he were listening to a silly boy who understood nothing.

"Let us all write our names," he said. "Here comes the book."

The Padrone bore it proudly down between the mirrors and the windows.

But Vere suddenly got up.

"I won't write my name," she said, sticking out her chin with the little determined air that was sometimes characteristic of her. "I am going to see what Gaspare and the sailors are doing."

And she walked quickly away towards the terrace.

The Marchesino sprang up in despair.

"Shall we all go, Madame?" he said. "I have ordered coffee. It will be brought in a moment to the terrace."

Hermione glanced at Artois.

"I will stay here for a little. I want to look at the book," she said. "We will come in a moment. I don't take coffee."

"Then—we will be upon the terrace. A rivederci per un momento—pour un moment, Madame."

He bowed over Hermione's hand, and hurried away after Vere.

The Padrone put his book very carefully down between Hermione and Artois, and left them with a murmured apology that he had to look after another party of guests which had just come into the restaurant.

"I thought you would be glad to get rid of those young things for a minute," said Hermione, in explanation of what she had done.

Artois did not reply, but turned over the leaves of the book mechanically.

"Oh, here is Tolstoy's signature," he said, stopping.

Hermione drew her chair nearer.

"What a clear handwriting!" she said.

"Yes, isn't it? 'Vedi Napoli e poi mori.'"

"Where are you going to write?"

He was looking towards the outer room of the restaurant which led onto the terrace.

He turned the leaves.

"I?—oh—here is a space."

He took up a pen the Padrone had brought, dipped it into the ink.

"What's the good?" he said, making a movement as if to push the book away.

"No; do write."

"Why should I?"

"I agree with Vere. Your name will add something worth having to the book."

"Oh, well—"

A rather bitter expression had come into his face.

"Dead-sea fruit!" he muttered.

But he bent, wrote something quickly, signed his name, blotted and shut the book. Hermione had not been able to see the sentence he had written. She did not ask what it was.

There was a noise of rather shuffling footsteps on the paved floor of the room. Three musicians had come in. They were shabbily dressed. One was very short, stout, and quite blind, with a gaping mouth that had an odd resemblance to an elephant's mouth when it lifts its trunk and shows its rolling tongue. He smiled perpetually. The other two were thin and dreary, middle-aged, and hopeless-looking. They stood not far from the table and began to play on guitars, putting wrong harmonies to a well-known Neapolitan tune, whose name Artois could not recall.

"What a pity it is they never put the right bass!" said Hermione.

"Yes. One would suppose they would hit it sometimes by mistake. But they seldom do."

Except for the thin and uncertain music the restaurant was almost silent. The people who had just come in were sitting down far away at the end of the long room. Hermione and Artois were the only other visitors, now that Vere and the Marchesino were outside on the terrace.

"Famous though it is, Frisio's does not draw the crowd," said Hermione.

To-night she found it oddly difficult to talk to her friend, although she had refused the Marchesino's invitation on purpose to do so.

"Perhaps people were afraid of the storm."

"Well, but it doesn't come."

"It is close," he said. "Don't you feel it? I do."

His voice was heavy with melancholy, and made her feel sad, even apprehensive.

"Where are the stars?" he added.

She followed his example and leaned out of the great window. Not a star was visible in all the sky.

"You are right. It is coming. I feel it now. The sea is like lead, and the sky, too. There is no sense of freedom to-night, no out-of-doors feeling. And the water is horribly calm."

As they both leaned out they heard, away to the left at some distance, the voices of Vere and the Marchesino.

"I stayed because I thought—I fancied all the chatter was getting a little on your nerves, Emile," Hermione said now. "They are so absurdly young, both of them. Wasn't it so?"

"Am I so old that youth should get upon my nerves?" he returned, with a creeping irritation, which, however, he tried to keep out of his voice.

"No. But of course we can hardly enjoy nonsense that might amuse them immensely. Vere is such a baby, and your friend is a regular boy, in spite of his self-assurance."

"Women often fancy men to be young in ways in which they are not young," said Artois. "Panacci is very much of a man, I can assure you."

"Panacci! I never heard you call him that before."

Her eager brown eyes went to his face curiously for a moment. Artois saw that, and said, rather hastily:

"It's true that nearly every one calls him Doro."

Once more they heard the chattering voices, and then a sound of laughter in the darkness. It made Hermione smile, but Artois moved uneasily. Just then there came to them from the sea, like a blow, a sudden puff of wind. It hit their faces.

"Do you want to avoid the storm?" Artois said.

"Yes. Do you think—"

"I am sure you can only avoid it by going at once. Look!"

He pointed towards the sea. The blackness before them was cut at some distance off by a long, level line of white.

"What's that?" asked Hermione, peering out.

"Foam."

"Foam! But surely it can't be!"

The wind struck them again. It was like a hot, almost like a sweating hand, coarse and violent, and repugnant.

Hermione drew in.

"There is something disgusting in nature to-night," she said—"something that seems almost unnatural."

The blind man began to sing behind them. His voice was soft and throaty. The phrasing was sickly. Some notes trembled. As he sang he threw back his head, stared with his sightless eyes at the ceiling, and showed his tongue. The whole of his fat body swayed. His face became scarlet. The two hopeless, middle-aged men on either side of him stared into vacancy as, with dirty hands on which the veins stood out, they played wrong basses to the melody on their guitars.

Suddenly Hermione was seized with a sensation of fear.

"Let us go. We had better go. Ah!"

She cried out. The wind, returning, had caught the white table-cloth. It flew up towards her, then sank down.

"What a fool I am!" she said. "I thought—I didn't know—"

She felt that really it was something in Artois which had upset her nerves, but she did not say so. In that moment, when she was startled, she had instinctively put out her hand towards him. But, as instinctively, she drew it back without touching him.

"Oh, here is Gaspare!" she said.

An immense, a really ridiculous sense of relief came to her as she saw Gaspare's sturdy legs marching decisively towards them, his great eyes examining the row of mirrors, the tables, the musicians, then settling comfortably upon his Padrona. Over his arms he carried the cloaks, and his hands grasped the two umbrellas. At that moment, if she had translated her impulse into an action, Hermione would have given Gaspare a good hug—just for being himself; for being always the same: honest, watchful, perfectly fearless, perfectly natural, and perfectly determined to take care of his Padrona and his Padroncina.

Afterwards she remembered that she had found in his presence relief from something that had distressed her in her friend.

"Signora, the storm is coming. Look at the sea!" said Gaspare. He pointed to the white line which was advancing in the blackness.

"I told the Signorina, and that Signore—"

A fierce flash of lightning zigzagged across the window-space, and suddenly the sound of the wind was loud upon the sea, and mingled with the growing murmur of waves.

"Ecco!" said Gaspare. "Signora, you ought to start at once. But the Signor Marchese—"

The thunder followed. Hermione had been waiting for it, and felt almost relieved when it came crashing above the Scoglio di Frisio.

"The Signor Marchese, Gaspare?" she asked, putting on the cloak he was holding for her.

"He only laughs, Signora," said Gaspare, rather contemptuously. "The Signor Marchese thinks only of his pleasure."

"Well, he must think of yours now," said Artois, decisively, to Hermione. "You will have a rough voyage to the island, even as it is."

They were walking towards the entrance. Hermione had noticed the pronoun, and said quietly:

"You will take a carriage to the hotel, or a tram?"

"The tram, I think. It passes the door here."

He glanced at her and added:

"I noticed that the cabin of the launch is very small, and as Gaspare is with you—"

"Oh, of course!" she said quickly. "It would be ridiculous for you to come all the way back with us. Besides, there is not room in the cabin."

She did not know why, but she felt guilty for a moment. Yet she had done nothing.

"There is the rain," said Artois.

They were just entering the outer room from which the terrace opened.

"Vere!" called Hermione.

As she called the lightning flashed again, and showed her Vere and the Marchesino running in from the darkness. Vere was laughing, and looked more joyous than before.

"Such a storm, Madre! The sea is a mass of foam. It's glorious! Hark at the fishermen!"

From the blackness below rose hoarse shouts and prolonged calls—some near, some far. Faintly with them mingled the quavering and throaty voice of the blind man, now raised in "Santa Lucia."

"What are we going to do, Monsieur Emile?"

"We must get home at once before it gets worse," said Hermione. "Marchese, I am so sorry, but I am afraid we must ask for the launch."

"But, madame, it is only a squall. By midnight it will be all over. I promise you. I am a Neapolitan."

"Ah, but you promised that there would be no storm at all."

"Sa-a-nta-a Lu-u-ci-i-a! Santa Lu-cia!"

The blind man sounded like one in agony. The thunder crashed again just above him, as if it desired to beat down his sickly voice.

Artois felt a sharp stab of neuralgia over his eyes.

Behind, in the restaurant, the waiters were running over the pavement to shut the great windows. The rush of the rain made a noise like quantities of silk rustling.

The Marchesino laughed, quite unabashed. His cheeks were slightly flushed and his eyes shone.

"Could I tell the truth, Signora? You might have refused to come. But now I speak the solemn truth. By midnight—"

"I'm afraid we really can't stay so late as that."

"But there is a piano. I will play valses. I will sing." He looked ardently at Vere, who was eagerly watching the sea from the window.

"And we will dance, the Signorina and I."

Artois made a brusque movement towards the terrace, muttering something about the launch. A glare of lightning lit up the shore immediately below the terrace, showing him the launch buffeted by the waves that were now breaking over the sandy beach. There came a summoning call from the sailors.

"If you do stay," Artois said to the Marchesino, turning back to them, "you must send the launch round to Mergellina. I don't believe it can stop here."

"Well, but there are rocks, Caro Emilio. It is protected!"

"Not enough."

"Signora," said Gaspare, "we had better go. It will only get worse. The sea is not too bad yet."

"Come along!" Hermione cried, with decision. "Come, Vere! I'm very sorry, Marchese, but we must really get back at once. Good-night, Emile! Gaspare give me your arm."

And she set off at once, clinging to Gaspare, who held an open umbrella over her.

"Good-night, Vere!" said Artois.

The girl was looking at him with surprised eyes.

"You are going—"

"I shall take the tram."

"Oh—of course. That is your quickest way."

"Signorina—the umbrella!"

The Marchesino was offering his arm to conduct Vere to the launch. He cast a challenging look of triumph at Artois.

"I would come in the launch," Artois said hastily. "But—Good-night!"

He turned away.

"A rivederci, Emilio!" called the Marchesino.

"—derci!"

The last syllables only came back to them through the wind and the rain.

"Take my arm, Signorina."

"Grazie, it is all right like this."

"Ma—"

"I am quite covered, really, thank you."

She hurried on, smiling, but not taking his arm. She knew how to be obstinate.

"Ma Signorina—mais Mademoiselle—"

"Gaspare! Is Madre all safe in the launch?"

Vere glided from under the Marchesino's umbrella and sought the shade of Gaspare's. Behind, the Marchesino was murmuring to himself Neapolitan street expressions.

"Si, Signorina."

Gaspare's face had suddenly lighted up. His Padroncina's little hand was holding tightly to his strong arm.

"Take care, Signorina. That is water!"

"Oh, I was nearly in. I thought—"

He almost lifted her into the launch, which was rising and falling on the waves.

"Madre! What a night!"

Vere sank down on the narrow seat of the little cabin. The Marchesino jumped aboard. The machine in the stern throbbed. They rushed forward into the blackness of the impenetrable night, the white of the leaping foam, the hissing of the rain, the roaring of the wind. In a blurred and hasty vision the lights of Frisio's ran before them, fell back into the storm like things defeated. Hermione fancied she discerned for a second the blind man's scarlet face and open mouth, the Padrone at a window waving a frantic adieu, having only just become aware of their departure. But if it were so they were gone before she knew—gone into mystery, with Emile and the world.

The Marchesino inserted himself reproachfully into the cabin. He had turned up the collar of his "smoking," and drawn the silk lapels forward over his soft shirt-front. His white gloves were saturated. He came to sit down by Vere.

"Madame!" he said reproachfully, "we should have waited. The sea is too rough. Really, it is dangerous. And the Signorina and I—we could have danced together."

Hermione could not help laughing, though she did not feel gay.

"I should not have danced," said Vere. "I could not. I should have had to watch the storm."

She was peering out of the cabin window at the wild foam that leaped up round the little craft and disappeared in the darkness. There was no sensation of fear in her heart, only a passion of interest and an odd feeling of triumph.

To dance with the Marchesino at the Scoglio di Frisio would have been banal in comparison with this glorious progress through the night in the teeth of opposing elements. She envied Gaspare, who was outside with the sailors, and whose form she could dimly see, a blur against the blackness. She longed to take off her smart little hat and her French frock, and be outside too, in the wind and the rain.

"It is ridiculous to be dressed like this!" she said, quickly, taking off the glove she had put on her left hand. "You poor Marchese!"

She looked at his damp "smoking," his soaking gloves and deplorable expression, and could not repress a little rush of laughter.

"Do forgive me! Madre, I know I'm behaving shamefully, but we are all so hopelessly inappropriate. Your diamond broach, Madre! And your hat is all on one side. Gaspare must have knocked it with the umbrella. I am sure we all look like hens in a shower!"

She leaned back against the swaying side of the cabin and laughed till the tears were in her eyes. The sudden coming of the storm had increased the excitement that had been already within her, created by the incidents of the day.

"Vere!" said her mother, but smiling through the protest.

The Marchesino showed his big white teeth. Everything that Vere did seemed to develop his admiration for her. He was delighted with this mood, and forgot his disappointment. But there was a glint of wonder in his eyes, and now he said:

"But the Signorina is not afraid! She does not cry out! She does not call upon the Madonna and the Saints! My mother, my sisters, if they were here—"

The prow of the launch struck a wave which burst over the bows, scattering spray to the roof of the cabin.

"But I like it, I love it!" said Vere. "Don't you?—don't you, Madre?"

Before Hermione could reply the Marchesino exclaimed:

"Signorina, in the breast of an angel you have the heart of a lion! The sea will never harm you. How could it? It will treat you as it treats the Saint of your pool, San Francesco. You know what the sailors and the fishermen say? In the wildest storms, when the sea crashes upon the rocks, never, never does it touch San Francesco. Never does it put out the lamp that burns at San Francesco's feet."

"Yes, I have heard them say that," Vere said.

Suddenly her face had become serious. The romance in the belief of the seamen had got hold of her, had touched her. The compliment to herself she ignored. Indeed, she had already forgotten it.

"Only the other night—" she began.

But she stopped suddenly.

"You know," she said, changing to something else, "that when the fishermen pass under San Francesco's pedestal they bend down, and lift a little water from the sea, and sprinkle it into the boat, and make the sign of the cross. They call it 'acqua benedetta.' I love to see them do that."

Another big wave struck the launch and made it shiver. The Marchesino crossed himself, but quite mechanically. He was intent on Vere.

"I wonder," the girl said, "whether to-night San Francesco will not be beaten by the waves, whether his light will be burning when we reach the island."

She paused, then she added, in a lower voice:

"I do hope it will—don't you, Madre?"

"Yes, Vere," said her mother.

Something in her mother's voice made the girl look up at her swiftly, then put a hand into hers, a hand that was all sympathy. She felt that just then her mother's imagination was almost, or quite, one with hers. The lights of Naples were gone, swallowed by the blackness of the storm. And the tiny light at the feet of the Saint, of San Francesco, who protected the men of the sea, and the boys—Ruffo, too!—would it greet them, star of the sea to their pool, star of the sea to their island, their Casa del Mare, when they had battled through the storm to San Francesco's feet?

"I do hope it will."

Why did Hermione's heart echo Vere's words with such a strenuous and sudden passion, such a deep desire? She scarcely knew then. But she knew that she wanted a light to be shining for her when she neared home—longed for it, needed it specially that night. If San Francesco's lamp were burning quietly amid the fury of the sea in such a blackness as this about them—well, it would seem like an omen. She would take it as an omen of happiness.

And if it were not burning?

She, too, longed to be outside with Gaspare and the sailors, staring into the darkness with eyes keen as those of a seaman, looking for the light. Since Vere's last words and her reply they had sat in silence. Even the Marchesino's vivacity was suddenly abated, either by the increasing violence of the storm or by the change in Vere. It would have been difficult to say by which. The lightning flashed. The thunder at moments seemed to split the sky asunder as a charge of gunpowder splits asunder a rock. The head wind rushed by, yet had never passed them, but was forever coming furiously to meet them. On the roof of the little cabin the rain made a noise that was no longer like the rustle of silk, but was like the crackle of musketry.

There was something oppressive, something even almost terrible, in being closely confined, shut in by low roof and narrow walls from such sweeping turbulence, such a clamor of wind and water and the sky.

Hermione looked at her diamond brooch, then at her cloak.

Slowly she lifted her hand and began to button it.

Vere moved and began to button up hers. Hermione glanced at her, and saw a watchful, shining, half-humorous, half-passionate look in her eyes that could not be mistaken.

She dropped her hands.

"No, Vere!"

"Yes, Madre! Yes, yes, yes!"

The Marchesino stared.

"No, I did not—"

"You did! You did, Madre! It's no use! I understood directly."

She began quickly to take off her hat.

"Marchese, we are going out."

"Vere, this is absurd."

"We are going outside, Marchese. Madre wants air."

The Marchesino, accustomed only to the habits and customs of Neapolitan women, looked frankly as if he thought Hermione mad.

"Poor Madre must have a breath of air."

"I will open the window, Signora!"

"And the rain all over her, and the thunder close above her, and the sea in her face, the sea—the sea!"

She clapped her hands.

"Gaspare! Gaspare!"

She put her face to the glass. Gaspare, who was standing up in the stern, with his hands holding fast to the rail that edged the cabin roof, bent down till his brown face was on a level with hers, and his big eyes were staring inquiringly into her eyes.

"We are coming out."

On the other side of the glass Gaspare made violently negative gestures. One word only came to those inside the cabin through the uproar of the elements.

"Impossible!"

"Signorina," said the Marchesino, "you cannot mean it. But you will be washed off. And the water—you will be drowned. It cannot be."

"Marchese, look at Madre! If she stays inside another minute she will be ill. She is stifling! Quickly! Quickly!"

The Marchesino, whose sense of humor was not of a kind to comprehend this freak of Vere's, was for once really taken aback. There were two sliding doors to the cabin, one opening into the bows of the launch, the other into the stern. He got up, looking very grave and rather confused, and opened the former. The wind rushed in, carrying with it spray from the sea. At the same moment there was a loud tapping on the glass behind them. Vere looked round. Gaspare was crouching down with his face against the pane. She put her ear to the glass by his mouth.

"Signorina, you must not go into the bows," he called. "If you will come out, come here, and I will take care of you."

He knew Vere's love of the sea and understood her desire.

"Go, Vere," said Hermione.

The Marchesino shut the door and stood by it, bending and looking doubtful.

"I will stay here with the Marchese. I am really too old to face such a tempest, and the Marchese has no coat. He simply can't go."

"But, Signora, it does not matter! I am ready."

"Impossible. Your clothes would be ruined. Go along, Vere! Turn up your collar."

She spoke almost as if to a boy, and like a gay boy Vere obeyed her and slipped out to Gaspare.

"You really won't come, Madre?"

"No. But—tell me if you see the light."

The girl nodded, and the door moved into its place, shutting out the wind.

Then the Marchesino sat down and looked at his damp patent-leather boots.

He really could not comprehend these English ladies. That Vere was greatly attracted by him he thoroughly believed. How could it be otherwise? Her liveliness he considered direct encouragement. And then she had gone out to the terrace after dinner, leaving her mother. That was to make him follow her, of course. She wanted to be alone with him. In a Neapolitan girl such conduct would have been a declaration. A Neapolitan mother would not have allowed them to sit together on the terrace without a chaperon. But the English mother had deliberately remained within and had kept Caro Emilio with her. What could such conduct mean, if not that the Signorina was in love with him, the Marchesino, and that the Signorina's mamma was perfectly willing for him to make love to her child?

And yet—and yet?

There was something in Vere that puzzled him, that had kept him strangely discreet upon the terrace, that made him silent and thoughtful now. Had she been a typical English girl he might have discerned something of the truth of her. But Vere was lively, daring, passionate, and not without some traces of half-humorous and wholly innocent coquetry. She was not at all what the Neapolitan calls "a lump of snow to cool the wine." In her innocence there was fire. That was what confused the Marchesino.

He stared at the cabin door by which Vere had gone out, and his round eyes became almost pathetic for a moment. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this exit was a second ruse, like Vere's departure to the terrace, and he made a movement as if to go out and brave the storm. But Hermione stopped him decisively.

"No, Marchese," she said, "really I cannot let you expose yourself to the rain and the sea in that airy costume. I might be your mother."

"Signora, but you—"

"No, compliments apart, I really might be, and you must let me use a mother's authority. Till we reach the island stay here and make the best of me."

Hermione had touched the right note. Metaphorically, the Marchesino cast himself at her feet. With a gallant assumption of undivided adoration he burst into conversation, and, though his eyes often wandered to the blurred glass, against which pressed and swayed a blackness that told of those outside, his sense of his duty as a host gradually prevailed, and he and Hermione were soon talking quite cheerfully together.

Vere had forgotten him as utterly as she had forgotten Naples, swallowed up by the night. Just then only the sea, the night, Gaspare, and the two sailors who were managing the launch were real to her—besides herself. For a moment even her mother had ceased to exist in her consciousness. As the sea swept the deck of the little craft it swept her mind clear to make more room for itself.

She stood by Gaspare, touching him, and clinging on, as he did, to the rail. Impenetrably black was the night. Only here and there, at distances she could not begin to judge of, shone vaguely lights that seemed to dance and fade and reappear like marsh lights in a world of mist. Were they on sea or land? She could not tell and did not ask. The sailors doubtless knew, but she respected them and their duty too much to speak to them, though she had given them a smile as she came out to join them, and had received two admiring salutes in reply. Gaspare, too, had smiled at her with a pleasure which swiftly conquered the faint reproach in his eloquent eyes. He liked his Padroncina's courage, liked the sailors of the Signor Marchese to see it. He was soaked to the skin, but he, too, was enjoying the adventure, a rare one on this summer sea, which had slept through so many shining days and starry nights like a "bambino in dolce letargo."

To-night it was awake, and woke up others, Vere's nature and his.

"Where is the island, Gaspare?" cried Vere through the wind to him.

"Chi lo sa, Signorina."

He waved one hand to the blackness before them.

"It must be there."

She strained her eyes, then looked away towards where the land must be. At a long distance across the leaping foam she saw one light. As the boat rose and sank on the crests and into the hollows of the waves the light shone and faded, shone and faded. She guessed it to be a light at the Antico Giuseppone. Despite the head wind and the waves that met them the launch travelled bravely, and soon the light was gone. She told herself that it must have been at the Giuseppone, and that now they had got beyond the point, and were opposite to the harbor of the Villa Rosebery. But no lights greeted them from the White Palazzo in the wood, or from the smaller white house low down beside the sea. And again she looked straight forward.

Now she was intent on San Francesco. She was thinking of him, of the Pool, of the island. And she thrilled with joy at the thought of the wonderful wildness of her home. As they drew on towards it the waves were bigger, the wind was stronger. Even on calm nights there was always a breeze when one had passed the Giuseppone going towards Ischia, and beyond the island there was sometimes quite a lively sea. What would it be to-night? Her heart cried out for a crescendo. Within her, at that moment, was a desire like the motorist's for speed. More! more! More wind! More sea! More uproar from the elements!

And San Francesco all alone in this terrific blackness! Had he not been dashed from his pedestal by the waves? Was the light at his feet still burning?

"Il Santo!" she said to Gaspare.

He bent his head till it was close to her lips.

"Il Santo! What has become of him, Gaspare?"

"He will be there, Signorina."

So Gaspare, too, held to the belief of the seamen of the Bay. He had confidence in the obedience of the sea, this sea that roared around them like a tyrant. Suddenly she had no doubt. It would be so. The saint would be untouched. The light would still be burning. She looked for it. And now she remembered her mother. She must tell her mother directly she saw it. But all was blackness still.

And the launch seemed weary, like a live thing whose strength is ebbing, who strains and pants and struggles gallantly, not losing heart but losing physical force. Surely it was going slower. She laid one hand upon the cabin roof as if in encouragement. Her heart was with the launch, as the seaman's is with his boat when it resists, surely for his sake consciously, the assault of the great sea.

"Coraggio!"

She was murmuring the word. Gaspare looked at her. And the word was in his eyes as it should be in all eyes that look at youth. And the launch strove on.

"Coraggio! Coraggio!"

The spray was in her face. Her hair was wet with the rain. Her French frock—that was probably ruined! But she knew that she had never felt more happy. And now—it was like a miracle! Suddenly out of the darkness a second darkness shaped itself, a darkness that she knew—the island. And almost simultaneously there shone out a little steady light.

"Ecco il Santo!"

"Ecco! Ecco!"

Vere called out: "Madre! Madre!"

She bent down.

"Madre! The light is burning."

The sailors, too, bent down, right down to the water. They caught at it with their hands, Gaspare, too. Vere understood, and, kneeling on the gunwale, firmly in Gaspare's grasp, she joined in their action.

She sprinkled the boat with the acqua benedetta and made the sign of the cross.

CHAPTER XIV

When, the next day, Artois sat down at his table to work he found it impossible to concentrate his mind. The irritation of the previous evening had passed away. He attributed it to the physical effect made upon him by the disturbed atmosphere. Now the sun shone, the sky was clear, the sea calm. He had just come out of an ice-cold bath, had taken his coffee, and smoked one cigarette. A quiet morning lay before him. Quiet?

He got up and went to the window.

On the wooden roof of the bath establishment opposite rows of towels, hung out to dry, were moving listlessly to and fro in the soft breeze. Capri was almost hidden by haze in the distance. In the sea, just below him, several heads of swimmers moved. One boy was "making death." He floated on his back with his eyes closed and his arms extended. His body, giving itself without resistance to every movement of the water, looked corpselike and ghostly.

A companion shouted to him. He threw up his arms suddenly and shouted a reply in the broadest Neapolitan, then began to swim vigorously towards the slimy rocks at the base of Castel dell' Ovo. Upon the wooden terrace of the baths among green plants in pots stood three women, probably friends of the proprietor. For though it was already hot, the regular bathing season of Naples had not yet begun and the baths were not completed. Only in July, after the festa of the Madonna del Carmine, do the Neapolitans give themselves heart and soul to the sea. Artois knew this, and wondered idly what the women were doing on the terrace. One had a dog. It sat in the sun and began to cough. A long wagon on two wheels went by, drawn by two mules and a thin horse harnessed abreast. It was full of white stone. The driver had bought some green stuff and flung it down upon the white. He wore a handkerchief on his head. His chest was bare. As he passed beneath the window he sang a loud song that sounded Eastern, such a song as the Spanish wagoners sing in Algeria, as they set out by night on their long journeys towards the desert. Upon a tiny platform of wood, fastened to slanting stakes which met together beneath it in a tripod, a stout man in shirt and trousers, with black whiskers, was sitting on a chair fishing with a rod and line. A boy sat beside him dangling his legs over the water. At a little distance a large fishing-smack, with sails set to catch the breeze farther out in the Bay, was being laboriously rowed towards the open sea by half-naked men, who shouted as they toiled at the immense oars.

Artois wondered where they were going. Their skins were a rich orange color. From a distance in the sunlight they looked like men of gold. Their cries and their fierce movements suggested some fantastic quest to lands of mysterious tumult.

Artois wished that Vere could see them.

What were the inhabitants of the island doing?

To-day his mind was beyond his governance, and roamed like a vagrant on a long, white road. Everything that he saw below him in the calm radiance of the morning pushed it from thought to thought. Yet none of these thoughts were valuable. None seemed fully formed. They resembled henids, things seen so far away that one cannot tell what they are, but is only aware that they exist and can attract attention.

He came out upon his balcony. As he did so he looked down into the road, and saw a hired carriage drive up, with Hermione in it.

She glanced up and saw him.

"May I come in for a minute?"

He nodded, smiling, and went out to meet her, glad of this interruption.

They met at the door of the lift. As Hermione stepped out she cast a rather anxious glance at her friend, a glance that seemed to say that she was not quite certain of her welcome. Artois' eyes reassured her.

"I feel guilty," she said.

"Why?"

"Coming at such an hour. Are you working?"

"No. I don't know why, but I am incapable of work. I feel both lazy and restless, an unfruitful combination. Perhaps something in me secretly knew that you were coming."

"Then it is my fault."

They came into his sitting-room. It had four windows, two facing the sea, two looking on the road, and the terraces and garden of the Hotel Hassler. The room scarcely suggested its present occupant. It contained a light-yellow carpet with pink flowers strewn over it, red-and-gold chairs, mirrors, a white marble mantelpiece, a gray-and-pink sofa with a pink cushion. Only the large writing-table, covered with manuscripts, letters, and photographs in frames, said something individual to the visitor. Hermione and Vere were among the photographs.

Hermione sat down on the sofa.

"I have come to consult you about something, Emile."

"What is it?"

"I really meant to ask you last night, but somehow I couldn't"

"Why?"

"I don't know. We—I—there seemed to be a sort of barrier between us—didn't there?"

"I was in a bad humor. I was tired after the journey, and perhaps the weather upset me."

"It's all right—one can't be always—Well, this is what I wanted to say. I alluded to it yesterday when I told you about my visit to Naples with Madame Alliani. Do you remember?"

"You hinted you had seen, or heard of, some tragedy."

"Yes. I believe it is a quite ordinary one in Naples. We went to visit a consumptive woman in one of those narrow streets going uphill to the left of the Via Roma, and while there by chance I heard of it. In the same house as the sick woman there is a girl. Not many days ago she was beautiful!"

"Yes? What has happened to her?"

"I'll tell you. Her name is Peppina. She is only nineteen, but she has been one of those who are not given a chance. She was left an orphan very young and went to live with an aunt. This aunt is a horrible old woman. I believe—they say she goes to the Galleria—"

Hermione paused.

"I understand," said Artois.

"She is greedy, wicked, merciless. We had the story from the woman we were visiting, a neighbor. This aunt forced Peppina into sin. Her beauty, which must have been extraordinary, naturally attracted attention and turned people's heads. It seems to have driven one man nearly mad. He is a fisherman, not young, and a married man. It seems that he is notoriously violent and jealous, and thoroughly unscrupulous. He is a member of the Camorra, too. He pestered Peppina with his attentions, coming day after day from Mergellina, where he lives with his wife. One night he entered the house and made a scene. Peppina refused finally to receive his advances, and told him she hated him before all the neighbors. He took out a razor and—"

Hermione stopped.

"I understand," said Artois. "He disfigured her."

"Dreadfully."

"It is often done here. Sometimes a youth does it simply to show that a girl is his property. But what is it you wish to do for Peppina? I see you have a plan in your head."

"I want to have her on the island."

"In what capacity?"

"As a servant. She can work. She is not a bad girl. She has only—well, Emile, the aunt only succeeded in forcing one lover on her. That is the truth. He was rich and bribed the aunt. But of course the neighbors all know, and—the population here has its virtues, but it is not exactly a delicate population."

"Per Bacco!"

"And now that the poor girl is disfigured the aunt is going to turn her out-of-doors. She says Peppina must go and earn money for herself. Of course nobody will take her. I want to. I have seen her, talked to her. She would be so thankful. She is in despair. Think of it! Nineteen, and all her beauty gone! Isn't it devilish?"

"And the man?"

"Oh, they say he'll get scarcely anything, if anything. Two or three months, perhaps. He is 'protected.' It makes my blood boil."

Artois was silent, waiting for her to say more, to ask questions.

"The only thing is—Vere, Emile," she said.

"Vere?"

"Yes. You know how friendly she is with the servants. I like her to be. But of course till now they have been all right—so far as I know."

"You do well to add that proviso."

"Peppina would not wait on us. She would be in the kitchen. Am I justified in taking her? Of course I could help her with money. If I had not seen her, talked to her, that is what I should have done, no doubt. But she wants—she wants everything, peace, a decent home, pure air. I feel she wants the island."

"And the other servants?"

"They need only know she was attacked. They need not know her past history. But all that does not matter. It is only the question of Vere that troubles me."

"You mean that you are not decided whether you ought to bring into the house with Vere a girl who is not as Vere is?"

"Yes."

"And you want me to advise you?"

"Yes."

"I can't do that, Hermione."

She looked at him almost as if she were startled.

"Why not? I always rely—"

"No, no. This is not a man's business, my business."

He spoke with an odd brusqueness, and there were traces of agitation in his face. Hermione did not at all understand what feeling was prompting him, but again, as on the previous evening, she felt as if there were a barrier between them—very slight, perhaps, very shadowy, but definite nevertheless. There was no longer complete frankness in their relations. At moments her friend seemed to be subtly dominated by some secret irritation, or anxiety, which she did not comprehend. She had been aware of it yesterday. She was aware of it now. After his last exclamation she said nothing.

"You are going to this girl now?" he asked.

"I mean to. Yes, I shall go."

She sat still for a minute, looking down at the pink-and-yellow carpet.

"And what will you do?"

She looked up at him.

"I think I shall take her to the island. I am almost sure I shall. Emile, I don't believe in cowardice, and I sometimes think I am inclined to be a coward about Vere. She is growing up. She will be seventeen this year, very soon. There are girls who marry at sixteen, even English girls."

"That is true."

She could gather nothing from his tone; and now his face was perfectly calm.

"My instinct is to keep Vere just as she is, to preserve the loveliness of childhood in her as long as possible, to keep away from her all knowledge of sin, sorrow, the things that distract and torture the world. But I mustn't be selfish about Vere. I mustn't keep her wrapped in cotton wool. That is unwholesome. And, after all, Vere must have her life apart from me. Last night I realized that strongly."

"Last night?"

"Yes, from the way in which she treated the Marchese, and later from something else. Last night Vere showed two sides of a woman's nature—the capacity to hold her own, what is vulgarly called 'to keep her distance,' and the capacity to be motherly."

"Was Vere motherly to the Marchesino, then?" asked Artois, not without irony.

"No—to Ruffo."

"That boy? But where was he last night?"

"When we got back to the island, and the launch had gone off, Vere and I stood for a minute at the foot of the steps to listen to the roaring of the sea. Vere loves the sea."

"I know that."

As he spoke he thought of something that Hermione did not know.

"The pool was protected, and under the lee of the island it was comparatively calm. But the rain was falling in torrents. There was one fishing-boat in the pool, close to where we were, and as we were standing and listening, Vere said, suddenly, 'Madre, that's Ruffo's boat!' I asked her how she knew—because he has changed into another boat lately—she had told me that. 'I saw his head,' she answered. 'He's there and he's not asleep. Poor boy, in all this rain!' Ruffo has been ill with fever, as I told you, and when Vere said that I remembered it at once."

"Had you told Vere yet?" interposed Artois.

"No. But I did then. Emile, she showed an agitation that—well, it was almost strange, I think. She begged me to make him come into the house and spend the night there, safe from the wind and the rain."

"And you did, of course?"

"Yes. He was looking very pale and shaky. The men let him come. They were nice and sympathetic. I think they are fond of the boy."

"Ruffo seems to know how to attract people to him."

"Yes."

"And so Vere played the mother to Ruffo?"

"Yes. I never saw that side of her before. She was a woman then. Eventually Ruffo slept with Gaspare."

"And how did Gaspare accept the situation?"

"Better than I should have expected. I think he likes Ruffo personally, though he is inclined to be suspicious and jealous of any strangers who come into our lives. But I haven't had time to talk to him this morning."

"Is Ruffo still in the house?"

"Oh no. He went off in the boat. They came for him about eight."

"Ah!"

Artois went to the window and looked out. But now he saw nothing, although the three women were still talking and gesticulating on the terrace of the bath-house, more fishing-boats were being towed or rowed out into the Bay, carts were passing by, and people were strolling in the sun.

"You say that Vere showed agitation last night?" he said, turning round after a moment.

"About Ruffo's illness? It really almost amounted to that. But Vere was certainly excited. Didn't you notice it?"

"I think she was."

"Emile," Hermione said, after an instant of hesitation, "you remember my saying to you the other day that Vere was not a stranger to me?"

"Yes, quite well."

"You said nothing—I don't think you agreed. Well, since that day—only since then—I have sometimes felt that there is much in Vere that I do not understand, much that is hidden from me. Has she changed lately?"

"She is at an age when development seems sudden, and is often striking, even startling."

"I don't know why, but—but I dread something," Hermione said. "I feel as if—no, I don't know what I feel. But if Vere should ever drift away from me I don't know how I could bear it. A boy—one expects him to go out into the world. But a girl! I want to keep Vere. I must keep Vere. If anything else were to be taken from me I don't think I could bear it."

"Vere loves you. Be sure of that."

"Yes."

Hermione got up.

"Well, you won't give me your advice?"

"No, Hermione."

He looked at her steadily.

"You must treat Vere as you think best, order her life as you think right. In some things you do wisely to consult me. But in this you must rely on yourself. Let your heart teach you. Do not ask questions of my head."

"Your head!" she exclaimed.

There was a trace of disappointment, even of surprise, in her voice. She looked at him as if she were going to say more, but again she was disconcerted by something in his look, his attitude.

"Well, good-bye, Emile."

"I will come with you to the lift."

He went with her and touched the electric bell. As they waited for a moment he added:

"I should like to have an evening quietly on the island."

"Come to-night, or whenever you like. Don't fix a time. Come when the inclination whispers—'I want to be with friends.'"

He pressed her hand.

"Shall I see Peppina?"

"Chi lo sa?"

"And Ruffo?"

She laughed.

"The Marchesino, too, perhaps."

"No," said Artois, emphatically. "Disfigured girls and fisher-boys—as many as you like, but not the alta aristocrazia Napoletana."

"But I thought—"

"I like Doro, but—I like him in his place."

"And his place?"

"Is not the island—when I wish to be quiet there."

The lift descended. Artois went out once more onto the balcony, and watched her get into the carriage and drive away towards Naples. She did not look up again.

"She has gone to fetch that girl Peppina," Artois said to himself, "and I might have prevented it."

He knew very well the reason why he had not interfered. He had not interfered because he had wished too much to interfere. The desire had been strong enough to startle him, to warn him.

An islet! That suggests isolation. Like Hermione, he wished to isolate Vere, to preserve her as she was in character. He did not know when the wish had first been consciously in his mind, but he knew that since he had been consulted by Vere, since she had broken through her reserve and submitted to him her poems, unveiling for him alone what was really to her a holy of holies, the wish had enormously increased. He told himself that Vere was unique, and that he longed to keep her unique, so that the talent he discerned in her might remain unaffected. How great her talent was he did not know. He would not know, perhaps, for a very long time. But it was definite, it was intimate. It was Vere's talent, no one else's.

He had made up his mind very soon about Hermione's incapacity to produce work of value. Although Vere was such a child, so inexperienced, so innocent, so cloistered, he knew at once that he dared not dash her hopes. It was possible that she might eventually become what her mother certainly could never be.

But she must not be interfered with. Her connection with the sea must not be severed. And people were coming into her life—Ruffo, the Marchesino, and now this wounded girl Peppina.

Artois felt uneasy. He wished Hermione were less generous-hearted, less impulsive. She looked on him as a guide, a check. He knew that. But this time he would not exercise his prerogative. Ruffo he did not mind—at least he thought he did not. The boy was a sea creature. He might even be an inspiring force to Vere. Something Artois had read had taught him that. And Ruffo interested him, attracted him too.

But he hated Vere's acquaintance with the Marchesino. He knew that the Marchesino would make love to her. And the knowledge was odious to him. Let Vere be loved by the sea, but by no man as yet.

And this girl, Peppina?

He thought of the horrors of Naples, of the things that happen "behind the shutter," of the lives led by some men and women, some boys and girls of the great city beneath the watching volcano. He thought of evenings he had spent in the Galleria. He saw before him an old woman about whom he had often wondered. Always at night, and often in the afternoon, she walked in the Galleria. She was invariably alone. The first time he had seen her he had noticed her because she had a slightly humped back. Her hair was snow white, and was drawn away from her long, pale face and carefully arranged under a modest bonnet. She carried a small umbrella and a tiny bag. Glancing at her casually, he had supposed her to be a respectable widow of the borghese class. But then he had seen her again and again, and by degrees he had come to believe that she was something very different. And then one night in late spring he had seen her in a new light dress with white thread gloves. And she had noticed him watching her, and had cast upon him a look that was unmistakable, a look from the world "behind the shutter"; and he had understood. Then she had followed him persistently. When he sat before the "Gran caffe" sipping his coffee and listening to the orchestra of women that plays on the platform outside the caffe, she had passed and repassed, always casting upon him that glance of sinister understanding, of invitation, of dreary wickedness that sought for, and believed that it had found, an answering wickedness in him.

Terrible old woman! Peppina's aunt might well be like that. And Peppina would sleep, perhaps to-night, in the Casa del Mare, under the same roof as Vere.

He resolved to go that evening to the island, to see Peppina, to see Vere. He wished, too, to have a little talk with Gaspare about Ruffo.

The watch-dog instinct, which dwelt also in Gaspare, was alive in him.

But to-day it was alive to do service for Vere, not for Hermione. He knew that, and said to himself that it was natural. For Hermione was a woman, with experience of life; but Vere was only upon the threshold of the world. She needed protection more than Hermione.

Some time ago, when he was returning to Naples from the island on an evening of scirocco, Artois had in thought transferred certain hopes of his from Hermione to Vere. He had said to himself that he must henceforth hope for Hermione in Vere.

Now was he not transferring something else from the mother to the child?

CHAPTER XV

Artois had intended to go that evening to the island. But he did not fulfil his intention. When the sun began to sink he threw a light coat over his arm and walked down to the harbor of Santa Lucia. A boatman whom he knew met him and said:

"Shall I take you to the island, Signore?"

Artois was there to take a boat. He meant to say yes. Yet when the man spoke he answered no. The fellow turned away and found another customer. Two or three minutes later Artois saw his boat drawing out to sea in the direction of Posilipo. It was a still evening, and very clear after the storm of the preceding night. Artois longed to be in that travelling boat, longed to see the night come from the summit of the island with Hermione and Vere. But he resisted the sea, its wide peace, its subtle summons, called a carriage and drove to the Galleria. Arrived there, he took his seat at a little table outside the "Gran Caffe," ordered a small dinner, and, while he was eating it, watched the people strolling up and down, seeking among them for a figure that he knew.

As the hour drew near for the music to begin, and the girls dressed in white came out one by one to the platform that, surrounded by a white railing edged with red velvet, is built out beyond the caffe to face the crowd, the number of promenaders increased, and many stood still waiting for the first note, and debating the looks of the players. Others thronged around Artois, taking possession of the many little tables, and calling for ices, lemon-water, syrups, and liqueurs. Priests, soldiers, sailors, students, actors—who assemble in the Galleria to seek engagements—newsboys, and youths whose faces suggested that they were "ruffiani," mingled with foreigners who had come from the hotels and from the ships in the harbor, and whose demeanor was partly curious and partly suspicious, as of one who longs to probe the psychology of a thief while safely guarding his pockets. The buzz of voices, the tramp of feet, gained a peculiar and vivid sonorousness from the high and vaulted roof; and in the warm air, under the large and winking electric lights, the perpetually moving figures looked strangely capricious, hungry, determined, furtive, ardent, and intent. On their little stands the electric fans whirred as they slowly revolved, casting an artificial breeze upon pallid faces, and around the central dome the angels with gilded wings lifted their right arms as if pointing the unconscious multitude the difficult way to heaven.

A priest sat down with two companions at the table next to Artois. He had a red cord round his shaggy black hat. His face was like a parroquet's, with small, beady eyes full of an unintellectual sharpness. His plump body suggested this world, and his whole demeanor, the movements of his dimpled, dirty hands, and of his protruding lips, the attitude of his extended legs, the pose of his coarse shoulders, seemed hostile to things mystical. He munched an ice, and swallowed hasty draughts of iced water, talking the while with a sort of gluttonous vivacity. Artois looked at him and heard, with his imagination, the sound of the bell at the Elevation, and saw the bowed heads of the crouching worshippers. The irony of life, that is the deepest mystery of life, came upon him like the wave of some Polar sea. He looked up at the gilded angels, then dropped his eyes and saw what he had come to see.

Slowly threading her way through the increasing throng, came the old woman whom he had watched so often and by whom he had been watched. To-night she had on her summer dress, a respectable, rather shiny gown of grayish mauve, a bonnet edged with white ribbon, a pair of white thread gloves. She carried her little bag and a small Japanese fan. Walking in a strange, flat-footed way that was peculiar to her, and glancing narrowly about her, yet keeping her hand almost still, she advanced towards the band-stand. As she came opposite to Artois the orchestra of women struck up the "Valse Noir," and the old woman stood still, impeded by the now dense crowd of listeners. While the demurely sinister music ran its course, she remained absolutely immobile. Artois watched her with a keen interest.

It had come into his mind that she was the aunt of Peppina, the disfigured girl, who perhaps to-night was sleeping in the Casa del Mare with Vere.

Presently, attracted, no doubt, by his gaze, the old woman looked across at Artois and met his eyes. Instantly a sour and malignant expression came into her long, pale face, and she drew up a corner of her upper lip, as a dog sometimes does, showing a tooth that was like a menace.

She was secretly cursing Artois.

He knew why. Encouraged by his former observation of her, she had scented a client in him and had been deceived, and this deception had bred within her an acrid hatred of him. To-night he would chase away that hatred. For he meant to speak to her. The old woman looked away from him, holding her head down as if in cold disdain. Artois read easily what was passing in her mind. She believed him wicked, but nervous in his wickedness, desirous of her services but afraid to invite them. And she held him in the uttermost contempt. Well, to-night he would undeceive her on one point at least. He kept his eyes upon her so firmly that she looked at him again. This time he made a sign of recognition, of understanding. She stared as if in suspicious amazement. He glanced towards the dome, then at her once more. At this moment the waiter came up. Artois paid his bill slowly and ostentatiously. As he counted out the money upon the little tray he looked up once, and saw the eyes in the long, pale face of the venerable temptress glitter while they watched. The music ceased, the crowd before the platform broke up, and began quickly to melt away. Only the woman waited, holding her little bag and her cheap Japanese fan.

Artois drew out a cigar, lit it slowly, then got up, and began to move out among the tables.

The priest looked after him, spoke rapidly to his companions, and burst into a throaty laugh which was loudly echoed.

"Maria Fortunata is in luck to-night!" said some one.

Then the band began again, the waiter came with more ices, and the tall, long-bearded forestiere was forgotten.

Without glancing at the woman, Artois strolled slowly on. Many people looked at him, but none spoke to him, for he was known now, as each stranger who stays long in Naples is known, summed up, labelled, and either ignored or pestered. The touts and the ruffiani were aware that it was no use to pester the Frenchman, and even the decrepit and indescribably seedy old men who hover before the huge plate-glass windows of the photograph shops, or linger near the entrance to the cinematograph, never peeped at him out of the corners of their bloodshot eyes or whispered a word of the white slaves in his ear.

When he was beneath the dome, and could see the light gleaming upon the wings of the pointing angels, Artois seemed to be aware of an individual step among the many feet behind him, a step soft, furtive, and obstinate, that followed him like a fate's. He glanced up at the angels. A melancholy and half-bitter smile came to his lips. Then he turned to the right and made his way still slowly towards the Via Roma, always crowded from the early afternoon until late into the night. As he went, as he pushed through the mob of standing men at the entrance of the Galleria, and crossed the street to the far side, from which innumerable narrow and evil-looking alleys stretch away into the darkness up the hill, the influence of the following old woman increased upon him, casting upon him like a mist her hateful eagerness. He desired to be rid of it, and, quickening his walk, he turned into the first alley he came to, walked a little way up it, until he was in comparative solitude and obscurity, then stopped and abruptly turned.

The shiny, grayish mauve gown and the white-trimmed bonnet were close to him. Between them he faintly perceived a widely smiling face, and from this face broke at once a sickly torrent of speech, half Neapolitan dialect, half bastard French.

"Silenzio!" Artois said, sternly.

The old harridan stopped in surprise, showing her tooth.

"What has become of Peppina?"

"Maria Santissima!" she ejaculated, moving back a step in the darkness.

She paused. Then she said:

"You know Peppina!"

She came forward again, quite up to him, and peered into his face, seeking there for an ugly truth which till now had been hidden from her.

"What had you to do with Peppina?"

"Nothing. Tell me about her, and—"

He put his hand to the inside pocket of his coat, and showed her the edge of a little case containing paper notes. The woman misunderstood him. He knew that by her face, which for the moment was as a battle-field on which lust fought with a desperate anger of disappointment. Then cunning came to stop the battle.

"You have heard of Peppina, Signore? You have never seen her?"

Artois played with her for a moment.

"Never."

Her smile widened. She put up her thin hands to her hair, her bonnet, coquettishly.

"There is not a girl in Naples as beautiful as Peppina. Mother of—"

But the game was too loathsome with such a player.

"Beautiful! Macche!"

He laughed, made a gesture of pulling out a knife and smashing his face with it.

"Beautiful! Per Dio!"

The coquetry, the cunning, dropped out of the long, pale face.

"The Signore knows?"

"Ma si! All Naples knows."

The old woman's face became terrible. Her two hands shot up, dropped, shot up again, imprecating, cursing the world, the sky, the whole scheme of the universe, it seemed. She chattered like an ape. Artois soothed her with a ten-lire note.

That night, when he went back to the hotel, he had heard the aunt's version of Peppina, and knew—that which really he had known before—that Hermione had taken her to live on the island.

Hermione! What was she? An original, clever and blind, great-hearted and unwise. An enthusiast, one created to be carried away.

Never would she grow really old, never surely would the primal fires within her die down into the gray ashes that litter so many of the hearths by which age sits, a bleak, uncomely shadow.

And Peppina was on the island, a girl from the stews of Naples; not wicked, perhaps, rather wronged, injured by life—nevertheless, the niece of that horror of the Galleria.

He thought of Vere and shuddered.

Next day towards four o'clock the Marchesino strolled into Artois' room, with a peculiarly impudent look of knowledge upon his face.

"Buon giorno, Caro Emilio," he said. "Are you busy?"

"Not specially."

"Will you come with me for a stroll in the Villa? Will you come to see the gathering together of the geese?"

"Che Diavolo! What's that?"

"This summer the Marchesa Pontini has organized a sort of club, which meets in the Villa every day except Sundays. Three days the meeting is in the morning, three days in the afternoon. The silliest people of the aristocracy belong to this club, and the Marchesa is the mother goose. Ecco! Will you come, or—or have you some appointment?" He smiled in his friend's face.

Artois wondered, but could not divine, what was at the back of his mind.

"No, I had thought of going on the sea."

"Or to the Toledo, perhaps?"

The Marchesino laughed happily.

"The Toledo? Why should I go there?"

"Non lo so. Put on your chapeau and come. Il fait tres beau cet apres-midi."

Doro was very proud of his French, which made Artois secretly shiver, and generally spoke it when he was in specially good spirits, or was feeling unusually mischievous. As they walked along the sea-front a moment later, he continued in Italian:

"You were not at the island yesterday, Emilio?"

"No. Were you?"

"I naturally called to know how the ladies were after that terrible storm. What else could I do?"

"And how were they?"

"The Signora was in Naples, and of course the Signorina could not have received me alone. But the saints were with me, Emilio. I met her on the sea; quite by herself, on the sea of the Saint's pool. She was lying back in a little boat, with no hat on, her hands behind her head—so, and her eyes—her beautiful eyes, Emilio, were full of dreams, of dreams of the sea."

"How do you know that?" said Artois, rather sharply.

"Cosa?"

"How do you know the Signorina was dreaming of the sea? Did she—did she tell you?"

"No, but I am sure. We walked together from the boats. I told her she was an enchantress of the sea, the spirit of the wave—I told her!"

He spread out his hands, rejoicing in the remembrance of his graceful compliments.

"The Signorina was delighted, but she could not stay long. She had a slight headache and was a little tired after the storm. But she would have liked to ask me to the house. She was longing to. I could see that."

He seized his mustache.

"She turned her head away, trying to conceal from me her desire, but—"

He laughed.

"Le donne! Le donne!" he happily exclaimed.

Artois found himself wondering why, until Doro had made the acquaintance of the dwellers on the island, he had never wished to smack his smooth, complacent cheeks.

They turned from the sea into the broad walk of the Villa, and walked towards the kiosk. Near it, on the small, green chairs, were some ladies swathed in gigantic floating-veils, talking to two or three very smart young men in white suits and straw hats, who leaned forward eying them steadily with a determined yet rather vacuous boldness that did not disconcert them. One of the ladies, dressed in black-and-white check, was immensely stout. She seemed to lead the conversation, which was carried on with extreme vivacity in very loud and not melodious voices.

"Ecco the gathering of the geese!" said the Marchesino, touching Artois on the arm. "And that"—he pointed to the stout lady, who at this moment tossed her head till her veil swung loose like a sail suddenly deserted by the wind—"is the goose-mother. Buona sera, Marchesa! Buona sera—molto piacere. Carlo, buona sera—a rivederci, Contessa! A questa sera."

He showed his splendid teeth in a fixed but winning smile, and, hat in hand, went by, walking from his hips. Then, replacing his hat on his head, he added to his friend:

"The Marchesa is always hoping that the Duchessa d'Aosta will come one day, if only for a moment, to smile upon the geese. But—well, the Duchessa prefers to climb to the fourth story to see the poor. She has a heart. Let us sit here, Emilio."

They sat down under the trees, and the Marchesino looked at his pointed boots for a moment in silence, pushing forward his under lip until his blond mustache touched the jaunty tip of his nose. Then he began to laugh, still looking before him.

"Emilio! Emilio!"

He shook his head repeatedly.

"Emilio mio! And that you should be asking me to show you Naples! It is too good! C'est parfait!"

The Marchesino turned towards Artois.

"And Maria Fortunata! Santa Maria of the Toledo, the white-haired protectress of the strangers! Emilio—you might have come to me! But you do not trust me. Ecco! You do not—"

Artois understood.

"You saw me last night?"

"Ma si! All Naples saw you. Do you not know that the Galleria is full—but full—of eyes?"

"Va bene! But you don't understand."

"Emilio!"

He shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands, his eyebrows. His whole being seemed as if it were about to mount ironically towards heaven.

"You don't understand. I repeat it."

Artois spoke quietly, but there was a sound in his voice which caused his frivolous companion to stare at him with an inquiry that was, for a moment, almost sulky.

"You forget, Doro, how old I am."

"What has that to do with it?"

"You forget—"

Artois was about to allude to his real self, to point out the improbability of a man so mental, so known, so travelled as he was, falling like a school-boy publicly into a sordid adventure. But he stopped, realizing the uselessness of such an explanation. And he could not tell the Marchesino the truth of his shadowy colloquy in a by-street with the old creature from behind the shutter.

"You have made a mistake about me," he said. "But it is of no consequence. Look! There is another goose coming."

He pointed with his cane in the direction of the chatterers near the kiosk.

"It is papa! It is papa!"

"Pardon! I did not recognize—"

The Marchesino got up.

"Let us go there. The Marchesa with papa—it is better than the Compagnia Scarpetta! I will present you."

But Artois was in no mood for a cataract of nothingness.

"Not now," he said. "I have—"

The Marchesino shot a cruel glance of impudent comprehension at him, and touched his left hand in token of farewell.

"I know! I know! The quickest horse to the Toledo. A-ah! A-ah! May the writer's saint go with you! Addio, mio caro!"

There was a hint of real malice in his voice. He cocked his hat and strutted away towards the veils and the piercing voices. Artois stared after him for a moment, then walked across the garden to the sea, and leaned against the low wall looking towards Capri. He was vexed at this little episode—unreasonably vexed. In his friend Doro he now discerned a possible enemy. An Italian who has trusted does not easily forgive if he is not trusted in return. Artois was conscious of a dawning hostility in the Marchesino. No doubt he could check it. Doro was essentially good-tempered and light-hearted. He could check it by an exhibition of frankness. But this frankness was impossible to him, and as it was impossible he must allow Doro to suspect him of sordid infamies. He knew, of course, the Neapolitan's habitual disbelief in masculine virtue, and did not mind it. Then why should he mind Doro's laughing thought of himself as one of the elderly crew who cling to forbidden pleasures? Why should he feel sore, angry, almost insulted?

Vere rose before him, as one who came softly to bring him the answer to his questionings. And he knew that his vexation arose from the secret apprehension of a future in which he would desire to stand between her and the Marchesino with clean hands, and tell Doro certain truths which are universal, not national. Such truths would come ill from one whom the lectured held unclean.

As he walked home to the hotel his vexation grew.

When he was once more in his room he remembered his remark to Hermione, "We shall have many quiet, happy evenings together this summer, I hope," and her strange and doubtful reply. And because he felt himself invaded by her doubts he resolved to set out for the island. If he took a boat at once he could be there between six and seven o'clock.

And perhaps he would see the new occupant of the Casa del Mare. Perhaps he would see Peppina.

CHAPTER XVI

"I have come, you see," said Artois that evening, as he entered Hermione's room, "to have the first of our quiet, happy evenings, about which you were so doubtful."

"Was I?"

She smiled at him from her seat between the big windows.

Outside the door he had, almost with a sudden passion, dismissed the vague doubts and apprehensions that beset him. He came with a definite brightness, a strong intimacy, holding out his hands, intent really on forcing Fate to weave her web in accordance with his will.

"We women are full of little fears, even the bravest of us. Chase mine away, Emile."

He sat down.

"What are they?"

She shook her head.

"Formless—or almost. But perhaps that adds to the uneasiness they inspire. To put them into words would be impossible."

"Away with them!"

"Willingly."

Her eyes seemed to be asking him questions, to be not quite satisfied, not quite sure of something.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I wonder if you have it in you to be angry with me."

"Make your confession."

"I have Peppina here."

"Of course."

"You knew—?"

"I have known you as an impulsive for—how many years? Why should you change?"

He looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he continued:

"Sometimes you remind me—in spots, as it were—of George Sand."

She laughed, not quite without bitterness.

"In spots, indeed!"

"She described herself once in a book as having 'a great facility' for illusions, a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was inexhaustible—"

"Oh!"

"Wait! From these qualities, she said, came hurry, mistakes innumerable, heroic devotion to objects that were worthless, much weakness, tremendous disappointments."

Hermione said nothing, but sat still looking grave.

"Well? Don't you recognize something of yourself in the catalogue, my friend?"

"Have I a great facility for illusions? Am I capable of heroic devotion to worthless objects?"

Suddenly Artois remembered all he knew and she did not know.

"At least you act hastily often," he said evasively. "And I think you are often so concentrated upon the person who stands, perhaps suffering, immediately before you, that you forget who is on the right, who is on the left."

"Emile, I asked your advice yesterday, and you would not give it me."

"A fair hit!" he said. "And so Peppina is here. How did the servants receive her?"

"I think they were rather surprised. Of course they don't know the truth."

"They will within—shall we say twenty-four hours, or less?"

"How can they? Peppina won't tell them."

"You are sure? And when Gaspare goes into Naples to 'fare la spesa'?"

"I told Gaspare last night."

"That was wisdom. You understand your watch-dog's character."

"You grant that Gaspare is not an instance of a worthless object made the recipient of my heroic devotion?"

"Give him all you like," said Artois, with warmth. "You will never repent of that. Was he angry when you told him?"

"I think he was."

"Why?"

"I heard him saying 'Testa della Madonna!' as he was leaving me."

Artois could not help smiling.

"And Vere?" he said, looking directly at her.

"I have not told Vere anything about Peppina's past," Hermione said, rather hastily. "I do not intend to. I explained that Peppina had had a sad life and had been attacked by a man who had fallen in love with her, and for whom she didn't care."

"And Vere was all sympathy and pity?" said Artois, gently.

"She didn't seem much interested, I thought. She scarcely seemed to be listening. I don't believe she has seen Peppina yet. When we arrived she was shut up in her room."

As she spoke she was looking at him, and she saw a slight change come over his face.

"Do you think—" she began, and paused. "I wonder if she was reading," she added, slowly, after a moment.

"Even the children have their secrets," he answered. As he spoke he turned his head and looked out of the window towards Ischia. "How clear it is to-night! There will be no storm."

"No. We can dine outside. I have told them." Her voice sounded slightly constrained. "I will go and call Vere," she added.

"She is in the house?"

"I think so."

She went out, shutting the door behind her.

So Vere was working. Artois felt sure that her conversation with him had given to her mind, perhaps to her heart, too, an impulse that had caused an outburst of young energy. Ah! the blessed ardors of youth! How beautiful they are, and, even in their occasional absurdity, how sacred. What Hermione had said had made him realize acutely the influence which his celebrity and its cause—the self that had made it—must have upon a girl who was striving as Vere was. He felt a thrill of pleasure, even of triumph, that startled him, so seldom now, jealous and careful as he was of his literary reputation, did he draw any definite joy from it. Would Vere ever do something really good? He found himself longing that she might, as the proud godparent longs for his godchild to gain prizes. He remembered the line at the close of Maeterlinck's "Pelleas and Melisande," a line that had gone like a silver shaft into this soul when he first heard it—"Maintenant c'est au tour de la pauvre petite" (Now it's the child's turn.)

"Now it's the child's turn," he said it to himself, forming the words with his lips. At that moment he was freed entirely from the selfishness of age, and warm with a generous and noble sympathy with youth, its aspirations, its strivings, its winged hopes. He got up from his chair. He had a longing to go to Vere and tell her all he was feeling, a longing to pour into her—as just then he could have poured it—inspiration molten in a long-tried furnace. He had no need of any one but Vere.

The doors opened and Hermione came back.

"Vere is coming, Emile," she said.

"You told her I was here?"

She looked at him swiftly, as if the ringing sound in his voice had startled her.

"Yes. She is glad, I know. Dear little Vere!"

Her voice was dull, and she spoke—or he fancied so—rather mechanically. He remembered all she did not know and was conscious of her false position. In their intercourse she had so often, so generally, been the enthusiastic sympathizer. More than she knew she had inspired him.

"Dear Hermione! How good it is to be here with you!" he said, turning towards her the current of his sympathy. "As one grows old one clings to the known, the proved. That passion at least increases while so many others fade away, the passion for all that is faithful in a shifting world, for all that is real, that does not suffer corruption, disintegration! How adorable is Time where Time is powerless!"

"Is Time ever powerless?" she said. "Ah, here is Vere!"

They dined outside upon the terrace facing Vesuvius. Artois sat between mother and child. Vere was very quiet. Her excitement, her almost feverish gayety of the evening of the storm had vanished. To-night dreams hung in her eyes. And the sea was quiet as she was, repentant surely of its former furies. There seemed something humble, something pleading in its murmur, as if it asked forgiveness and promised amendment.

The talk was chiefly between Hermione and Artois. It was not very animated. Perhaps the wide peace of the evening influenced their minds. When coffee was carried out Artois lit his pipe, and fell into complete silence, watching the sea. Giulia brought to Hermione a bit of embroidery on which she was working, cleared away the dessert and quietly disappeared. From the house now and then came a sound of voices, of laughter. It died away, and the calm of the coming night, the calm of the silent trio that faced it, seemed to deepen as if in delicate protest against the interference. The stillness of Nature to-night was very natural. But was the human stillness natural? Presently Artois, suddenly roused, he knew not why, to self-consciousness, found himself wondering. Vere lay back in her wicker chair like one at ease. Hermione was leaning forward over her work with her eyes bent steadily upon it. Far off across the sea the smoke from the summit of Vesuvius was dyed at regular intervals by the red fire that issued from the entrails of the mountain. Silently it rose from its hidden world, glowed angrily, menacingly, faded, then glowed again. And the life that is in fire, and that seems to some the most intense of all the forces of life, stirred Artois from his peace. The pulse of the mountain, whose regular beating was surely indicated by the regularly recurring glow of the rising flame, seemed for a moment to be sounding in his ears, and, with it, all the pulses that were beating through the world. And he thought of the calm of their bodies, of Hermione's, of Vere's, of his own, as he had thought of the calm of the steely sky, the steely sea, that had preceded the bursting of the storm that came from Ischia. He thought of it as something unnatural, something almost menacing, a sort of combined lie that strove to conceal, to deny, the leaping fires of the soul.

Suddenly Vere got up and went quietly away. While she had been with them silence had been easy. Directly she was gone Artois felt that it was difficult, in another moment that it was no longer possible.

"Am I to see Peppina to-night?" he asked.

"Do you wish to?"

Hermione's hands moved a little faster about their work when he spoke.

"I feel a certain interest in her, as I should in any new inhabitant of the island. A very confined space seems always to heighten the influence of human personality, I think. On your rock everybody must mean a good deal, perhaps more than you realize, Hermione."

"I am beginning to realize that," she answered, quietly. "Perhaps they mean too much. I wonder if it is wise to live as we do?"

"In such comparative isolation, you mean?"

"Yes."

She laid her work down in her lap.

"I'm afraid that by nature I am a monopolist," she said. "And as I could never descend into the arena of life to struggle to keep what I have, if others desired to take it from me, I am inclined jealously to guard it."

She took up her work again.

"I've been thinking that I am rather like the dog that buries his bone," she added, bending once more over the embroidery.

"Are you thinking of—of your husband?"

"Yes, and of Vere. I isolated myself with Maurice. Now I am isolating myself with Vere. Perhaps it is unwise, weak, this instinct to keep out the world."

"Are you thinking of changing your mode of life, then?" he asked.

In his voice there was a sound of anxiety which she noticed.

"Perhaps. I don't know."

She glanced at him and away, and he thought that there was something strange in her eyes. After a pause, she said:

"What would you advise?"

"Surely you are happy here. And—and Vere is happy."

"Vere is happy—yes."

He realized the thoughtlessness of his first sentence.

"But I must think of Vere's development. Lately, in these last days, I have been realizing that Vere is moving, is beginning to move very fast. Perhaps it is time to bring her into contact with more people. Perhaps—"

"You once asked my advice," he interrupted. "I give it now. Leave Vere alone. What she needs she will obtain. Have no fear of that."

"You are sure?"

"Quite sure. Sometimes, often, the children know instinctively more than their elders know by experience."

Hermione's lips trembled.

"Sometimes," she said, in a low voice, "I think Vere knows far more than I do. But—but I often feel that I am very blind, very stupid. You called me an impulsive—I suppose I am one. But if I don't follow my impulses, what am I to follow? One must have a guide."

"Yes, and reason is often such a dull one, like a verger throwing one over a cathedral and destroying its mystery and its beauty with every word he speaks. When one is young one does not feel that one needs a guide at all."

"Sometimes—often—I feel very helpless now," she said.

He was acutely conscious of the passionate longing for sympathy that was alive within her, and more faintly aware of a peculiar depression that companioned her to-night. Yet, for some reason unknown to him, he could not issue from a certain reserve that checked him, could not speak to her as he had spoken not long ago in the cave. Indeed, as she came in her last words a little towards him, as one with hands tremblingly and a little doubtfully held out, he felt that he drew back.

"I think we all feel helpless often when we have passed our first youth," he answered.

He got up and stretched himself, towering above her.

"Shall we stroll about a little?" he added. "I feel quite cramped with sitting."

"You go. I'll finish this flower."

"I'll take a turn and come back."

As he went she dropped her embroidery and sat staring straight before her at the sea.

Artois heard voices in the house, and listened for a new one, the voice of Peppina. But he could not distinguish it. He went down into the tiny garden. No one was there, and he returned, and passing through the house came out on its farther side. Here he met Gaspare coming up from the sea.

"Good-evening, Gaspare," he said.

"Good-evening, Signore."

"I hear there's a new-comer in the house."

"Signore?"

"A new servant."

Gaspare lifted his large eyes towards heaven.

"Testa della Madonna?" said Artois.

"Signore?"

"Have a cigar, Gaspare?"

"Grazie, Signore."

"Is she a good sort of girl, do you think?"

"Who, Signore?"

"This Peppina."

"She is in the kitchen, Signore. I have nothing to do with her."

"I see."

Evidently Gaspare did not mean to talk. Artois decided to change the subject.

"I hear you had that boy, Ruffo, sleeping in the house the other night," he said.

"Si, Signore; the Signorina wished it."

Gaspare's voice sounded rather more promising.

"He seems popular on the island."

"He had been ill, Signore, and it was raining hard. Poveretto! He had had the fever. It was bad for him to be out in the boat."

"So Ruffo's getting hold of you too!" thought Artois.

He pulled at his cigar once or twice. Then he said:

"Do you think he looks like a Sicilian?"

Gaspare's eyes met his steadily.

"A Sicilian, Signore?"

"Yes."

"Signore, he is a Sicilian. How should he not look like one?"

Gaspare's voice sounded rebellious.

"Va bene, Gaspare, va bene. Have you seen the Signorina?"

"I think she is at the wooden seat, Signore. The Signorina likes to look at the sea from there."

"I will go and see if I can find her."

"Va bene, Signore. And I will go to speak with the Signora."

He took off his hat and went into the house. Artois stood for a moment looking after him and pulling at his beard. There was something very forcible in Gaspare's personality. Artois felt it the more because of his knowledge of Gaspare's power of prolonged, perhaps of eternal silence. The Sicilian was both blunt and subtle, therefore not always easily read. To-night he puzzled Artois because he impressed him strongly, yet vaguely. He seemed to be quietly concealing something that was not small. What it was Artois could not divine. Only he felt positive that there was something. In Gaspare's eyes that evening he had seen an expression such as had been in them long ago in Sicily, when Artois rode up after Maurice's death to see Hermione, and Gaspare turned from him and looked over the wall of the ravine: an expression of dogged and impenetrable reserve, that was like a door closing upon unseen, just not seen, vistas.

"Che Diavolo!" muttered Artois.

Then he went up to look for Vere.

A little wind met him on the crest of the cliff, the definite caress of the night, which had now fallen ever so softly. The troop of the stars was posted in the immeasurable deeps of the firmament. There was, there would be, no moon, yet it was not black darkness, but rather a dimly purple twilight which lifted into its breast the wayward songs of the sea. And the songs and the stars seemed twin children of the wedded wave and night. Divinely soft was the wind, divinely dreamy the hour, and bearing something of youth as a galley from the East bears odors. Over the spirit of Artois a magical essence seemed scattered. And the youngness that lives forever, however deeply buried, in the man who is an artist, stirred, lifted itself up, stood erect to salute the night. As he came towards Vere he forgot. The poppy draught was at his lips. The extreme consciousness, which was both his strength and his curse, sank down for a moment and profoundly slept.

"Vere!" he said. "Vere, do I disturb you?"

The girl turned softly on the bench and looked at him.

"No. I often come here. I like to be here at nightfall. Madre knows that. Did she tell you?"

"No."

"You guessed?"

"I met Gaspare."

He stood near her.

"Where is Madre?"

"On the terrace. She preferred to stay quietly there. And so you have been working very hard?"

He spoke gently, half smilingly, but not at all derisively.

"Yes. But how did you know?"

"I gathered it from something your mother said. Do you know, Vere, I think soon she will begin to wonder what you do when you are shut up for so long in your room."

The girl's face looked troubled for a moment.

"She doesn't—she has no idea."

"Oh no."

Vere was silent for a while.

"I wonder if I ought to tell her, Monsieur Emile," she said at length.

"Tell her!" Artois said, hastily. "But I thought—"

He checked himself, suddenly surprised at the keenness of his own desire to keep their little secret.

"I know. You mean what I said the other day. But—if Madre should be hurt. I don't think I have ever had a secret from her before, a real secret. But—it's like this. If Madre knows I shall feel horribly self-conscious, because of what I told you—her having tried and given it up. I shall feel guilty. Is it absurd?"

"No."

"And—and—I don't believe I shall be able to go on. Of course some day, if it turns out that I ever can do anything, I must tell. But that would be different. If it's certain that you can do a thing well it seems to me that you have a right to do it. But—till then—I'm a little coward, really."

She ended with a laugh that was almost deprecating.

"Don't tell your mother yet, Vere," said Artois, decisively. "It is as you say: if you told her before you have thoroughly tried your wings you might be paralyzed. When, if ever, you can show her something really good she will be the first to encourage you. But—till then—I think with you that her influence in that direction would probably be discouraging. Indeed, I feel sure of it."

"But if she should really begin to wonder! Perhaps she will ask. It's absurd, but I can't help feeling as if we, you and I, were conspirators, Monsieur Emile."

He laughed happily.

"What a blessed place this is!" he said. "One is made free of the ocean here. What is that far-away light?"

He pointed.

"Low down? Oh, that must be the light of a fisherman, one of those who seek in the rocks for shell-fish."

"How mysterious it looks, moving to and fro! One feels life there, the doings of unknown men in the darkness."

"I wonder if—would you hate to go out a little way in the boat? The men look so strange when one is near them, almost like fire-people."

"Hate! Let us go."

"And we'll get Madre to come too."

"Oh yes."

Vere got up and they went into the house. As they came out upon the terrace Hermione took up her embroidery, and Gaspare, who was standing beside her, picked up the tray with the coffee-cups and went off with it towards the kitchen.

"Well, Vere?"

"Madre, we are going out a little way in the boat, and we want you to come with us."

"Where are you going?"

"To see the fishermen, just beyond the grotto of Virgilio. You will come?"

"Do come, my friend," added Artois.

But Hermione sat still.

"I'm a little tired to-night," she answered. "I think I would rather stay quietly here. You won't be long, will you?"

"Oh no, Madre. Only a few minutes. But, really, won't you?" Vere laid her hand on her mother's. "It's so lovely on the sea to-night."

"I know. But honestly, I'm lazy to-night."

Vere looked disappointed. She took away her hand gently.

"Then we'll stay with you, won't we, Monsieur Emile?"

"No, Vere," said her mother quickly, before he could answer. "You two go. I sha'n't be dull. You won't be very long?"

"No, of course. But—"

"Go, dearest, go. Are you going to row, Emile?"

"I could. Or shall we take Gaspare?"

"It's Gaspare's supper-time," said Vere.

"Hush, then!" said Artois, putting his finger to his lips. "Let us creep down softly, or he will think it his duty to come with us, starving, and that would spoil everything. Au revoir, Hermione," he whispered.

"Good-bye, Madre," whispered Vere.

They glided away, the big man and the light-footed child, going on tiptoe with elaborate precaution.

As Hermione looked after them, she said to herself:

"How young Emile is to-night!"

At that moment she felt as if she were much older than he was.

They slipped down to the sea without attracting the attention of Gaspare, got into the little boat, and rowed gently out towards Nisida.

"I feel like a contrabandista," said Artois, as they stole under the lee of the island towards the open sea—"as if Gaspare would fire upon us if he heard the sound of oars."

"Quick! Quick! Let us get away. Pull harder, Monsieur Emile! How slow you are!"

Laughingly Artois bent to the oars.

"Vere, you are a baby!" he said.

"And what are you, then, I should like to know?" she answered, with dignity.

"I! I am an old fellow playing the fool."

Suddenly his gayety had evaporated, and he was conscious of his years. He let the boat drift for a moment.

"Check me another time, Vere, if you see me inclined to be buffo," he said.

"Indeed I won't. Why should I? I like you best when you are quite natural."

"Do you?"

"Yes. Look! There are the lights! Oh, how strange they are. Go a little nearer, but not too near."

"Tell me, then. Remember, I can't see."

"Yes. One, two, three—"

She counted. Each time she said a number he pulled. And she, like a little coxswain, bent towards him with each word, giving him a bodily signal for the stroke. Presently she stretched out her hand.

"Stop!"

He stopped at once. For a minute the boat glided on. Then the impetus he had given died away from it, and it floated quietly without perceptible movement upon the bosom of the sea.

"Now, Monsieur Emile, you must come and sit by me."

Treading softly he obeyed her, and sat down near her, facing the shadowy coast.

"Now watch!"

They sat in silence, while the boat drifted on the smooth and oily water almost in the shadow of the cliffs. At some distance beyond them the cliffs sank, and the shore curved sharply in the direction of the island with its fort. There was the enigmatic dimness, though not dense darkness, of the night. Nearer at hand the walls of rock made the night seem more mysterious, more profound, and at their base flickered the flames which had attracted Artois' attention. Fitfully now these flames, rising from some invisible brazier, or from some torch fed by it, fell upon half-naked forms of creatures mysteriously busy about some hidden task. Men they were, yet hardly men they seemed, but rather unknown denizens of rock, or wave, or underworld; now red-bodied against the gleam, now ethereally black as are shadows, and whimsical and shifty, yet always full of meaning that could not be divined. They bent, they crouched. They seemed to die down like a wave that is, then is not. Then rising they towered, lifting brawny arms towards the stars. Silence seemed to flow from them, to exude from their labors. And in the swiftness of their movements there was something that was sad. Or was it, perhaps, only pathetic, wistful with the wistfulness of the sea and of all nocturnal things? Artois did not ask, but his attention, the attention of mind and soul, was held by these distant voiceless beings as by a magic. And Vere was still as he was, tense as he was. All the poetry that lay beneath his realism, all the credulity that slept below his scepticism, all the ignorance that his knowledge strove to dominate, had its wild moment of liberty under the smiling stars. The lights moved and swayed. Now the seamed rock, with its cold veins and slimy crevices was gilded, its nudity clothed with fire. Now on the water a trail of glory fell, and travelled and died. Now the red men were utterly revealed, one watching with an ardor that was surely not of this world, some secret in the blackness, another turning as if to strike in defence of his companion. Then both fell back and were taken by the night. And out of the night came a strong voice across the water.

"Madre di Dio, che splendore!"

Artois got up, turned the boat, and began to row gently away, keeping near the base of the cliffs. He meant to take Vere back at once to the island, leaving the impression made upon her by the men of the fire vivid, and undisturbed by speech. But when they came to the huge mouth of the Grotto of Virgil, Vere said:

"Go in for a moment, please, Monsieur Emile."

He obeyed, thinking that the mother's love for this dark place was echoed by the child. Since his conversation with Hermione on the day of scirocco he had not been here, and as the boat glided under the hollow blackness of the vault, and there lay still, he remembered their conversation, the unloosing of her passion, the strength and tenacity of the nature she had shown to him, gripping the past with hands almost as unyielding as the tragic hands of death.

And he waited in silence, and with a deep expectation, for the revelation of the child. It seemed to him that Vere had her purpose in coming here, as Hermione had had hers. And once more the words of the old man in "Pelleas and Melisande" haunted him. Once more he heard them in his heart.

"Now it's the child's turn."

Vere dropped her right hand over the gunwale till it touched the sea, making a tiny splash.

"Monsieur Emile!" she said.

"Yes, Vere."

"Do you believe in the evil eye?"

Artois did not know what he had expected Vere to say, but her question seemed to strike his mind like a soft blow, it was so unforeseen.

"No," he answered.

She was silent. It was too dark for him to see her face at all clearly. He had only a vague general impression of her, of her slightness, vitality, youth, and half-dreamy excitement.

"Why do you ask me?"

"Giulia said to me this evening that she was sure the new servant had the evil eye."

"Peppina?"

"Yes, that is her name."

"Have you seen her?"

"No, not yet. It's odd, but I feel as if I would rather not."

"Have you any reason for such a feeling?"

"I don't think so. Poor thing! I know she has a dreadful scar. But I don't believe it's that. It's just a feeling I have."

"I dare say it will have gone by the time we get back to the island."

"Perhaps. It's nice and dark here."

"Do you like darkness, Vere?"

"Sometimes. I do now."

"Why?"

"Because I can talk better and be less afraid of you."

"Vere! What nonsense! You are incapable of fear."

She laughed, but the laugh sounded serious, he thought.

"Real fear—perhaps. But you don't know"—she paused—"you don't know how I respect you."

There was a slight pressure on the last words.

"For all you've done, what you are. I never felt it as I have just lately, since—since—you know."

Artois was conscious of a movement of his blood.

"I should be a liar if I said I am not pleased. Tell me about the work, Vere—now we are in the dark."

And then he heard the revelation of the child, there under the weary rock, as he had heard the revelation of the mother. How different it was! Yet in it, too, there was the beating of the pulse of life. But there was no regret, no looking back into the past, no sombre exhibition of force seeking—as a thing groping, desperately in a gulf—an object on which to exercise itself. Instead there was aspiration, there was expectation, there was the wonder of bright eyes lifted to the sun. And there was a reverence that for a moment recalled to Artois the reverence of the dead man from whose loins this child had sprung. But Vere's was the reverence of understanding, not of a dim amazement—more beautiful than Maurice's. When he had been with Hermione under the brooding rock Artois had been impregnated with the passionate despair of humanity, and had seen for a moment the world with out-stretched hands, seeking, surely, for the nonexistent, striving to hold fast the mirage. Now he was impregnated with humanity's passionate hope. He saw life light-footed in a sweet chase for things ideal. And all the blackness of the rock and of the silent sea was irradiated with the light that streamed from a growing soul.

A voice—an inquiring, searching voice, surely, rose quivering from some distance on the sea, startling Vere and Artois. It was untrained but unshy, and the singer forced it with resolute hardihood that was indifferent to the future. Artois had never heard the Marchesino sing before, but he knew at once that it was he. Some one at the island must surely have told the determined youth that Vere was voyaging, and he was now in quest of her, sending her an amorous summons couched in the dialect of Naples.

Vere moved impatiently.

"Really!" she began.

But she did not continue. The quivering voice began another verse. Artois had said nothing, but, as he sat listening to this fervid protestation, a message illuminated as it were by the vibrato, he began to hate the terrible frankness of the Italian nature which, till now, he had thought he loved. The beauty of reticence appealed to him in a new way. There was savagery in a bellowed passion. The voice was travelling. They heard it moving onward towards Nisida. Artois wondered if Vere knew who was the singer. She did not leave him long in doubt.

"Now's our chance, Monsieur Emile!" she said, suddenly, leaning towards him. "Row to the island for your life, or the Marchesino will catch us!"

Without a word he bent to the oars.

"How absurd the Marchesino is!"

Vere spoke aloud, released from fear.

"Absurd? He is Neapolitan."

"Very well, then! The Neapolitans are absurd!" said Vere, with decision. "And what a voice! Ruffo doesn't sing like that. That shaking sounds—sounds so artificial."

"And yet I dare say he is very much in earnest."

Artois was almost pleading a cause against his will.

"Oh!"

The girl gave almost a little puff that suggested a rather childish indignation.

"I like the people best," she added. "They say what they feel simply, and it means ever so much more. Am I a democrat?"

He could not help laughing.

"Chi lo sa? An Anarchist perhaps."

She laughed too.

"Bella tu si—Bella tu si! It's too absurd! One would think—"

"What, Vere?"

"Never mind. Don't be inquisitive, Monsieur Emile."

He rowed on meekly.

"There is San Francesco's light," she said, in a moment. "I wonder if it is late. Have we been away long? I have no idea."

"No more have I."

Nor had he.

When they reached land he made the boat fast and turned to walk up to the house with her. He found her standing very still just behind him at the edge of the sea, with a startled look on her face.

"What is it, Vere?" he asked.

"Hush!"

She held up her hand and bent her head a little to one side, as one listening intently.

"I thought I heard—I did hear—something—"

"Something?"

"Yes—so strange—I can't hear it now."

"What was it like?"

She looked fixedly at him.

"Like some one crying—horribly."

"Where? Near us?"

"Not far. Listen again."

He obeyed, holding his breath. But he heard nothing except the very faint lapping of the sea at their feet.

"Perhaps I imagined it," she said at length.

"Let us go up to the house," he said. "Come, Vere."

He had a sudden wish to take her into the house. But she remained where she was.

"Could it have been fancy, Monsieur Emile?"

"No doubt."

Her eyes were intensely grave, almost frightened.

"But—just look, will you? Perhaps there really is somebody."

"Where? It's so dark."

Artois hesitated; but Vere's face was full of resolution, and he turned reluctantly to obey her. As he did so there came to them both through the dark the sound of a woman crying and sobbing convulsively.

"What is it? Oh, who can it be?" Vere cried out.

She went swiftly towards the sound.

Artois followed, and found her bending down over the figure of a girl who was crouching against the cliff, and touching her shoulder.

"What is it? What is the matter? Tell me."

The girl looked up, startled, and showed a passionate face that was horribly disfigured. Upon the right cheek, extending from the temple almost to the line of the jaw, a razor had cut a sign, a brutal sign of the cross. As Vere saw it, showing redly through the darkness, she recoiled. The girl read the meaning of her movement, and shrank backward, putting up her hand to cover the wound. But Vere recovered instantly, and bent down once more, intent only on trying to comfort this sorrow, whose violence seemed to open to her a door into a new and frightful world.

"Vere!" said Artois. "Vere, you had better—"

The girl turned round to him.

"It must be Peppina!" she said.

"Yes. But—"

"Please go up to the house, Monsieur Emile. I will come in a moment."

"But I can't leave you—"

"Please go. Just tell Madre I'm soon coming."

There was something inexorable in her voice. She turned away from him and began to speak softly to Peppina.

Artois obeyed and left her.

He knew that just then she would not acknowledge his authority. As he went slowly up the steps he wondered—he feared. Peppina had cried with the fury of despair, and the Neapolitan who is desperate knows no reticence.

Was the red sign of passion to be scored already upon Vere's white life? Was she to pass even now, in this night, from her beautiful ignorance to knowledge?

CHAPTER XVII

That night the Marchesino failed in his search for Vere, and he returned to Naples not merely disappointed but incensed. He had learned from a fisherman in the Saint's Pool that she was out upon the sea "with a Signore," and he had little difficulty in guessing who this Signore was. Of course it was "Caro Emilio," the patron of Maria Fortunata. He began to consider his friend unfavorably. He remembered how frankly he had always told Emilio of his little escapades, with what enthusiasm, in what copious detail. Always he had trusted Emilio. And now Emilio was trying to play him false—worse, was making apparently a complete success of the attempt. For Emilio and Vere must have heard his beautiful singing, must have guessed from whom that vibrant voice proceeded, must have deliberately concealed themselves from its possessor. Where had they lain in hiding? His shrewd suspicion fell upon the very place. Virgilio's Grotto had surely been their refuge.

"Ladro! Vigiliacco!" Words of no uncertain meaning flowed from his overcharged heart. His whole hot nature was aroused. His spirit was up in arms. And now, almost for the first time, he drew a comparison between his age and Emilio's. Emilio was an old man. He realized it. Why had he never realized it before? Was he, full of youth, beauty, chivalrous energy and devotion, to be interfered with, set aside, for a man with gray hairs thick upon his head, for a man who spent half his hours bent over a writing-table? Emilio had never wished him to know the ladies of the island. He knew the reason now, and glowed with a fiery lust of battle. Vere had attracted him from the first. But this opposition drove on attraction into something stronger, more determined. He said to himself that he was madly in love. Never yet had he been worsted in an amour by any man. The blood surged to his head at the mere thought of being conquered in the only battle of life worth fighting—the battle for a woman, and by a man of more than twice his age, a man who ought long ago to have been married and have had children as old as the Signorina Vere.

Well, he had been a good friend to Emilio. Now Emilio should see that the good friend could be the good enemy. 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.

She had come into the house quietly, and found Artois waiting for her alone. Hermione had gone to bed, leaving word that she had a headache. And Vere was glad that night not to see her mother. She wished to see no one, and she bade Artois good-bye at once, telling him nothing, and not meeting his eyes when he touched her hand in adieu. And he had asked nothing. Why should he, when he read the truth in the grave, almost stern face of the child?

Vere knew.

The veils that hung before the happy eyes of childhood had been torn away, and those eyes had looked for the first time into the deeps of an unhappy human heart.

And he had thought it possible to preserve, perhaps for a long while, Vere's beautiful ignorance untouched. He had thought of the island as a safe retreat in which her delicate, and as yet childish talent, might gradually mature under his influence and the influence of the sea. She had been like some charming and unusual plant of the sea, shot with sea colors, wet with sea winds, fresh with the freshness of the smooth-backed waves. And now in a moment she was dropped into the filthy dust of city horrors. What would be the result upon her and upon her dawning gift?

The double question was in his mind, and quite honestly. For his interest of the literary man in Vere was very vivid. Never yet had he had a pupil or dreamed of having one. There are writers who found a school, whose fame is carried forward like a banner by young and eager hands. Artois had always stood alone, ardently admired, ardently condemned, but not imitated. And he had been proud of his solitude. But—lately—had not underthoughts come into his mind, thoughts of leaving an impress on a vivid young intellect, a soul that was full of life, and the beginnings of energy? Had not he dreamed, however vaguely, of forming, like some sculptor of genius, an exquisite statuette—poetry, in the slim form of a girl-child singing to the world?

And now Peppina had rushed into Vere's life, with sobs and a tumult of cries to the Madonna and the saints, and, no doubt, with imprecations upon the wickedness of men. And where were the dreams of the sea? And his dreams, where were they?

That night the irony that was in him woke up and smiled bitterly, and he asked himself how he, with his burden of years and of knowledge of life, could have been such a fool as to think it possible to guard any one against the assaults of the facts of life. Hermione, perhaps, had been wiser than he, and yet he could not help feeling something that was almost like anger against her for what he called her quixotism. The woman of passionate impulses—how dangerous she is, even when her impulses are generous, are noble! Action without thought, though the prompting heart behind it be a heart of gold—how fatal may it be!

And then he remembered a passionate impulse that had driven a happy woman across a sea to Africa, and he was ashamed.

Yet again the feeling that was almost like hostility returned. He said to himself that Hermione should have learned caution in the passing of so many years, that she ought to have grown older than she had. But there was something unconquerably young, unconquerably naïve, in her—something that, it seemed, would never die. Her cleverness went hand in hand with a short-sightedness that was like a rather beautiful, yet sometimes irritating stupidity. And this latter quality might innocently make victims, might even make a victim of her own child.

And then a strange desire rose up in Artois, a desire to protect Vere against her own mother.

But how could that be done?

Vere, guarded by the beautiful unconsciousness of youth, was unaware of the subtleties that were brought into activity by her. That the Marchesino was, or thought himself, in love with her she realized. But she could not connect any root-sincerity with his feeling. She was accustomed vaguely to think of all young Southern Italians as perpetually sighing for some one's dark eyes. The air of the South was full of love songs that rose and fell without much more meaning than a twitter of birds, that could not be stilled because it was so natural. And the Marchesino was a young aristocrat who did absolutely nothing of any importance to the world. The Northern blood in Vere demanded other things of a man than imitations of a seal, the clever driving of a four-in-hand, light-footed dancing, and songs to the guitar. In Gaspare she saw more reality than she saw as yet in the Marchesino. The dawning intellect of her began to grasp already the nobility of work. Gaspare had his work to do, and did it with loyal efficiency. Ruffo, too, had his profession of the sea. He drew out of the deep his livelihood. Even with the fever almost upon him he had been out by night in the storm. That which she liked and respected in Gaspare, his perfect and natural acceptance of work as a condition of his life, she liked and respected in Ruffo.

On the morning after the incident with Peppina, Vere came down looking strangely grave and tired. Her mother, too, was rather heavy-eyed, and the breakfast passed almost severely. When it was over Hermione, who still conducted Vere's education, but with a much relaxed vigor in the summer months, suggested that they should read French together.

"Let us read one of Monsieur Emile's books, Madre," said Vere, with an awakening of animation. "You know I have never read one, only two or three baby stories, and articles that don't count."

"Yes, but Emile's books are not quite suitable for you yet, Vere."

"Why, Madre?"

"They are very fine, but they dive deep into life, and life contains many sad and many cruel things."

"Oughtn't we to prepare ourselves for them, then?"

"Not too soon, I think. I am nearly sure that if you were to read Emile's books just yet you would regret it."

Vere said nothing.

"Don't you think you can trust me to judge for you in this matter, figlia mia? I—I am almost certain that Emile himself would think as I do."

It was not without an effort, a strong effort, that Hermione was able to speak the last sentence. Vere came nearer to her mother, and stood before her, as if she were going to say something that was decisive or important. But she hesitated.

"What is it, Vere?" Hermione asked, gently.

"I might learn from life itself what Monsieur Emile's books might teach me."

"Some day. And when that time comes neither I nor he would wish to keep them out of your hands."

"I see. Well, Madre dear, let us read whatever you like."

Vere had been on the verge of telling her mother about the previous night and Peppina. But, somehow, at the last moment she could not.

And thus, for the moment at least, Artois and she shared another secret of which Hermione was unaware.

But very soon Hermione noticed that Vere was specially kind always to Peppina. They did not meet, perhaps, very often, but when by chance they did Vere spoke to the disfigured girl with a gentleness, almost a tenderness, that were striking.

"You like Peppina, Vere?" asked her mother one day.

"Yes, because I pity her so much."

There was a sound that was almost like passion in the girl's voice; and, looking up, Hermione saw that her eyes were full of light, as if the spirit had set two lamps in them.

"It is strange," Vere continued, in a quieter tone; "but sometimes I feel as if on the night of the storm I had had a sort of consciousness of her coming—as if, when I saw the Saint's light shining, and bent down to the water and made the sign of the Cross, I already knew something of Peppina's wound, as if I made the sign to protect our Casa del Mare, to ward off something evil."

"That was coming to us with Peppina, do you mean?"

"I don't know, Madre."

"Are you thinking of Giulia's foolish words about the evil eye?"

"No. It's all vague, Madre. But Peppina's cross sometimes seems to me to be a sign, a warning come into the house. When I see it it seems to say there is a cross to be borne by some one here, by one of us."

"How imaginative you are, Vere!"

"So are you, Madre! But you try to hide it from me."

Hermione was startled. She took Vere's hand, and held it for a moment in silence, pressing it with a force that was nervous. And her luminous, expressive eyes, immensely sensitive, beautiful in their sensitiveness, showed that she was moved. At last she said:

"Perhaps that is true. Yes, I suppose it is."

"Why do you try to hide it?"

"I suppose—I think because—because it has brought to me a great deal of pain. And what we hide from others we sometimes seem almost to be destroying by that very act, though of course we are not."

"No. But I think I should like to encourage my imagination."

"Do you encourage it?" the mother asked, looking at her closely.

Again, as Vere had been on the edge of telling her mother all she knew about Peppina, she was on the edge of telling her about the poems of the sea. And again, moved by some sudden, obstinate reluctance, come she knew not why, she withheld the words that were almost on her lips.

And each time the mother was aware of something avoided, of an impulse stifled, and therefore of a secret deliberately kept. The first time Hermione had not allowed her knowledge to appear. But on this second occasion for a moment she lost control of herself, and when, after a perceptible pause, Vere said, "I know I love it," and was silent, she exclaimed:

"Keep your secrets, Vere. Every one has a right to their freedom."

"But, Madre—" Vere began, startled by her mother's abrupt vehemence.

"No, Vere, no! My child, my dearest one, never tell me anything but of your own accord, out of your own heart and desire. Such a confidence is beautiful. But anything else—anything else, I could not bear from you."

And she got up and left the room, walking with a strange slowness, as if she put upon herself an embargo not to hasten.

The words and—specially that—the way in which they were spoken made Vere suddenly and completely aware of something that perhaps she had already latently known—that the relation between her mother and herself had, of late, not been quite what once it was. At moments she had felt almost shy of her mother, only at moments. Formerly she had always told her mother everything, and had spoken—as her mother had just said—out of her own heart and desire, with eagerness, inevitably. Now—well, now she could not always do that. Was it because she was growing older? Children are immensely frank. She had been a child. But now—she thought of the Marchesino, of Peppina, of her conversation with Monsieur Emile in the Grotto of Virgilio, and realized the blooming of her girlhood, was aware that she was changing. And she felt half frightened, then eager, ardently eager. An impulse filled her, the impulse towards a fulness of life that, till now, she had not known. And for a moment she loved those little, innocent secrets that she kept.

But then she thought again of her mother, the most beloved of all her world. There had been in her mother's voice a sound of tragedy.

Vere stood for a long while by the window thinking.

The day was very hot. She longed to bathe, to wash away certain perplexities that troubled her in the sea. But Gaspare was not on the island. He had gone she knew not where. She looked at the sea with longing. When would Gaspare be back? Well, at least she could go out in the small boat. Then she would be near to the water. She ran down the steps and embarked. At first she only rowed a little way out into the Saint's Pool, and then leaned back against the white cushions, and looked up at the blue sky, and let her hand trail in the water. But she was restless to-day. The Pool did not suffice her, and she began to paddle out along the coast towards Naples. She passed a ruined, windowless house named by the fisherfolk "The Palace of the Spirits," and then a tiny hamlet climbing up from a minute harbor to an antique church. Children called to her. A fisherman shouted: "Buon viaggio, Signorina!" She waved her hand to them apathetically and rowed slowly on. Now she had a bourne. A little farther on there was a small inlet of the sea containing two caves, not gloomy and imposing like the Grotto of Virgilio, but cosy, shady, and serene. Into the first of them she ran the boat until its prow touched the sandy bottom. Then she lay down at full length, with her hands behind her head on the cushions, and thought—and thought.

Figures passed through her mind, a caravan of figures travelling as all are travelling: her mother, Gaspare, Giulia, with her plump and swarthy face; Monsieur Emile, to whom she had drawn so pleasantly, interestingly near in these last days; the Marchesino (strutting from the hips and making his bold eyes round), Peppina, Ruffo. They went by and returned, gathered about her, separated, melted away as people do in our musings. Her eyes were fixed on the low roof of the cave. The lilt of the water seemed to rock her soul in a cradle. "Madre—Ruffo! Madre—Ruffo!" The words were in her mind like a refrain. And then the oddity, the promiscuity of life struck her. How many differences there were in this small group of people by whom she was surrounded! What would their fates be, and hers? Would her life be happy? She did not feel afraid. Youth ran in her veins. But—would it be? She saw the red cross on Peppina's cheek. Why was one singled out for misery, another for joy? Which would be her fate? Ruffo seemed to be standing near her. She had seen him several times in these last days, but only at evening, fugitively, when he came in the boat with the fishermen. He was stronger now. He had saluted her eagerly. She had spoken to him from the shore. But he had not landed again on the island. She felt as if she saw his bright and beaming eyes. And Ruffo—would he be happy? She hoped so. She wanted him to be happy. He was such a dear, active boy—such a real boy. What must it be like to have a brother? Gaspare approved of Ruffo now, she thought; and Gaspare did not like everybody, and was fearfully blunt in expressing his opinion. She loved his bluntness. How delightfully his nose twitched when he was pleased! Dear old Gaspare! She could never feel afraid of anything or anybody when he was near. Monsieur Emile—the poems—the Marchesino singing. She closed her eyes to think the better.

"Signorina! Signorina!"

Vere woke and sat up.

"Signorina!"

Gaspare was looking at her from his boat.

"Gaspare!"

She began to realize things.

"I was—I was thinking."

"Si, Signorina. I always think like that when I am in bed."

She laughed. She was wide awake now.

"How did you find me?"

"I met one of the fishermen. He had seen you row into the cave."

"Oh!"

She looked at him more steadily. His brown face was hot. Perspiration stood on his forehead just under the thick and waving hair.

"Where have you been, Gaspare? Not to Naples in all this heat?"

"I have been to Mergellina, Signorina."

"Mergellina! Did you see Ruffo?"

"Si, Signorina."

There was something very odd about Gaspare to-day, Vere thought. Or was she still not thoroughly awake? His eyes looked excited, surely, as if something unusual had been happening. And they were fixed upon her face with a scrutiny that was strange, almost as if he saw her now for the first time.

"What is it, Gaspare? Why do you look at me like that?"

Gaspare turned his eyes away.

"Like what, Signorina? Why should I not look at you?"

"What have you been doing at Mergellina?"

She spoke rather imperiously.

"Nothing particular, Signorina."

"Oh!"

She paused, but he did not speak.

"Where did you see Ruffo?"

"At the harbor, Signorina."

"Tell me, Gaspare, do you like him?"

"Ruffo?"

"Yes."

"I do not dislike him, Signorina. He has never done me any harm."

"Of course not. Why should he?"

"I say—he has not."

"I like Ruffo."

"Lo so."

Again he looked at her with that curious expression in his eyes. Then he said:

"Come, Signorina! It is getting late. We must go to the island."

And they pulled out round the point to the open sea.

During the hot weather the dwellers in the Casa del Mare made the siesta after the mid-day meal. The awnings and blinds were drawn. Silence reigned, and the house was still as the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty. At the foot of the cliffs the sea slept in the sunshine, and it was almost an empty sea, for few boats passed by in those hot, still hours.

To-day the servants were quiet in their quarters. Only Gaspare was outside. And he, in shirt and trousers, with a white linen hat covering his brown face, was stretched under the dwarf trees of the little garden, in the shadow of the wall, resting profoundly after the labors of the morning. In their respective rooms Hermione and Vere were secluded behind shut doors. Hermione was lying down, but not sleeping. Vere was not lying down. Generally she slept at this time for an hour. But to-day, perhaps because of her nap in the cave, she had no desire for sleep.

She was thinking about her mother. And Hermione was thinking of her. Each mind was working in the midst of its desert space, its solitude eternal.

What was growing up between them, and why was it growing?

Hermione was beset by a strange sensation of impotence. She felt as if her child were drifting from her. Was it her fault, or was it no one's, and inevitable? Had Vere been able to divine certain feelings in her, the mother, obscure pains of the soul that had travelled to mind and heart? She did not think it possible. Nor had it been possible for her to kill those pains, although she had made her effort—to conceal them. Long ago, before she was married to Maurice, Emile had spoken to them of jealousy. At the time she had not understood it. She remembered thinking, even saying, that she could not be jealous.

But then she had not had a child.

Lately she had realized that there were forces in her of which she had not been aware. She had realized her passion for her child. Was it strange that she had not always known how deep and strong it was? Her mutilated life was more vehemently centred upon Vere than she had understood. Of Vere she could be jealous. If Vere put any one before her, trusted any one more than her, confided anything to another rather than to her, she could be frightfully jealous.

Recently she had suspected—she had imagined—

Restlessly she moved on her bed. A mosquito-curtain protected it. She was glad of that, as if it kept out prying eyes. For sometimes she was ashamed of the vehemence within her.

She thought of her friend Emile, whom she had dragged back from death.

He, too, had he not drifted a little from her in these last days? It seemed to her that it was so. She knew that it was so. Women are so sure of certain things, more almost than men are ever sure of anything. And why should Vere have drifted, Emile have drifted, if there were not some link between them—some link between the child and the middle-aged man which they would not have her know of?

Vere had told to Emile something that she had kept, that she still kept from her mother. When Vere had been shut up in her room she had not been reading. Emile knew what it was that she did during those long hours when she was alone. Emile knew that, and perhaps other things of Vere that she, Hermione, did not know, was not allowed to know.

Hermione, in their long intimacy, had learned to read Artois more clearly, more certainly than he realized. Although often impulsive, and seemingly unconscious of the thoughts of others, she could be both sharply observant and subtle, especially with those she loved. She had noticed the difference between his manner when first they spoke of Vere's hidden occupation and his manner when last they spoke of it. In the interval he had found out what it was, and that it was not reading. Of that she was positive. She was positive also that he did not wish her to suspect this. Vere must have told him what it was.

It was characteristic of Hermione that at this moment she was free from any common curiosity as to what it was that Vere did during those many hours when she was shut up in her room. The thing that hurt her, that seemed to humiliate her, was the Emile should know what it was and not she, that Vere should have told Emile and not told her.

As she lay there she cowered under the blow a mutual silence can give, and something woke up in her, something fiery, something surely that could act with violence. It startled her, almost as a stranger rushing into her room would have startled her.

For a moment she thought of her child and her loved friend with a bitterness that was cruel.

How long had they shared their secret? She wondered, and began to consider the recent days, searching their hours for those tiny incidents, those small reticences, avoidances, that to women are revelations. When had she first noticed a slight change in Emile's manner to her? When had Vere and he first seemed a little more intimate, a little more confidential than before? When had she, Hermione, first felt a little "out of it," not perfectly at ease with these two dear denizens of her life?

Her mind fastened at once upon the day of the storm. On the night of the storm, when she and Emile had been left alone in the restaurant, she had felt almost afraid of him. But before then, in the afternoon on the island, there had been something. They had not been always at ease. She had been conscious of trying to tide over moments that were almost awkward—once or twice, only once or twice. But that was the day. Her woman's instinct told her so. That was the day on which Vere had told Emile the secret she had kept from her mother. How excited Vere had been, almost feverishly excited! And Emile had been very strange. When the Marchesino and Vere went out upon the terrace, how restless, how irritable he—

Suddenly Hermione sat up in her bed. The heat, the stillness, the white cage of the mosquito net, the silence had become intolerable to her. She pulled aside the net. Yes, that was better. She felt more free. She would lie down outside the net. But the pillow was hot. She turned it, but its pressure against her cheek almost maddened her, and she got up, went across the room to the wash-stand and bathed her face with cold water. Then she put some eau de Cologne on her forehead, opened a drawer and drew out a fan, went over to an arm-chair near the window and sat down in it.

What had Emile written in the visitors' book at the Scoglio di Frisio? With a strange abruptness, with a flight that was instinctive as that of a homing pigeon, Hermione's mind went to that book as to a book of revelation. Just before he wrote he had been feeling acutely—something. She had been aware of that at the time. He had not wanted to write. And then suddenly, almost violently, he had written and had closed the book.

She longed to open that book now, at once, to read what he had written. She felt as if it would tell her very much. There was no reason why she should not read it. The book was one that all might see, was kept to be looked over by any chance visitor. She would go one day, one evening, to the restaurant and see what Emile had written. He would not mind. If she had asked him that night of course he would have shown her the words. But she had not asked him. She had been almost afraid of things that night. She remembered how the wind had blown up the white table-cloth, her cold, momentary shiver of fear, her relief when she had seen Gaspare walking sturdily into the room.

And now, at once, this thought of Gaspare brought to her a sense of relief again, of relief so great, so sharp—piercing down into the very deep of her nature—that by it she was able to measure something, her inward desolation at this moment. Yes, she clung to Gaspare, because he was loyal, because he loved her, because he had loved Maurice—but also because she was terribly alone.

Because he had loved Maurice! Had there been a time, really a time, when she had possessed one who belonged utterly to her, who lived only in and for her? Was that possible? To-day, with the fierceness of one starving, she fastened upon this memory, her memory, hers only, shared by no one, never shared by living or dead. That at least she had, and that could never be taken from her. Even if Vere, her child, slipped from her, if Emile, her friend, whose life she had saved, slipped from her, the memory of her Sicilian was forever hers, the memory of his love, his joy in their mutual life, his last kiss. Long ago she had taken that kiss as a gift made to two—to her and to Vere unborn. To-day, almost savagely, she took it to herself, alone, herself—alone. Hers it was, hers only, no part of it Vere's.

That she had—her memory, and Gaspare's loyal, open-hearted devotion. He knew what she had suffered. He loved her as he had loved his dead Padrone. He would always protect her, put her first without hesitation, conceal nothing from her that it was her right—for surely even the humblest, the least selfish, the least grasping, surely all who love have their rights—that it was her right to know.

Her cheeks were burning. She felt like one who had been making some physical exertion.

Deeply silent was the house. Her room was full of shadows, yet full of the hidden presence of the sun. There was a glory outside, against which she was protected. But outside, and against assaults that were inglorious, what protection had she? Her own personality must protect her, her own will, the determination, the strength, the courage that belong to all who are worth anything in the world. And she called upon herself. And it seemed to her that there was no voice that answered.

There was a hideous moment of drama.

She sat there quietly in her chair in the pretty room. And she called again, and she listened—and again there was silence.

Then she was afraid. She had a strange and horrible feeling that she was deserted by herself, by that which, at least, had been herself and on which she had been accustomed to rely. And what was left was surely utterly incapable, full of the flabby wickedness that seems to dwell in weakness. It seemed to her that if any one who knew her well, if Vere, Emile, or even Gaspare, had come into the room just then, the intruder would have paused on the threshold amazed to see a stranger there. She felt afraid to be seen and yet afraid to remain alone. Should she do something definite, something defiant, to prove to herself that she had will and could exercise it?

She got up, resolved to go to Vere. When she was there, with her child, she did not know what she was going to do. She had said to Vere, "Keep your secrets." What if she went now and humbled herself, explained to the child quite simply and frankly a mother's jealousy, a widow's loneliness, made her realize what she was in a life from which the greatest thing had been ruthlessly withdrawn? Vere would understand surely, and all would be well. This shadow between them would pass away. Hermione had her hand on the door. But she did not open it. An imperious reserve, autocrat, tyrant, rose up suddenly within her. She could never make such a confession to Vere. She could never plead for her child's confidence—a confidence already given to Emile, to a man. And now for the first time the common curiosity to which she had not yet fallen a victim came upon her, flooded her. What was Vere's secret? That it was innocent, probably even childish, Hermione did not question even for a moment. But what was it?

She heard a light step outside and drew back from the door. The step passed on and died away down the paved staircase. Vere had gone out to the terrace, the garden, or the sea.

Hermione again moved forward, then stopped abruptly. Her face was suddenly flooded with red as she realized what she had been going to do, she who had exclaimed that every one has a right to their freedom.

For an instant she had meant to go to Vere's room, to try to find out surreptitiously what Emile knew.

A moment later Vere, coming back swiftly for a pencil she had forgotten, heard the sharp grating of a key in the lock of her mother's door.

She ran on lightly, wondering why her mother was locking herself in, and against whom.

CHAPTER XVIII

During the last days Artois had not been to the island, nor had he seen the Marchesino. A sudden passion for work had seized him. Since the night of Vere's meeting with Peppina his brain had been in flood with thoughts. Life often acts subtly upon the creative artist, repressing or encouraging his instinct to bring forth, depressing or exciting him when, perhaps, he expects it least. The passing incidents of life frequently have their hidden, their unsuspected part in determining his activities. So it was now with Artois. He had given an impetus to Vere. That was natural, to be expected, considering his knowledge and his fame, his great experience and his understanding of men. But now Vere had given an impetus to him—and that was surely stranger. Since the conversation among the shadows of the cave, after the vision of the moving men of darkness and of fire, since the sound of Peppina sobbing in the night, and the sight of her passionate face lifted to show its gashed cross to Vere, Artois' brain and head had been alive with a fury of energy that forcibly summoned him to work, that held him working. He even felt within him something that was like a renewal of some part of his vanished youth, and remembered old days of student life, nights in the Quartier Latin, his debut as a writer for the papers, the sensation of joy with which he saw his first article in the Figaro, his dreams of fame, his hopes of love, his baptism of sentiment. How he had worked in those days and nights! How he had hunted experience in the streets and the by-ways of the great city! How passionate and yet how ruthless he had been, as artists often are, governed not only by their quick emotions, but also by the something watchful and dogged underneath, that will not be swept away, that is like a detective hidden by a house door to spy out all the comers in the night. Something, some breath from the former days, swept over him again. In his ears there sounded surely the cries of Paris, urging him to the assault to the barricades of Fame. And he sat down, and he worked with the vehement energy, with the pulsating eagerness of one of "les jeunes." Hour after hour he worked. He took coffee, and wrote through the night. He slept when the dawn came, got up, and toiled again.

He shut out the real world and he forgot it—until the fit was past. And then he pushed away his paper, he laid down his pen, he stretched himself, and he knew that his great effort had tired him tremendously—tremendously.

He looked at his right hand. It was cramped. As he held it up he saw that it was shaking. He had drunk a great deal of black coffee during those days, had drunk it recklessly as in the days of youth, when he cared nothing about health because he felt made of iron.

"Pf-f-f!"

And so there was Naples outside, the waters of the Bay dancing in the sunshine of the bright summer afternoon, people bathing and shouting to one another from the diving platforms and the cabins; people galloping by in the little carriages to eat oysters at Posilipo. Lazy, heedless, pleasure-loving wretches! He thought of Doro as he looked at them.

He had given strict orders that he was not to be disturbed while he was at work, unless Hermione came. And he had not once been disturbed. Now he rang the bell. An Italian waiter, with crooked eyes and a fair beard, stepped softly in.

"Has any one been to see me? Has any one asked for me lately?" he said. "Just go down, will you, and inquire of the concierge."

The waiter departed, and returned to say that no one had been for the Signore.

"Not the Marchese Isidoro Panacci?

"The concierge says that no one has been, Signore."

"Va bene."

The man went out.

So Doro had not come even once! Perhaps he was seriously offended. At their last parting in the Villa he had shown a certain irony that had in it a hint of bitterness. Artois did not know of the fisherman's information, that Doro had guessed who was Vere's companion that night upon the sea. He supposed that his friend was angry because he believed himself distrusted. Well, that could soon be put right. He thought of the Marchesino now with lightness, as the worker who has just made a great and prolonged effort is inclined to think of the habitual idler. Doro was like a feather on the warm wind of the South. He, Artois, was not in the mood just then to bother about a feather. Still less was he inclined for companionship. He wanted some hours of complete rest out in the air, with gay and frivolous scenes before his eyes.

He wanted to look on, but not to join in, the merry life that was about him, and that for so long a time he had almost violently ignored.

He resolved to take a carriage, drive slowly to Posilipo, and eat his dinner there in some eyrie above the sea; watching the pageant that unfolds itself on the evenings of summer about the ristoranti and the osterie, round the stalls of the vendors of Fruitti di Mare, and the piano-organs, to the accompaniment of which impudent men sing love songs to the saucy, dark-eyed beauties posed upon balconies, or gathered in knots upon the little terraces that dominate the bathing establishments, and the distant traffic of the Bay. His brain longed for rest, but it longed also for the hum and the stir of men. His heart lusted for the sight of pleasure, and must be appeased.

Catching up his hat, almost with the hasty eagerness of a boy, he went down-stairs. On the opposite side of the road was a smart little carriage in which the coachman was asleep, with his legs cocked up on the driver's seat, displaying a pair of startling orange-and-black socks. By the socks Artois knew his man.

"Pasqualino! Pasqualino!" he cried.

The coachman sprang up, showing a round, rosy face, and a pair of shrewd, rather small dark eyes.

"Take me to Posilipo."

"Si, Signore."

Pasqualino cracked his whip vigorously.

"Ah—ah! Ah—ah!" he cried to his gayly bedizened little horse, who wore a long feather on his head, flanked by bunches of artificial roses.

"Not too fast, Pasqualino. I am in no hurry. Keep along by the sea."

The coachman let the reins go loose, and instantly the little horse went slowly, as if all his spirit and agility had suddenly been withdrawn from him.

"I have not seen you for several days, Signore. Have you been ill?"

Pasqualino had turned quite round on his box, and was facing his client.

"No, I've been working."

"Si?"

Pasqualino made a grimace, as he nearly always did when he heard a rich Signore speak of working.

"And you? You have been spending money as usual. All your clothes are new."

Pasqualino smiled, showing rows of splendid teeth under his little twisted-up mustache.

"Si, Signore, all! And I have also new underclothing."

"Per Bacco!"

"Ecco, Signore!"

He pulled his trousers up to his knees, showing a pair of pale-blue drawers.

"The suspenders—they are new, Signore!" He drew attention to the scarlet elastics that kept the orange-and-black socks in place. "My boots!" He put his feet up on the box that Artois might see his lemon-colored boots, then unbuttoned and threw open his waistcoat. "My shirt is new! My cravat is new! Look at the pin!" He flourished his plump, brown, and carefully washed hands. "I have a new ring." He bent his head. "My hat is new."

Artois broke into a roar of laughter that seemed to do him good after his days of work.

"You young dandy! And where do you get the money?"

Pasqualino looked doleful and hung his head.

"Signore, I am in debt. But I say to myself, 'Thank the Madonna, I have a rich and generous Padrone who wishes his coachman to be chic. When he sees my clothes he will be contented, and who knows what he will do?'"

"Per Bacco! And who is this rich and generous Signore?"

"Ma!" Pasqualino passionately flung out the ringed hand that was not holding the reins—"Ma!—you, Signore."

"You young rascal! Turn round and attend to your driving!"

But Artois laughed again. The impudent boyishness of Pasqualino, and his childish passion for finery, were refreshing, and seemed to belong to a young and thoughtless world. The sea-breeze was soft as silk, the afternoon sunshine was delicately brilliant. The Bay looked as it often does in summer—like radiant liberty held in happy arms, alluring, full of promises. And a physical well-being invaded Artois such as he had not known since the day when he had tea with Vere upon the island.

He had been shut in. Now the gates were thrown open, and to what a brilliant world! He issued forth into it with almost joyous expectation.

They went slowly, and presently drew near to the Rotonda. Artois leaned a little forward and saw that the fishermen were at work. They stood in lines upon the pavement pulling at the immense nets which were still a long way out to sea. When the carriage reached them Artois told Pasqualino to draw up, and sat watching the work and the fierce energy of the workers. Half naked, with arms and legs and chests that gleamed in the sun like copper, they toiled, slanting backward, one towards another, laughing, shouting, swearing with a sort of almost angry joy. In their eyes there was a carelessness that was wild, in their gestures a lack of self-consciousness that was savage. But they looked like creatures who must live forever. And to Artois, sedentary for so long, the sight of them brought a feeling almost of triumph, but also a sensation of envy. Their vigor made him pine for movement.

"Drive on slowly, Pasqualino," he said. "I will follow you on foot, and join you at the hill."

"Si Signore."

He got out, stood for a moment, then strolled on towards the Mergellina. As he approached this part of the town, with its harbor and its population of fisherfolk, the thought of Ruffo came into his mind. He remembered that Ruffo lived here. Perhaps he might see the boy this afternoon.

On the mole that serves as a slight barrier between the open sea and the snug little harbor several boys were fishing. Others were bathing, leaping into the water with shouts from the rocks. Beyond, upon the slope of dingy sand among the drawn-up boats, children were playing, the girls generally separated from the boys. Fishermen, in woolen shirts and white linen trousers, sat smoking in the shadow of their craft, or leaned muscular arms upon them, standing at ease, staring into vacancy or calling to each other. On the still water there was a perpetual movement of boats; and from the distance came a dull but continuous uproar, the yells and the laughter of hundreds of bathers at the Stabilimento di Bagni beyond the opposite limit of the harbor.

Artois enjoyed the open-air gayety, the freedom of the scene; and once again, as often before, found himself thinking that the out-door life, the life loosed from formal restrictions, was the only one really and fully worth living. There was a carelessness, a camaraderie among these people that was of the essence of humanity. Despite their frequent quarrels, their intrigues, their betrayals, their vendettas, they hung together. There was a true and vital companionship among them.

He passed on with deliberation, observing closely, yet half-lazily—for his brain was slack and needed rest—the different types about him, musing on the possibilities of their lives, smiling at the gambols of the intent girls, and the impudent frolics of the little boys who seemed the very spawn of sand and sea and sun, till he had nearly passed the harbor, and was opposite to the pathway that leads down to the jetty, to the left of which lie the steam-yachts.

At the entrance to this pathway there is always a knot of people gathered about the shanty where the seamen eat maccaroni and strange messes, and the stands where shell-fish are exposed for sale. On the far side of the tramway, beneath the tall houses which are let out in rooms and apartments for families, there is an open space, and here in summer are set out quantities of strong tables, at which from noon till late into the evening the people of Mergellina, and visitors of the humbler classes from Naples, sit in merry throngs, eating, smoking, drinking coffee, syrups, and red and white wine.

Artois stood still for a minute to watch them, to partake from a distance, and unknown to them, in their boisterous gayety. He had lit a big cigar, and puffed at it as his eyes roved from group to group, resting now on a family party, now on a quartet of lovers, now on two stout men obviously trying to drive a bargain with vigorous rhetoric and emphatic gestures, now on an elderly woman in a shawl spending an hour with her soldier son in placid silence, now on some sailors from a ship in the distant port by the arsenal bent over a game of cards, or a party of workmen talking wages or politics in their shirt-sleeves with flowers above their ears.

What a row they made, these people! Their animation was almost like the animation of a nightmare. Some were ugly, some looked wicked; others mischievous, sympathetic, coarse, artful, seductive, boldly defiant or boisterously excited. But however much they differed, in one quality they were nearly all alike. They nearly all looked vivid. If they lacked anything, at least it was not life. Even their sorrows should be energetic.

As this thought came into his mind Artois' eyes chanced to rest on two people sitting a little apart at a table on which stood a coffee-cup, a thick glass half full of red wine, and a couple of tumblers of water. One was a woman, the other—yes, the other was Ruffo.

When Artois realized this he kept his eyes upon them. He forgot his interest in the crowd.

At first he could only see Ruffo's side-face. But the woman was exactly opposite to him.

She was neatly dressed in some dark stuff, and wore a thin shawl, purple in color, over her shoulders. She looked middle-aged. Had she been an Englishwoman Artois would have guessed her to be near fifty. But as she was evidently a Southerner it was possible that she was very much younger. Her figure was broad and matronly. Her face, once probably quite pretty was lined, and had the battered and almost corrugated look that the faces of Italian women of the lower classes often reveal when the years begin to increase upon them. The cheek-bones showed harshly in it, by the long and dark eyes, which were surrounded by little puckers of yellow flesh. But Artois' attention was held not by this woman's quite ordinary appearance, but by her manner. Like the people about her she was vivacious, but her vivacity was tragic—she had not come here to be gay. Evidently she was in the excitement of some great grief or passion. She was speaking vehemently to Ruffo, gesticulating with her dark hands, on which there were two or three cheap rings, catching at her shawl, swaying her body, nodding her head, on which the still black hair was piled in heavy masses. And her face was distorted by an emotion that seemed of sorrow and anger mingled. In her ears, pretty and almost delicate in contrast to the ruggedness of her face, were large gold rings, such as Sicilian women often wear. They swayed in response to her perpetual movements. Artois watched her lips as they opened and shut, were compressed or thrust forward, watched her white teeth gleaming. She lifted her two hands, doubled into fists, till they were on a level with her shoulders, shook them vehemently, then dashed them down on the table. The coffee-cup was overturned. She took no notice of it. She was heedless of everything but the subject which evidently obsessed her.

The boy, Ruffo, sat quite still listening to her. His attitude was calm. Now and then he sipped his wine, and presently he took from his pocket a cigarette, lighted it carefully, and began to smoke. There was something very boyish and happy-go-lucky in his attitude and manner. Evidently, Artois thought, he was very much at home with this middle-aged woman. Probably her vehemence was to him an every-day affair. She laid one hand on his arm and bent forward. He slightly shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. She kept her hand on his arm, went on talking passionately, and suddenly began to weep. Tears rushed out of her eyes. Then the boy took her hand gently, stroked it, and began to speak to her, always keeping her hand in his. The woman, with a despairing movement, laid her face down on the table, with her forehead touching the wood. Then she lifted it up. The paroxysm seemed to have passed. She took out a handkerchief from inside the bodice of her dress and dried her eyes. Ruffo struck the table with his glass. An attendant came. He paid the bill, and the woman and he got up to go. As they did so Ruffo presented for a moment his full face to Artois, and Artois swiftly compared it with the face of the woman, and felt sure that they were mother and son.

Artois moved on towards the hill of Posilipo, but after taking a few steps turned to look back. The woman and Ruffo had come into the road by the tram-line. They stood there for a moment, talking. Then Ruffo crossed over to the path, and the woman went away slowly towards the Rotonda. Seeing Ruffo alone Artois turned to go back, thinking to have a word with the boy. But before he could reach him he saw a man step out from behind the wooden shanty of the fishermen and join him.

This man was Gaspare.

Ruffo and Gaspare strolled slowly away towards the jetty where the yachts lie, and presently disappeared.

Artois found Pasqualino waiting for him rather impatiently not far from the entrance to the Scoglio di Frisio.

"I thought you were dead, Signore," he remarked, as Artois came up.

"I was watching the people."

He got into the carriage.

"They are canaglia," said Pasqualino, with the profound contempt of the Neapolitan coachman for those who get their living by the sea. He lived at Fuorigrotta, and thought Mergellina a place of outer darkness.

"I like them," returned Artois.

"You don't know them, Signore. I say—they are canaglia. Where shall I drive you?"

Artois hesitated, passing in mental review the various ristoranti on the hill.

"Take me to the Ristorante della Stella," he said, at length.

Pasqualino cracked his whip, and drove once more merrily onward.

When Artois came to the ristorante, which was perched high up on the side of the road farthest from the sea, he had almost all the tables to choose from, as it was still early in the evening, and in the summer the Neapolitans who frequent the more expensive restaurants usually dine late. He sat down at a table in the open air close to the railing, from which he could see a grand view of the Bay, as well as all that was passing on the road beneath, and ordered a dinner to be ready in half an hour. He was in no hurry, and wanted to finish his cigar.

There was a constant traffic below. The tram-bell sounded its reiterated signal to the crowds of dusty pedestrians to clear the way. Donkeys toiled upward, drawing carts loaded with vegetables and fruit. Animated young men, wearing tiny straw hats cocked impertinently to one side, drove frantically by in light gigs that looked like the skeletons of carriages, holding a rein in each hand, pulling violently at their horses' mouths, and shouting "Ah—ah!" as if possessed of the devil. Smart women made the evening "Passeggiata" in landaus and low victorias, wearing flamboyant hats, and gazing into the eyes of the watching men ranged along the low wall on the sea-side with a cool steadiness that was almost Oriental. Some of them were talking. But by far the greater number leaned back almost immobile against their cushions; and their pale faces showed nothing but the languid consciousness of being observed and, perhaps, desired. Stout Neapolitan fathers, with bulging eyes, immense brown cheeks, and peppery mustaches, were promenading with their children and little dogs, looking lavishly contented with themselves. Young girls went primly past, holding their narrow, well-dressed heads with a certain virginal stiffness that was yet not devoid of grace, and casting down eyes that were supposed not yet to be enlightened. Their governesses and duennas accompanied them. Barefooted brown children darted in and out, dodging pedestrians and horses. Priests and black-robed students chattered vivaciously. School-boys with peaked caps hastened homeward. The orphans from Queen Margherita's Home, higher up the hill, marched sturdily through the dust to the sound of a boyish but desperately martial music. It was a wonderfully vivid world, but the eyes of Artois wandered away from it, over the terraces, the houses, and the tree-tops. Their gaze dropped down to the sea. Far off, Capri rose out of the light mist produced by the heat. And beyond was Sicily.

Why had that woman, Ruffo's mother, wept just now? What was her tragedy? he wondered. Accurately he recalled her face, broad now, and seamed with the wrinkles brought by trouble and the years.

He recalled, too, Ruffo's attitude as the boy listened to her vehement, her almost violent harangue. How boyish, how careless it had been—yet not unkind or even disrespectful, only wonderfully natural and wonderfully young.

"He was the deathless boy."

Suddenly those words started into Artois' mind. Had he read them somewhere? For a moment he wondered. Or had he heard them? They seemed to suggest speech, a voice whose intonations he knew. His mind was still fatigued by work, and would not be commanded by his will. Keeping his eyes fixed on the ethereal outline of Capri, he strove to remember, to find the book which had contained these words and given them to his eyes, or the voice that had spoken them and given them to his ears.

"He was the deathless boy."

A piano-organ struck up below him, a little way up the hill to the right, and above its hard accompaniment there rose a powerful tenor voice singing. The song must have been struck forcibly upon some part of his brain that was sleeping, must have summoned it to activity. For instantly, ere the voice had sung the first verse, he saw imaginatively a mountain top in Sicily, evening light—such as was then shining over and transfiguring Capri—and a woman, Hermione. And he heard her voice, very soft, with a strange depth and stillness in it, saying those words: "He was the deathless boy."

Of course! How could he have forgotten? They had been said of Maurice Delarey. And now idly, strangely, he had recalled them as he thought of Ruffo's young and careless attitude by the table of the ristorante that afternoon.

The waiter, coming presently to bring the French Signore the plate of oysters from Fusaro, which he had ordered as the prelude to his dinner, was surprised by the deep gravity of his face, and said:

"Don't you like 'A Mergellina,' Signore? We are all mad about it. And it won the first prize at last year's festa of Piedigrotta."

"Comment donc?" exclaimed Artois, as if startled. "What?—no—yes. I like it. It's a capital song. Lemon? That's right—and red pepper. Va bene!"

And he bent over his plate rather hurriedly and began to eat.

The piano-organ and the singing voice died away down the hill, going towards Mergellina.

But the effect, curious and surely unreasonable, of the song remained. Often, while he ate, Artois turned his eyes towards the mountain of Capri, and each time that he did so he saw, beyond it and its circling sea, Sicily, Monte Amato, the dying lights on Etna, the evening star above its plume of smoke, the figure of a woman set in the shadow of her sorrow, yet almost terribly serene; and then another woman, sitting at a table, vehemently talking, then bowing down her head passionately as if in angry grief.

When he had finished his dinner the sun had set, and night had dropped down softly over the Bay. Capri had disappeared. The long serpent of lights had uncoiled itself along the sea. Down below, very far down, there was the twang and the thin, acute whine of guitars and mandolines, the throbbing cry of Southern voices. The stars were out in a deep sky of bloomy purple. There was no chill in the air, but a voluptuous, brooding warmth, that shed over the city and the waters a luxurious benediction, giving absolution, surely, to all the sins, to all the riotous follies of the South.

Artois rested his arms on the balustrade.

The ristorante was nearly full now, gay with lights and with a tempest of talk. The waiter came to ask if the Signore would take coffee.

Artois hesitated a moment, then shook his head. He realized that his nerves had been tried enough in these last days and nights. He must let them rest for a while.

The waiter went away, and he turned once more towards the sea. To-night he felt the wonder of Italy, of this part of the land and of its people, as he had not felt it before, in a new and, as it seemed to him, a mysterious way. A very modern man and, in his art, a realist, to-night there was surely something very young alert within him, something of vague sentimentality that was like an echo from Byronic days. He felt over-shadowed, but not unpleasantly, by a dim and exquisite melancholy, in which he thought of nature and of human nature pathetically, linking them together; those singing voices with the stars, the women who leaned on balconies to listen with the sea that was murmuring below them, the fishermen upon that sea with the deep and marvellous sky that watched their labors.

In a beautiful and almost magical sadness he too was one with the night, this night in Italy. It held him softly in its arms. A golden sadness streamed from the stars. The voices below expressed it. The fishermen's torches in the Bay, those travelling lights that are as the eyes of the South searching for charmed things in secret places, lifted the sorrows of earth towards the stars, and they were golden too. There was a joy even in the tears wept on such a night as this.

He loved detail. It was, perhaps, his fault to love it too much. But now he realized that the magician, Night, knew better than he what were the qualities of perfection. She had changed Naples into a diaper of jewels sparkling softly in the void. He knew that behind that lacework of jewels there were hotels, gaunt and discolored houses full of poverty, shame, and wickedness, galleries in which men hunted the things that gratify their lusts, alleys infected with disease and filth indescribable. He knew it, but he no longer felt it. The glamour of the magician was upon him. Perhaps behind the stars there were terrors, too. But who, looking upon them, could believe it? Detail might create a picture; its withdrawal let in upon the soul the spirit light of the true magic.

It was a mistake to search too much, to draw too near, to seek always to see clearly.

The Night taught that in Italy, and many things not to be clothed with words.

Reluctantly at last he lifted his arms from the balcony rail and got up to leave the restaurant. He dreaded the bustle of the street. As he came out into it he heard the sharp "Ting! Ting!" of a tram-bell higher up the hill, and stepped aside to let the tram go by. Idly he looked at it as it approached. He was still in the vague, the almost sentimental mood that had come upon him with the night. The tram came up level with him and slipped slowly by. There was a number of people in it, but on the last seat one woman sat alone. He saw her clearly as she passed, and recognized Hermione.

She did not see him. She was looking straight before her.

"Ah-ah! Ah-ah!"

A shower of objurgations in the Neapolitan dialect fell upon Artois from the box of a carriage coming up the hill. He jumped back and gained the path. There again he stood still. The sweet and half-melancholy vagueness had quite left him now. The sight of his friend had swept it away. Why was she going to Mergellina at that hour? And why did she look like that?

And he thought of the expression he had seen on her face as the tram slipped by, an expression surely of excitement; but also a furtive expression.

Artois had seen Hermione in all her moods, and hers was a very changeful face. But never before had he seen her look furtive. Nor could he have conceived it possible that she could look so.

Perhaps the lights had deceived him. And he had only seen her for an instant.

But why was she going to Mergellina?

Then suddenly it occurred to him that she might be going to Naples, not to Mergellina at all. He knew no reason why her destination should be Mergellina. He began to walk down the hill rather quickly. Some hundreds of yards below the Ristorante della Stella there is a narrow flight of steps between high walls and houses, which leads eventually down to the sea at a point where there are usually two or three boats waiting for hire. Artois, when he started, had no intention of going to sea that night, but when he reached the steps he paused, and finally turned from the path and began to descend them.

He had realized that he was really in pursuit, and abruptly relinquished his purpose. Why should he wish to interfere with an intention of Hermione's that night?

He would return to Naples by sea.

As he came in sight of the water there rose up to him in a light tenor voice a melodious cry:

"Barca! Barca!"

He answered the call.

"Barca!"

The sailor who was below came gayly to meet him.

"It is a lovely night for the Signore. I could take the Signore to Sorrento or to Capri to-night."

He held Artois by the right arm, gently assisting him into the broad-bottomed boat.

"I only want to go to Naples."

"To which landing, Signore?"

"The Vittoria. But go quietly and keep near the shore. Go round as near as you can to the Mergellina."

"Va bene, Signore."

They slipped out, with a delicious, liquid sound, upon the moving silence of the sea.

CHAPTER XIX

Hermione was not going to Mergellina, but to the Scoglio di Frisio. She had only come out of her room late in the afternoon. During her seclusion there she had once been disturbed by Gaspare, who had come to ask her if she wanted him for anything, and, if not, whether he might go over to Mergellina for the rest of the afternoon to see some friends he had made there. She told him he was free till night, and he went away quickly, after one searching, wide-eyed glance at the face of his Padrona.

When he had gone Hermione told herself that she was glad he was away. If he had been on the island she might have been tempted to take one of the boats, to ask him to row her to the Scoglio that evening. But now, of course, she would not go. It was true that she could easily get a boatman from the village on the mainland near by, but without Gaspare's companionship she would not care to go. So that was settled. She would think no more about it. She had tea with Vere, and strove with all her might to be natural, to show no traces in face or manner of the storm that had swept over her that day. She hoped, she believed that she was successful. But what a hateful, what an unnatural effort that was!

A woman who is not at her ease in her own home with her own girl—where can she be at ease?

It was really the reaction from that effort that sent Hermione from the island that evening. She felt as if she could not face another meal with Vere just then. She felt transparent, as if Vere's eyes would be able to see all that she must hide if they were together in the evening. And she resolved to go away. She made some excuse—that she wished for a little change, that she was fidgety and felt the confinement of the island.

"I think I'll go over to the village," she said; "and walk up to the road and take the tram."

"Will you, Madre?"

Hermione saw in Vere's eyes that the girl was waiting for something.

"I'll go by myself, Vere," she said. "I should be bad company to-day. The black dog is at my heels."

She laughed, and added:

"If I am late in coming back, have dinner without me."

"Very well, Madre."

Vere waited a moment; then as if desiring to break forcibly through the restraint that bound them put out her hand to her mother's and said:

"Why don't you go to Naples and have dinner with Monsieur Emile? He would cheer you up, and it is ages since we have seen him."

"Only two or three days. No, I won't disturb Emile. He may be working."

Vere felt that somehow her eager suggestion had deepened the constraint. She said no more, and Hermione presently crossed over to the mainland and began her walk to the road that leads from Naples to Bagnoli.

Where was she going? What was she really about to do?

Certainly she would not adopt the suggestion of Vere. Emile was the last person whom she wished to see—by whom she wished to be seen—just then.

The narrow path turned away from the sea into the shadow of high banks. She walked very slowly, like one out for a desultory stroll; a lizard slipped across the warm earth in front of her, almost touching her foot, climbed the bank swiftly, and vanished among the dry leaves with a faint rustle.

She felt quite alone to-day in Italy, and far off, as if she had no duties, no ties, as if she were one of those solitary, drifting, middle-aged women who vaguely haunt the beaten tracks of foreign lands. It was sultry in this path away from the sea. She was sharply conscious of the change of climate, the inland sensation, the falling away of the freedom from her, the freedom that seems to exhale from wave and wind of the wave.

She walked on, meeting no one and still undecided what to do. The thought of the Scoglio di Frisio returned to her mind, was dismissed, returned again. She might go and dine there quietly alone. Was she deceiving herself, and had she really made up her mind to go to the Scoglio before she left the island? No, she had come away mainly because she felt the need of solitude, the difficulty of being with Vere just for this one night. To-morrow it would be different. It should be different to-morrow.

She saw a row of houses in the distance, houses of poor people, and knew that she was nearing the road. Clothes were hanging to dry. Children were playing at the edge of a vineyard. Women were washing linen, men sitting on the doorsteps mending nasse. As she went by she nodded to them, and bade them "Buona sera." They answered courteously, some with smiling faces, others with grave and searching looks—or so she thought.

The tunnel that runs beneath the road at the point where this path joins it came in sight. And still Hermione did not know what she was going to do. As she entered the tunnel she heard above her head the rumble of a tram going towards Naples. This decided her. She hurried on, turned to the right, and came out on the highway before the little lonely ristorante that is set here to command the view of vineyards and of sea.

The tram was already gliding away at some distance down the road.

A solitary waiter came forward in his unsuitable black into the dust to sympathize with the Signora, and to suggest that she should take a seat and drink some lemon water, or gazzosa, while waiting for the next tram. Or would not the Signora dine in the upper room and watch the tramontare del sole. It would be splendid this evening. And he could promise her an excellent risotto, sardines with pomidoro, and a bifteck such as certainly she could not get in the restaurants of Naples.

"Very well," Hermione answered, quickly, "I will dine here, but not directly—in half an hour or three-quarters."

What Artois was doing at the Ristorante della Stella she was doing at the Trattoria del Giardinetto.

She would dine quietly here, and then walk back to the sea in the cool of the evening.

That was her decision. Yet when evening fell, and her bill was paid, she took the tram that was going down to Naples, and passed presently before the eyes of Artois. The coming of darkness had revived within her much of the mood of the afternoon. She felt that she could not go home without doing something definite, and she resolved to go to the Scoglio di Frisio, have a cup of coffee there, look through the visitors' book, and then take a boat and return by night to the island. The sea wind would cool her, would do her good.

Nothing told her when the eyes of her friend were for an instant fixed upon her, when the mind of her friend for a moment wondered at the strange, new look in her face. She left the tram presently at the doorway above which is Frisio's name, descended to the little terrace from which Vere had run in laughing with the Marchesino, and stood there for a moment hesitating.

The long restaurant was lit up, and from it came the sound of music—guitars, and a voice singing. She recognized the throaty tenor of the blind man raised in a spurious and sickly rapture:

"Sa-anta-a Lu-u-ci-ia! Santa Luci—a!"

It recalled her sharply to the night of the storm. For a moment she felt again the strange, the unreasonable sense of fear, indefinable but harsh, which had come upon her then, as fear comes suddenly sometimes upon a child.

Then she stepped into the restaurant.

As on the other night, there were but few people dining there, and they were away at the far end of the big room. Near them stood the musicians under a light—seedy, depressed; except the blind man, who lifted his big head, rolled his tongue, and swelled and grew scarlet in an effort to be impressive.

Hermione sat down at the first table.

For a moment no one saw her. She heard men's voices talking loudly and gayly, the clatter of plates, the clink of knives and forks. She looked round for the visitors' book. If it were lying near she thought she would open it, search for what Emile had written, and then slip away at once unobserved.

There was a furtive spirit within her to-night.

But she could not see the book; so she sat still, listening to the blind man and gazing at the calm sea just below her. A boat was waiting there. She could see the cushions, which were white and looked ghastly in the darkness, the dim form of the rower standing up to search for clients.

"Barca! Barca!"

He had seen her.

She drew back a little. As she did so her chair made a grating noise, and instantly the sharp ears of the Padrone caught a sound betokening the presence of a new-comer in his restaurant. It might be a queen, an empress! Who could tell?

With his stiff yet alert military gait, he at once came marching down towards her, staring hard with his big, bright eyes. When he saw who it was he threw up his brown hands.

"The Signora of the storm!" he exclaimed. He moved as if about to turn around. "I must tell—"

But Hermione stopped him with a quick, decisive gesture.

"One moment, Signore."

The Padrone approached aristocratically.

"The Marchese Isidoro Panacci is here dining with friends, the Duca di—"

"Yes, yes. But I am only here for a moment, so it is not worth while to tell the Marchese."

"You are not going to dine, Signora! The food of Frisio does not please you!"

He cast up his eyes in deep distress.

"Indeed it does. But I have dined. What I want is a cup of coffee, and—and a liqueur—une fine. And may I look over your wonderful visitors' book? To tell the truth, that is what I have come for, to see the marvellous book. I hadn't enough time the other night. May I?"

The Padrone was appeased. He smiled graciously and turned upon his heels.

"At once, Signora."

"And—not a word to the Marchese! He is with friends. I would rather not disturb him."

The Padrone threw up his chin and clicked his tongue against his teeth. A shrewd, though not at all impudent, expression had come into his face. A Signora alone, at night, in a restaurant! He was a man of the great world. He understood. What a mercy it was to be "educato"!

He came back again almost directly, bearing the book as a sacristan might bear a black-letter Bible.

"Ecco, Signora."

With a superb gesture he placed it before her.

"The coffee, the fine. Attendez, Signora, pour un petit momento."

He stood to see the effect of his French upon her. She forced into her face a look of pious admiration, and he at once departed. Hermione opened the book rather furtively. She had the unpleasant sensation of doing a surreptitious action, and she was an almost abnormally straightforward woman by nature. The book was large, and contained an immense number of inscriptions and signatures in handwritings that varied as strangely as do the characters of men. She turned the leaves hastily. Where had Emile written? Not at the end of the book. She remembered that his signature had been followed by others, although she had not seen, or tried to see, what he had written. Perhaps his name was near Tolstoy's. They had read together Tolstoy's Vedi Napoli e poi Mori.

But where was Tolstoy's name?

A waiter came with the coffee and the brandy. She thanked him quickly, sipped the coffee without tasting it, and continued the search.

The voice of the blind man died away. The guitars ceased.

She started. She was afraid the musicians would come down and gather round her. Why had she not told the Padrone she wished to be quite alone? She heard the shuffle of feet. They were coming. Feverishly she turned the pages. Ah! here is was! She bent down over the page.

"La conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons

en nous. EMILE ARTOIS.

"Nuit d'orage. Juin."

The guitars began a prelude. The blind man shifted from one fat leg to another, cast up his sightless eyes, protruded and drew in his tongue, coughed, spat—

"Cameriere!"

Hermione struck upon the table sharply. She had forgotten all about the Marchesino. She was full of the desire to escape, to get away and be out on the sea.

"Cameriere!"

She called more loudly.

A middle-aged waiter came shuffling over the floor.

"The bill, please."

As she spoke she drank the brandy.

"Si, Signora."

He stood beside her.

"One coffee?"

"Si."

"One cognac!"

"Si, si."

The blind man burst into song.

"One fifty, Signora."

Hermione gave him a two-lire piece and got up to go.

"Signora—buona sera! What a pleasure!"

The Marchesino stood before her, smiling, bowing. He took her hand, bent over it, and kissed it.

"What a pleasure!" he repeated, glancing round. "And you are alone! The Signorina is not here?"

He stared suspiciously towards the terrace.

"And our dear friend Emilio?"

"No, no. I am quite alone."

The blind man bawled, as if he wished to drown the sound of speech.

"Please—could you stop him, Marchese?" said Hermione. "I—really—give him this for me."

She gave the Marchese a lira.

"Signora, it isn't necessary. Silenzio! Silenzio! P-sh-sh-sh!"

He hissed sharply, almost furiously. The musicians abruptly stopped, and the blind man made a gurgling sound, as if he were swallowing the unfinished portion of his song.

"No; please pay them."

"It's too much."

"Never mind."

The Marchese gave the lire to the blind man, and the musicians went drearily out.

Then Hermione held out her hand at once.

"I must go now. It is late."

"You are going by sea, Signora?"

"Yes."

"I will accompany you."

"No, indeed. I couldn't think of it. You have friends."

"They will understand. Have you your own boat?"

"No."

"Then of course I shall come with you."

But Hermione was firm. She knew that to-night the company of this young man would be absolutely unbearable.

"Marchese, indeed I cannot—I cannot allow it. We Englishwomen are very independent, you know. But you may call me a boat and take me down to it, as you are so kind."

"With pleasure, Signora."

He went to the open window. At once the boatman's cry rose up.

"Barca! Barca!"

"That is Andrea's voice," said the Marchesino. "I know him. Barca—si!"

The boat began to glide in towards the land.

As they went out the Marchesino said:

"And how is the Signorina?"

"Very well."

"I have had a touch of fever, Signora, or I should have come over to the island again. I stayed too long in the sea the other day, or—" He shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm sorry," said Hermione. "You are very pale to-night."

For the first time she looked at him closely, and saw that his face was white, and that his big and boyish eyes held a tired and yet excited expression.

"It is nothing. It has passed. And our friend—Emilio? How is he?"

A hardness had come into his voice. Hermione noticed it.

"We have not seen him lately. I suppose he has been busy."

"Probably. Emilio has much to do in Naples," said the Marchesino, with an unmistakable sneer. "Do allow me to escort you to the island, Signora."

They had reached the boat. Hermione shook her head and stepped in at once.

"Then when may I come?"

"Whenever you like."

"To-morrow?"

"Certainly."

"At what time?"

Hermione suddenly remembered his hospitality and felt that she ought to return it.

"Come to lunch—half-past twelve. We shall be quite alone."

"Signora, for loneliness with you and the Signorina I would give up every friend I have ever had. I would give up—"

"Half-past twelve, then, Marchese. Addio!"

"A rivederci, Signora! A demain! Andrea, take care of the Signora. Treat her as you would treat the Madonna. Do you hear?"

The boatman grinned and took off his cap, and the boat glided away across the path of yellow light that was shed from the window of Frisio's.

Hermione leaned back against the white cushions. She was thankful to escape. She felt tired and confused. That dreadful music had distracted her, that—and something else, her tricked expectation. She knew now that she had been very foolish, perhaps even very fantastic. She had felt so sure that Emile had written in that book—what?

As the boat went softly on she asked herself exactly what she had expected to find written there, and she realized that her imagination had, as so often before, been galloping like a frightened horse with the reins upon its neck. And then she began to consider what he had written.

"La conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en nous."

She did not know the words. Were they his own or another's? And had he written them simply because they had chanced to come into his mind at the moment, or because they expressed some underthought or feeling that had surged up in him just then? She wished she knew.

It was a fine saying, she thought, but for the moment she was less interested in it than in Emile's mood, his mind, when he had written it. She realized now, on this calm of the sea, how absurd had been the thought that a man so subtle as Emile would flagrantly reveal a passing phase of his nature, a secret irritability, a jealousy, perhaps, or a sudden hatred in a sentence written for any eyes that chose to see. But he might covertly reveal himself to one who understood him well.

She sat still, trying to match her subtlety against his.

From the shore came sounds of changing music, low down or falling to them from the illuminated heights where people were making merry in the night. Now and then a boat passed them. In one, young men were singing, and interrupting their song to shout with laughter. Here and there a fisherman's torch glided like a great fire-fly above the oily darkness of the sea. The distant trees of the gardens climbing up the hill made an ebony blackness beneath the stars, a blackness that suggested impenetrable beauty that lay deep down with hidden face. And the lights dispersed among them, gaining significance by their solitude, seemed to summon adventurous or romantic spirits to come to them by secret paths and learn their revelation. Over the sea lay a delicate warmth, not tropical, not enervating, but softly inspiring. And beyond the circling lamps of Naples Vesuvius lit up the firmament with a torrent of rose-colored fire that glowed and died, and glowed again, constantly as beats a heart.

And to Hermione came a melancholy devoid of all violence, soft almost as the warmth upon this sea, quite as the resignation of the fatalistic East. She felt herself for a moment such a tiny, dark thing caught in the meshes of the great net of the Universe, this Universe that she could never understand. What could she do? She must just sink down upon the breast of this mystery, let it take her, hold her, do with her what it would.

Her subtlety against Emile's! She smiled to herself in the dark. What a combat of midgets! She seemed to see two marionettes battling in the desert.

And yet—and yet! She remembered a saying of Flaubert's, that man is like a nomad journeying on a camel through the desert; and he is the nomad, and the camel—and the desert.

How true that was, for even now, as she felt herself to be nothing, she felt herself to be tremendous.

She heard the sound of oars from the darkness before them, and saw the dim outline of a boat, then the eyes of Emile looking straight into hers.

"Emile!"

"Hermione!"

His face was gone. But yielding to her impulse she made Andrea stop, and, turning round, saw that the other boat had also stopped a little way from hers. It began to back, and in a moment was level with them.

"Emile! How strange to meet you! Have—you haven't been to the island?"

"No. I was tired. I have been working very hard. I dined quietly at Posilipo."

He did not ask her where she had been.

"Yes. I think you look tired," she said. He did not speak, and she added: "I felt restless, so I took the tram from the Trattoria del Giardinetto as far as the Scoglio di Frisio, and am going back, as you see, by boat."

"It is exquisite on the sea to-night," he said.

"Yes, exquisite, it makes one sad."

She remembered all she had been through that day, as she looked at his powerful face.

"Yes," he answered. "It makes one sad."

For a moment she felt that they were in perfect sympathy, as they used to be. Their sadness, born of the dreaming hour, united them.

"Come soon to the island, dear Emile," she said, suddenly and with the impulsiveness that was part of her, forgetting all her jealousy and all her shadowy fears. "I have missed you."

He noticed that she ruled out Vere in that sentence; but the warmth of her voice stirred warmth in him, and he answered:

"Let me come to-morrow."

"Do—do!"

"In the morning, to lunch, and to spend a long day."

Suddenly she remembered the Marchesino and the sound of his voice when he had spoken of his friend.

"Lunch?" she said.

Instantly he caught her hesitation, her dubiety.

"It isn't convenient, perhaps?"

"Perfectly, only—only the Marchesino is coming."

"To-morrow—To lunch?"

The hardness of the Marchesino's voice was echoed now in the voice of Artois. There was antagonism between these men. Hermione realized it.

"Yes. I invited him this evening."

There was a slight pause. Then Artois said:

"I'll come some other day, Hermione. Well, my friend, au revoir, and bon voyage to the island."

His voice had suddenly become cold, and he signed to his boatman.

"Avanti!"

The boat slipped away and was lost in the darkness.

Hermione had said nothing. Once again—why, she did not know—her friend had made her feel guilty.

Andrea, the boatman, still paused. Now she saw him staring into her face, and she felt like a woman publicly deserted, almost humiliated.

"Avanti, Andrea!" she said.

Her voice trembled as she spoke.

He bent to his oars and rowed on.

And man is the nomad, and the camel—and the desert.

Yes, she carried the desert within her, and she was wandering in it alone. She saw herself, a poor, starved, shrinking figure, travelling through a vast, a burning, a waterless expanse, with an iron sky above her, a brazen land beneath. She was in rags, barefoot, like the poorest nomad of them all.

But even the poorest nomad carries something.

Against her breast, to her heart, she clasped—a memory—the sacred memory of him who had loved her, who had taken her to be his, who had given her himself.

CHAPTER XX

That night when Hermione drew near to the island she saw the Saint's light shining, and remembered how, in the storm, she had longed for it—how, when she had seen it above the roaring sea, she had felt that it was a good omen. To-night it meant nothing to her. It was just a lamp lit, as a lamp might be lit in a street, to give illumination in darkness to any one who passed. She wondered why she had thought of it so strangely.

Gaspare met her at the landing. She noticed at once a suppressed excitement in his manner. He looked at Andrea keenly and suspiciously.

"How late you are, Signora!"

He put out his strong arm to help her to the land.

"Am I, Gaspare? Yes, I suppose I am—you ought all to be in bed."

"I should not go to bed while you were out, Signora."

Again she linked Gaspare with her memory, saw the nomad not quite alone on the journey.

"I know."

"Have you been to Naples, Signora?"

"No—only to—"

"To Mergellina?"

He interrupted her almost sharply.

"No, to the Scoglio di Frisio. Pay the boatman this, Gaspare. Good-night, Andrea."

"Good-night, Signora."

Gaspare handed the man his money, and at once the boat set out on its return to Posilipo.

Hermione stood at the water's edge watching its departure. It passed below the Saint, and the gleam of his light fell upon it for a moment. In the gleam the black figure of Andrea was visible stooping to the water. He was making the fishermen's sign of the Cross. The cross on Peppina's face—was it an enemy of the Cross that carried with it San Francesco's blessing? Vere's imagination! She turned to go up to the house.

"Is the Signorina in bed yet, Gaspare?"

"No, Signora."

"Where is she? Still out?"

"Si, Signora."

"Did she think I was lost?"

"Signora, the Signorina is on the cliff with Ruffo."

"With Ruffo?"

They were going up the steps.

"Si, Signora. We have all been together."

Hermione guessed that Gaspare had been playing chaperone, and loved him for it.

"And you heard the boat coming from the cliff?"

"I saw it pass under the Saint's light, Signora. I did not hear it."

"Well, but it might have been a fisherman's boat."

"Si, Signora. And it might have been your boat."

The logic of this faithful watcher was unanswerable. They came up to the house.

"I think I'll go and see Ruffo," said Hermione.

She was close to the door of the house, Gaspare stood immediately before her. He did not move now, but he said:

"I can go and tell the Signorina you are here, Signora. She will come at once."

Again Hermione noticed a curious, almost dogged, excitement in his manner. It recalled to her a night of years ago when he had stood on a terrace beside her in the darkness and had said: "I will go down to the sea. Signora, let me go down to the sea!"

"There's nothing the matter, is there, Gaspare?" she said, quickly. "Nothing wrong?"

"Signora, of course not! What should there be?"

"I don't know."

"I will fetch the Signorina."

On that night, years ago, she had battled with Gaspare. He had been forced to yield to her. Now she yielded to him.

"Very well," she answered. "Go and tell the Signorina I am here."

She turned and went into the house and up to the sitting-room. Vere did not come immediately. To her mother it seemed as if she was a very long time coming; but at last her light step fell on the stairs, and she entered quickly.

"Madre! How late you are! Where have you been?"

"Am I late? I dined at the little restaurant at the top of the hill where the tram passes."

"There? But you haven't been there all this time?"

"No. Afterwards I took the tram to Posilipo and came home by boat. And what have you been doing?"

"Oh, all sorts of things—what I always do. Just now I've been with Ruffo."

"Gaspare told me he was here."

"Yes. We've been having a talk."

Hermione waited for Vere to say something more, but she was silent. She stood near the window looking out, and the expression on her face had become rather vague, as if her mind had gone on a journey.

"Well," said the mother at last, "and what does Ruffo say for himself, Vere?"

"Ruffo? Oh, I don't know."

She paused, then added:

"I think he has rather a hard time, do you know, Madre?"

Hermione had taken off her hat. She laid it on a table and sat down. She was feeling tired.

"But generally he looks so gay, so strong. Don't you remember that first day you saw him?"

"Ah—then!"

"Of course, when he had fever—"

"No, it wasn't that. Any one might be ill. I think he has things at home to make him unhappy sometimes."

"Has he been telling you so?"

"Oh, he doesn't complain," Vere said, quickly, and almost with a touch of heat. "A boy like that couldn't whine, you know, Madre. But one can understand things without hearing them said. There is some trouble. I don't know what it is exactly. But I think his step-father—his Patrigno, as he calls him—must have got into some bother, or done something horrible. Ruffo seemed to want to tell me, and yet not to want to tell me. And, of course, I couldn't ask. I think he'll tell me to-morrow, perhaps."

"Is he coming here to-morrow?"

"Oh, in summer I think he comes nearly every night."

"But you haven't said anything about him just lately."

"No. Because he hasn't landed till to-night since the night of the storm."

"I wonder why?" said Hermione.

She was interested; but she still felt tired, and the fatigue crept into her voice.

"So do I," Vere said. "He had a reason, I'm sure. You're tired Madre, so I'll go to bed. Good-night."

She came to her mother and kissed her. Moved by a sudden overwhelming impulse of tenderness, Hermione put her arms round the child's slim body. But even as she did so she remembered Vere's secret, shared with Emile and not with her. She could not abruptly loose her arms without surprising her child. But they seemed to her to stiffen, against her will, and her embrace was surely mechanical. She wondered if Vere noticed this, but she did not look into her eyes to see.

"Good-night, Vere."

"Good-night."

Vere was at the door when Hermione remembered her two meetings of that evening.

"By-the-way," she said, "I met the Marchesino to-night. He was at the Scoglio di Frisio."

"Was he?"

"And afterwards on the sea I met Emile."

"Monsieur Emile! Then he isn't quite dead!"

There was a sound almost of irritation in Vere's voice.

"He has been working very hard."

"Oh, I see."

Her voice had softened.

"The Marchesino is coming here to lunch to-morrow."

"Oh, Madre!"

"Does he bore you? I had to ask him to something after accepting his dinner, Vere."

"Yes, yes, of course. The Marchese is all right."

She stood by the door with her bright, expressive eyes fixed on her mother. Her dark hair had been a little roughened by the breeze from Ischia, and stuck up just above the forehead, giving to her face an odd, almost a boyish look.

"What is it, Vere?"

"And when is Monsieur Emile coming? Didn't he say?"

"No. He suggested to-morrow, but when I told him the Marchese was coming he said he wouldn't."

As Hermione said this she looked very steadily at her child. Vere's eyes did not fall, but met hers simply, fearlessly, yet not quite childishly.

"I don't wonder," she said. "To tell the truth, Madre, I can't see how a man like the Marchesino could interest a man like Monsieur Emile—at any rate, for long. Well—" She gave a little sigh, throwing up her pretty chin. "A letto si va!"

And she vanished.

When she had gone Hermione thought she too would go to bed. She was very tired. She ought to go. Yet now she suddenly felt reluctant to go, and as if the doings of the day for her were not yet over. And, besides, she was not going to sleep well. That was certain. The dry, the almost sandy sensation of insomnia was upon her. What was the matter with Gaspare to-night? Perhaps he had had a quarrel with some one at Mergellina. He had a strong temper as well as a loyal heart.

Hermione went to a window. The breeze from Ischia touched her. She opened her lips, shut her eyes, drank it in. It would be delicious to spend the whole night upon the sea, like Ruffo. Had he gone yet? Or was he in the boat asleep, perhaps in the Saint's Pool? How interested Vere was in all the doings of that boy—how innocently, charmingly interested!

Hermione stood by the window for two or three minutes, then went out of the room, down the stairs, to the front door of the house. It was already locked. Yet Gaspare had not come up to say good-night to her. And he always did that before he went to bed. She unlocked the door, went out, shut it behind her, and stood still.

How strangely beautiful and touching the faint noise of the sea round the island was at night, and how full of meaning not quite to be divined! It came upon her heart like the whisper of a world trying to tell its secret to the darkness. What depths, what subtleties, what unfailing revelations of beauty, and surely, too, of love, there were in Nature! And yet in Nature what terrible indifference there was: a powerful, an almost terrific inattention, like that of the sphinx that gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house. She walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was fond of. Presently she would go to the bridge and look over into the Pool and listen for the voices of the fishermen. She sat there for some time gaining a certain peace, losing something of her feeling of weary excitement and desolation under the stars. At last she thought that sleep might come if she went to bed. But before doing so she made her way to the bridge and leaned on the rail, looking down into the Pool.

It was very dark, but she saw the shadowy shape of a fishing-boat lying close to the rock. She stood and watched it, and presently she lost herself in a thicket of night thoughts, and forgot where she was and why she had come there. She was recalled by hearing a very faint voice singing, scarcely more than humming, beneath her.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate

Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:

Mi destan le dolcissime serate

Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

It was the same song that Artois had heard that day as he leaned on the balcony of the Ristorante della Stella. But this singer of it sang the Italian words, and not the dialetto. The song that wins the prize at the Piedigrotta Festival is on the lips of every one in Naples. In houses, in streets, in the harbor, in every piazza, and upon the sea it is heard incessantly.

And now Ruffo was singing it softly and rather proudly in the Italian, to attract the attention of the dark figure he saw above him. He was not certain who it was, but he thought it was the mother of the Signorina, and—he did not exactly know why—he wished her to find out that he was there, squatting on the dry rock with his back against the cliff wall. The ladies of the Casa del Mare had been very kind to him, and to-night he was not very happy, and vaguely he longed for sympathy.

Hermione listened to the pretty, tripping words, the happy, youthful words. And Ruffo sang them again, still very softly.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate—"

And the poor nomad wandering in the desert? But she had known the rapture of youth, the sweet white moons of summer in the South. She had known them long ago for a little while, and therefore she knew them while she lived. A woman's heart is tenacious, and wide as the world, when it contains that world which is the memory of something perfect that gave it satisfaction.

"Mi destan le dolcissime serate

Gli occhi do Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

Dear happy, lovable youth that can sing to itself like that in the deep night! Like that once Maurice, her sacred possession of youth, sang. She felt a rush of tenderness for Ruffo, just because he was so young, and sang—and brought back to her the piercing truth of the everlasting renewal that goes hand in hand with the everlasting passing away.

"Ruffo—Ruffo!"

Almost as Vere had once called "Pescator!" she called. And as Ruffo had once come running up to Vere he came now to Vere's mother.

"Good-evening, Ruffo."

"Good-evening, Signora."

She was looking at the boy as at a mystery which yet she could understand. And he looked at her simply, with a sort of fearless gentleness, and readiness to receive the kindness which he knew dwealt in her for him to take.

"Are you better?"

"Si, Signora, much better. The fever has gone. I am strong, you know."

"You are so young."

She could not help saying it, and her eyes were tender just then.

"Si, Signora, I am very young."

His simple voice almost made her laugh, stirred in her that sweet humor which has its dwelling at the core of the heart.

"Young and happy," she said.

And as she said it she remembered Vere's words that evening; "I think he has rather a hard time."

"At least, I hope you are happy, Ruffo," she added.

"Si, Signora."

He looked at her. She was not sure which he meant, whether his assent was to her hope or to the fact of his happiness. She wondered which it was.

"Young people ought to be happy," she said.

"Ought they, Signora?"

"You like your life, don't you? You like the sea?"

"Si, Signora. I could not live away from the sea. If I could not see the sea every day I don't know what I should do."

"I love it, too."

"The Signorina loves the sea."

He had ignored her love for it and seized on Vere's. She thought that this was very characteristic of his youth.

"Yes. She loves being here. You talked to her to-night, didn't you?"

"Si, Signora."

"And to Gaspare?"

"Si, Signora. And this afternoon, too. Gaspare was at Mergellina this afternoon."

"And you met there, did you?"

"Si, Signora. I had been with my mamma, and when I left my mamma—poveretta—I met Gaspare."

"I hope your mother is well."

"Signora, she is not very well just now. She is a little sad just now."

Hermione felt that the boy had some trouble which, perhaps, he would like to tell her. Perhaps some instinct made him know that she felt tender towards him, very tender that night.

"I am sorry for that," she said—"very sorry."

"Si, Signora. There is trouble in our house."

"What is it, Ruffo?"

The boy hesitated to answer. He moved his bare feet on the bridge and looked down towards the boat. Hermione did not press him, said nothing.

"Signora," Ruffo said, at last, coming to a decision, "my Patrigno is not a good man. He makes my mamma jealous. He goes after others."

It was the old story of the South, then! Hermione knew something of the persistent infidelities of Neapolitan men. Poor women who had to suffer them!

"I am sorry for your mother," she said, gently. "That must be very hard."

"Si, Signora, it is hard. My mamma was very unhappy to-day. She put her head on the table, and she cried. But that was because my Patrigno is put in prison."

"In prison! What has he done?"

Ruffo looked at her, and she saw that the simple expression had gone out of his eyes.

"Signora, I thought perhaps you knew."

"I? But I have never seen your step-father."

"No, Signora. But—but you have that girl here in your house."

"What girl?"

Suddenly, almost while she was speaking, Hermione understood.

"Peppina!" she said. "It was your Patrigno who wounded Peppina?"

"Si, Signora."

There was a silence between them. Then Hermione said, gently:

"I am very sorry for your poor mother, Ruffo—very sorry. Tell me, can she manage? About money, I mean?"

"It is not so much the money she was crying about, Signora. But, of course, while Patrigno is in prison he cannot earn money for her. I shall give her my money. But my mamma does not like all the neighbors knowing about that girl. It is a shame for her."

"Yes, of course it is. It is very hard."

She thought a moment. Then she said:

"It must be horrible—horrible!"

She spoke with all the vehemence of her nature. Again, as long ago, when she knelt before a mountain shrine in the night, she had put herself imaginatively in the place of a woman, this time in the place of Ruffo's mother. She realized how she would have felt if her husband, her "man," had ever been faithless to her.

Ruffo looked at her almost in surprise.

"I wish I could see your poor mother, Ruffo," she said. "I would go to see her, only—well, you see, I have Peppina here, and—"

She broke off. Perhaps the boy would not understand what she considered the awkwardness of the situation. She did not quite know how these people regarded certain things.

"Wait here a moment, Ruffo," she said. "I am going to give you something for your mother. I won't be a moment."

"Grazie, Signora."

Hermione went away to the house. The perfect naturalness and simplicity of the boy appealed to her. She was pleased, too, that he had not told all this to Vere. It showed a true feeling of delicacy. And she was sure he was a good son. She went up to her room, got two ten lira notes, and went quickly back to Ruffo, who was standing upon the bridge.

"There, Ruffo," she said, giving them to him. "These are for your mother."

The boy's brown face flushed, and into his eyes there came an expression of almost melting gentleness.

"Oh, Signora!" he said.

And there was a note of protest in his voice.

"Take them to her, Ruffo. And—and I want you to promise me something. Will you?"

"Si, Signora. I will do anything—anything for you."

Hermione put her hand on his shoulder.

"Be very, very kind to your poor mother, Ruffo."

"Signora, I always am good for my poor mamma."

He spoke with warm eagerness.

"I am sure you are. But just now, when she is sad, be very good to her."

"Si, Signora."

She took her hand from the boy's shoulder. He bent to kiss her hand, and again, as he was lifting up his head, she saw the melting look in his eyes. This time it was unmingled with amazement, and it startled her.

"Oh, Ruffo!" she said, and stopped, staring at him in the darkness.

"Signora! What is it? What have you?"

"Nothing. Good-night, Ruffo."

"Good-night, Signora."

He took off his cap and ran down to the boat. Hermione leaned over the railing, bending down to see the boy reappear below. When he came he looked like a shadow. From this shadow there rose a voice singing very softly.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate—"

The shadow went over to the boat, and the voice died away.

"Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

Hermione still was bending down. And she formed the last words with lips that trembled a little.

"Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

Then she said: "Maurice—Maurice!"

And then she stood trembling.

Yes, it was Maurice whom she had seen again for an instant in the melting look of Ruffo's face. She felt frightened in the dark. Maurice—when he kissed her for the last time, had looked at her like that. It could not be fancy. It was not.

Was this the very first time she had noticed in Ruffo a likeness to her dead husband? She asked herself if it was. Yes. She had never—or had there been something? Not in the face, perhaps. But—the voice? Ruffo's singing? His attitude as he stood up in the boat? Had there not been something? She remembered her conversation with Artois in the cave. She had said to him that—she did not know why—the boy, Ruffo, had made her feel, had stirred up within her slumbering desires, slumbering yearnings.

"I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay—and just this one touches some chord, and all the strings of my soul quiver."

She had said that.

Then there was something in the boy, something not merely fleeting like that look of gentleness—something permanent, subtle, that resembled Maurice.

Now she no longer felt frightened, but she had a passionate wish to go down to the boat, to see Ruffo again, to be with him again, now that she was awake to this strange, and perhaps only faint, imitation by another of the one whom she had lost. No—not imitation; this fragmentary reproduction of some characteristic, some—

She lifted herself up from the railing. And now she knew that her eyes were wet. She wiped them with her handkerchief, drew a deep breath, and went back to the house. She felt for the handle of the door, and, when she found it, opened the door, went in, and shut it rather heavily, then locked it. As she bent down to push home the bolt at the bottom a voice called out:

"Who's there?"

She was startled and turned quickly.

"Gaspare!"

He stood before her half dressed, with his hair over his eyes, and a revolver in his hand.

"Signora! It is you!"

"Si. What did you think? That it was a robber?"

Gaspare looked at her almost sternly, went to the door, bent down and bolted it, then he said:

"Signora, I heard a noise in the house a few minutes ago. I listened, but I heard nothing more. Still, I thought it best to get up. I had just put on my clothes when again I heard a noise at the door. I myself had locked it for the night. What should I think?"

"I was outside. I came back for something. That was what you heard. Then I went out again."

"Si."

He stood there staring at her in a way that seemed, she fancied, to rebuke her. She knew that he wished to know why she had gone out so late, returned to the house, then gone out once more.

"Come up-stairs for a minute, Gaspare," she said. "I want to speak to you."

He looked less stern, but still unlike himself.

"Si, Signora. Shall I put on my jacket?"

"No, no, never mind. Come like that."

She went up-stairs, treading softly, lest she might disturb Vere. He followed. When they were in her sitting-room she said:

"Gaspare, why did you go to bed without coming to say good-night to me?"

He looked rather confused.

"Did I forget, Signora? I was tired. Forgive me."

"I don't know whether you forgot. But you never came."

As Hermione spoke, suddenly she felt as if Gaspare, too, were going, perhaps, to drift from her. She looked at him with an almost sharp intensity which hardened her whole face. Was he, too, being insincere with her, he whom she trusted implicitly?

"Did you forget, Gaspare?" she said.

"Signora," he repeated, with a certain, almost ugly doggedness, "I was tired. Forgive me."

She felt sure that he had chosen deliberately not to come to her for the evening salutation. It was a trifle, yet to-night it hurt her. For a moment she was silent, and he was silent, looking down at the floor. Then she opened her lips to dismiss him. She intended to say a curt "Good-night"; but—no—she could not let Gaspare retreat from her behind impenetrable walls of obstinate reserve. And she did know his nature through and through. If he was odd to-night, unlike himself, there was some reason for it; and it could not be a reason that, known to her, would make her think badly of him. She was certain of that.

"Never mind, Gaspare," she said gently. "But I like you to come and say good-night to me. I am accustomed to that, and I miss it if you don't come."

"Si, Signora," he said, in a very low voice.

He turned a little away from her, and made a small noise with his nose as if he had a cold.

"Gaspare," she said, with an impulse to be frank, "I saw Ruffo to-night."

He turned round quickly. She saw moisture in his eyes, but they were shining almost fiercely.

"He told me something about his Patrigno. Did you know it?"

"His Patrigno and Peppina?"

Hermione nodded.

"Si Signora; Ruffo told me."

"I gave the boy something for his mother."

"His mother—why?"

There was quick suspicion in Gaspare's voice.

"Poor woman! Because of all this trouble. Her husband is in prison."

"Lo so. But he will soon be out again. He is 'protected.'"

"Who protects him?"

But Gaspare evaded the answer, and substituted something that was almost a rebuke.

"Signora," he said, bluntly, "if I were you I would not have anything to do with these people. Ruffo's Patrigno is a bad man. Better leave them alone."

"But, Ruffo?"

"Signora?"

"You like him, don't you?"

"Si, Signora. There is no harm in him."

"And the poor mother?"

"I am not friends with his mother, Signora. I do not want to be."

Hermione was surprised by his harshness.

"But why not?"

"There are people at Mergellina who are bad people," he said. "We are not Neapolitan. We had better keep to ourselves. You have too much heart, Signora, a great deal too much heart, and you do not always know what people are."

"Do you think I ought not to have given Ruffo that money for his mother?" Hermione asked, almost meekly.

"Si, Signora. It is not for you to give his mother money. It is not for you."

"Well, Gaspare, it's done now."

"Si, it's done now."

"You don't think Ruffo bad, do you?"

After a pause, Gaspare answered:

"No, Signora. Ruffo is not bad."

Hermione hesitated. She wanted to ask Gaspare something, but she was not sure that the opportunity was a good one. He was odd to-night. His temper had surely been upset. Perhaps it would be better to wait. She decided not to speak of what was in her mind.

"Well, Gaspare, good-night," she said.

"Good-night, Signora."

She smiled at him.

"You see, after all, you have had to say good-night to me!"

"Signora," he answered, earnestly, "even if I do not come to say good-night to you always, I shall stay with you till death."

Again he made the little noise with his nose, as he turned away and went out of the room.

That night, as she got into bed, Hermione called down on that faithful watch-dog's dark head a blessing, the best that heaven contained for him. Then she put out the light, and lay awake so long that when a boat came round the cliff from the Saint's Pool to the open sea, in the hour before the dawn, she heard the soft splash of the oars in the water and the sound of a boy's voice singing.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate

Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:

Mi destan le dolcissime serate

Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

She lifted herself up on her pillow and listened—listened until across the sea, going towards the dawn, the song was lost.

"Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

When the voice was near, had not Maurice seemed near to her? And when it died away, did not he fade with it—fade until the Ionian waters took him?

She sat up in the darkness until long after the song was hushed. But she heard it still in the whisper of the sea.

CHAPTER XXI

The Marchesino had really been unwell, as he had told Hermione. The Panacci disposition, of which he had once spoken to Artois, was certainly not a calm one, and Isidoro, was, perhaps, the most excitable member of an abundantly excitable family. Although changeable, he was vehement. He knew not the meaning of the word patience, and had always been accustomed to get what he wanted exactly when he wanted it. Delay in the gratification of his desires, opposition to his demands, rendered him as indignant as if he were a spoiled child unable to understand the fixed position and function of the moon. And since the night of his vain singing along the shore to the Nisida he had been ill with fever, brought on by jealousy and disappointment, brought on partly also by the busy workings of a heated imagination which painted his friend Emilio in colors of inky black.

The Marchesino had not the faintest doubt that Artois was in love with Vere. He believed this not from any evidence of his eyes, for, even now, in not very lucid moments, he could not recall any occasion on which he had seen Emilio paying court to the pretty English girl. But, then, he had only seen them together twice—on the night of his first visit to the island and on the night of the storm. It was the general conduct of his friend that convinced him, conduct in connection not with Vere, but with himself—apart from that one occasion when Emilio must have lain hidden with Vere among the shadows of the grotto of Virgil. He had been deceived by Emilio. He had thought of him as an intellectual, who was also a bon vivant and interested in Neapolitan life. But he had not thought of him as a libertine. Yet that was what he certainly was. The interview with Maria Fortunata in the alley beyond the Via Roma had quite convinced the Marchesino. He had no objection whatever to loose conduct, but he had a contempt for hypocrisy which was strong and genuine. He had trusted Emilio. Now he distrusted him, and was ready to see subtlety, deceit, and guile in all his undertakings.

Emilio had been trying to play with him. Emilio looked upon him as a boy who knew nothing of the world. The difference in their respective ages, so long ignored by him, now glared perpetually upon the Marchesino, even roused within him a certain condemnatory something that was almost akin to moral sense, a rare enough bird in Naples. He said to himself that Emilio was a wicked old man, "un vecchio briccone." The delights of sin were the prerogative of youth. Abruptly this illuminating fact swam, like a new comet, within the ken of the Marchesino. He towered towards the heights of virtuous indignation. As he lay upon his fevered pillow, drinking a tisane prepared by his anxious mamma, he understood the inner beauty of settling down—for the old, and white-haired age, still intent upon having its fling, appeared to him so truly pitiable and disgusting that he could almost have wept for Emilio had he not feared to make himself more feverish by such an act of enlightened friendship.

And the sense and appreciation of the true morality, ravishing in its utter novelty for the young barbarian, was cherished by the Marchesino until he began almost to swell with virtue, and to start on stilts to heaven, big with the message that wickedness was for the young and must not be meddled with by any one over thirty—the age at which, till now, he had always proposed to himself to marry some rich girl and settle down to the rigid asceticism of Neapolitan wedded life.

And as the Marchesino had lain in bed tingling with morality, so did he get up and issue forth to the world, and even set sail upon the following day for the island. Morality was thick upon him, as upon that "briccone" Emilio, something else was thick. About mediaeval chivalry he knew precisely nothing. Yet, as the white wings of his pretty yacht caught the light breeze of morning, he felt like a most virtuous knight sans peur et sans reproche. He even felt like a steady-going person with a mission.

But he wished he thoroughly understood the English nation. Towards the English he felt friendly, as do most Italians; but he knew little of them, except that they were very rich, lived in a perpetual fog, and were "un poco pazzi." But the question was how mad—in other words, how different from Neapolitans—they were! He wished he knew. It would make things easier for him in his campaign against Emilio.

Till he met the ladies of the island he had never said a hundred words to any English person. The Neapolitan aristocracy is a very conservative body, and by no means disposed to cosmopolitanism. To the Panacci Villa at Capodimonte came only Italians, except Emilio. The Marchesino had inquired of Emilio if his mother should call upon the Signora Delarey, but Artois, knowing Hermione's hatred of social formalities, had hastened to say that it was not necessary, that it would even be a surprising departure from the English fashion of life, which ordained some knowledge of each other by the ladies of two families, or at least some formal introduction by a mutual woman friend, before an acquaintance could be properly cemented. Hitherto the Marchesino had felt quite at ease with his new friends. But hitherto he had been, as it were, merely at play with them. The interlude of fever had changed his views and enlarged his consciousness. And Emilio was no longer at hand to be explanatory if desired.

The Marchesino wished very much that he thoroughly understood the inner workings of the minds of English ladies.

How mad were the English? How mad exactly, for instance, was the Signora Delarey? And how mad exactly was the Signorina? It would be very valuable to know. He realized that his accurate knowledge of Neapolitan women, hitherto considered by him as amply sufficient to conduct him without a false step through all the intricacies of the world feminine, might not serve him perfectly with the ladies of the island. His fever had, it seemed, struck a little blow on his self-confidence, and rendered him so feeble as to be almost thoughtful.

And then, what exactly did he want? To discomfit Emilio utterly? That, of course, did not need saying, even to himself. And afterwards? There were two perpendicular lines above his eyebrows as the boat drew near to the island.

But when he came into the little drawing-room, where Hermione was waiting to receive him, he looked young and debonair, though still pale from his recent touch of illness.

Vere was secretly irritated by his coming. Her interview with Peppina had opened her eyes to many things, among others to a good deal that was latent in the Marchesino. She could never again meet him, or any man of his type, with the complete and masterful simplicity of ignorant childhood that can innocently coquet by instinct, that can manage by heredity from Eve, but that does not understand thoroughly, either, what it is doing or why it is doing it.

Vere was not in the mood for the Marchesino.

She had been working, and she had been dreaming, and she wanted to have another talk with Monsieur Emile. Pretty, delicate, yet strong-fibred ambitions were stirring within her, and the curious passion to use life as a material, but not all of life that presented itself to her. With the desire to use that might be greedy arose the fastidious prerogative of rejection.

And that very morning, mentally, Vere had rejected the Marchesino as something not interesting in life, something that was only lively, like the very shallow stream. What a bore it would be having to entertain him, to listen to his compliments, to avoid his glances, to pretend to be at ease with him.

"But Madre can have him for a little first," she said to herself, as she looked into the glass to see that her hair was presentable. "Madre asked him to come. I didn't. I shall have nothing to say to him."

She had quite forgotten her eagerness on the night of the storm, when she heard the cry of the siren that betokened his approach. Again she looked in the glass and gave a pat to her hair. And just as she was doing it she thought of that day after the bathe, when Gaspare had come to tell her that Monsieur Emile was waiting for her. She had run down, then, just as she was, and now—

"Mamma mia! Am I getting vain!" she said to herself.

And she turned from the glass, and reluctantly went to meet their guest.

She had said to herself that it was a bore having the Marchesino to lunch, that he was uninteresting, frivolous, empty-headed. But directly she set eyes upon him, as he stood in the drawing-room by her mother, she felt a change in him. What had happened to him? She could not tell. But she was conscious that he seemed much more definite, much more of a personage, than he had seemed to her before. Even his face looked different, though paler, stronger. She was aware of surprise.

The Marchesino, too, though much less instinctively observant than Vere, noted a change in her. She looked more developed, more grown up. And he said to himself:

"When I told Emile she was a woman I was right."

Their meeting was rather grave and formal, even a little stiff. The Marchesino paid Vere two or three compliments, and she inquired perfunctorily after his health, and expressed regret for his slight illness.

"It was only a chill, Signorina. It was nothing."

"Perhaps you caught it that night," Vere said.

"What night, Signorina?"

Vere had been thinking of the night when he sang for her in vain. Suddenly remembering how she and Monsieur Emile had lain in hiding and slipped surreptitiously home under cover of the darkness, she flushed and said:

"The night of the storm—you got wet, didn't you?"

"But that was long ago, Signorina," he answered, looking steadily at her, with an expression that was searching and almost hard.

Had he guessed her inadvertence? She feared so, and felt rather guilty, and glad when Giulia came in to announce that lunch was ready.

Hermione, when they sat down, feeling a certain constraint, but not knowing what it sprang from, came to the rescue with an effort. She was really disinclined for talk, and was perpetually remembering that the presence of the Marchesino had prevented Emile from coming to spend a long day. But she remembered also her guest's hospitality at Frisio's, and her social instinct defied her natural reluctance to be lively. She said to herself that she was rapidly developing into a fogey, and must rigorously combat the grievous tendency. By a sheer exertion of will-power she drove herself into a different, and conversational, mood. The Marchesino politely responded. He was perfectly self-possessed, but he was not light-hearted. The unusual effort of being thoughtful had, perhaps, distressed or even outraged his brain. And the worst of it was that he was still thinking—for him quite profoundly.

However, they talked about risotto, they talked about Vesuvius, they spoke of the delights of summer in the South and of the advantages of living on an island.

"Does it not bore you, Signora, having the sea all round?" asked the Marchesino. "Do you not feel in a prison and that you cannot escape?"

"We don't want to escape, do we, Madre?" said Vere, quickly, before Hermione could answer.

"I am very fond of the island, certainly," said Hermione. "Still, of course, we are rather isolated here."

She was thinking of what she had said to Artois—that perhaps her instinct to shut out the world was morbid, was bad for Vere. The girl at once caught the sound of hesitation in her mother's voice.

"Madre!" she exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that you are tired of our island life?"

"I do not say that. And you, Vere?"

"I love being here. I dread the thought of the autumn."

"In what month do you go away, Signora?" asked the Marchesino.

"By the end of October we shall have made our flitting, I suppose."

"You will come in to Naples for the winter?"

Hermione hesitated. Then she said:

"I almost think I shall take my daughter to Rome. What do you say, Vere?"

The girls face had become grave, even almost troubled.

"I can't look forward in this weather," she said. "I think it's almost wicked to. Oh, let us live in the moment, Madre, and pretend it will be always summer, and that we shall always be living in our Casa del Mare!"

There was a sound of eager youth in her voice as she spoke, and her eyes suddenly shone. The Marchesino looked at her with an admiration he did not try to conceal.

"You love the sea, Signorina?" he asked.

But Vere's enthusiasm abruptly vanished, as if she feared that he might destroy its completeness by trying to share it.

"Oh yes," she said. "We all do here; Madre, Gaspare, Monsieur Emile—everybody."

It was the first time the name of Artois had been mentioned among them that day. The Marchesino's full red lips tightened over his large white teeth.

"I have not seen Signor Emilio for some days," he said.

"Nor have we," said Vere, with a touch of childish discontent.

He looked at her closely.

Emilio—he knew all about Emilio. But the Signorina? What were her feelings towards the "vecchio briccone"? He did not understand the situation, because he did not understand precisely the nature of madness of the English. Had the ladies been Neapolitans, Emilio an Italian, he would have felt on sure ground. But in England, so he had heard, there is a fantastic, cold, sexless something called friendship that can exist between unrelated man and woman.

"Don Emilio writes much," he said, with less than his usual alacrity. "When one goes to see him he has always a pen in his hand."

He tried to speak of Emilio with complete detachment, but could not resist adding:

"When one is an old man one likes to sit, one cannot be forever running to and fro. One gets tired, I suppose."

There was marked satire in the accent with which he said the last words. And the shrug of his shoulders was an almost audible "What can I know of that?"

"Monsieur Emile writes because he has a great brain, not because he has a tired body," said Vere, with sudden warmth.

Her mother was looking at her earnestly.

"Oh, Signorina, I do not mean—But for a man to be always shut up," began the Marchesino, "it is not life."

"You don't understand, Marchese. One can live in a little room with the door shut as one can never live—"

Abruptly she stopped. A flush ran over her face and down to her neck. Hermione turned away her eyes. But they had read Vere's secret. She knew what her child was doing in those hours of seclusion. And she remembered her own passionate attempts to stave off despair by work. She remembered her own failure.

"Poor little Vere!" That was her first thought. "But what is Emile doing?" That was the second. He had discouraged her. He had told her the truth. What was he telling Vere? A flood of bitter curiosity seemed to rise in her, drowning many things.

"What I like is life, Signorina," said the Marchesino. "Driving, riding, swimming, sport, fencing, being with beautiful ladies—that is life."

"Yes, of course, that is life," she said.

What was the good of trying to explain to him the inner life? He had no imagination.

Her youth made her very drastic, very sweeping, in her secret mental assertions.

She labelled the Marchesino "Philistine," and popped him into his drawer.

Lunch was over, and they got up.

"Are you afraid of the heat out-of-doors, Marchese?" Hermione asked, "or shall we have coffee in the garden? There is a trellis, and we shall be out of the sun."

"Signora, I am delighted to go out."

He got his straw hat, and they went into the tiny garden and sat down on basket-work chairs under a trellis, set in the shadow of some fig-trees. Giulia brought them coffee, and the Marchesino lighted a cigarette.

He said to himself that he had never been in love before.

Vere wore a white dress. She had no hat on, but held rather carelessly over her small, dark head a red parasol. It was evident that she was not afraid even of the midday sun. That new look in her face, soft womanhood at the windows gazing at a world more fully, if more sadly, understood, fascinated him, sent the blood up to his head. There was a great change in her. To-day she knew what before she had not known.

As he stared at Vere with adoring eyes suddenly there came into his mind the question: "Who has taught her?"

And then he thought of the night when all in vain he had sung upon the sea, while the Signorina and "un Signore" were hidden somewhere near him.

The blood sang in his head, and something seemed to expand in his brain, to press violently against his temples, as if striving to force its way out. He put down his coffee cup, and the two perpendicular lines appeared above his eyebrows, giving him an odd look, cruel and rather catlike.

"If Emilio—"

At that moment he longed to put a knife into his friend.

But he was not sure. He only suspected.

Hermione's role in this summer existence puzzled him exceedingly. The natural supposition in a Neapolitan would, of course, have been that Artois was her lover. But when the Marchesino looked at Hermione's eyes he could not tell.

What did it all mean? He felt furious at being puzzled, as if he were deliberately duped.

"Your cigarette has gone out, Marchese," said Hermione. "Have another."

The young man started.

"It's nothing."

"Vere, run in and get the Marchese a Khali Targa."

The girl got up quickly.

"No, no! I cannot permit—I have another here."

He opened his case. It was empty.

Vere laughed.

"You see!"

She went off before he could say another word, and the Marchesino was alone for a moment with Hermione.

"You are fortunate, Signora, in having such a daughter," he said, with a sigh that was boyish.

"Yes," Hermione said.

That bitter curiosity was still with her, and her voice sounded listless, almost cold. The Marchesino looked up. Ah! Was there something here that he could understand? Something really feminine? A creeping jealousy? He was on the qui vive at once.

"And such a good friend as Don Emilio," he added. "You have known Emilio for a long time, Signora?"

"Oh yes, for a very long time."

"He is a strange man," said the Marchesino, with rather elaborate carelessness.

"Do you think so? In what way?"

"He likes to know, but he does not like to be known."

There was a great deal of truth in the remark. Its acuteness surprised Hermione, who thought the Marchesino quick witted but very superficial.

"As he is a writer, I suppose he has to study people a good deal," she said, quietly.

"I do not think I can understand these great people. I think they are too grand for me."

"Oh, but Emile likes you very much. He told me so."

"It is very good of him," said the Marchesino, pulling at his mustaches.

He was longing to warn Hermione against Emilio—to hint that Emilio was not to be trusted. He believed that Hermione must be very blind, very unfitted to look after a lovely daughter. But when he glanced at her face he did not quite know how to hint what was in his mind. And just then Vere came back and the opportunity was gone. She held out a box to the Marchesino. As he thanked her and took a cigarette he tried to look into her eyes. But she would not let him. And when he struck his match she returned once more to the house, carrying the box with her. Her movement was so swift and unexpected that Hermione had not time to speak before she was gone.

"But—"

"I should not smoke another, Signora," said the Marchesino, quickly.

"You are sure?"

"Quite."

"Still, Vere might have left the box. She is inhospitable to-day."

Hermione spoke lightly.

"Oh, it is bad for cigarettes to lie in the sun. It ruins them."

"But you should have filled your case. You must do so before you go."

"Thank you."

His head was buzzing again. The touch of fever had really weakened him. He knew it now. Never gifted with much self-control, he felt to-day that, with a very slight incentive, he might lose his head. The new atmosphere which Vere diffused around her excited him strangely. He was certain that she was able to understand something of what he was feeling, that on the night of the storm she would not have been able to understand. Again he thought of Emilio, and moved restlessly in his chair, looking sideways at Hermione, then dropping his eyes. Vere did not come back.

Hermione exerted herself to talk, but the task became really a difficult one, for the Marchesino looked perpetually towards the house, and so far forgot himself as to show scarcely even a wavering interest in anything his hostess said. As the minutes ran by a hot sensation of anger began to overcome him. A spot of red appeared on each cheek.

Suddenly he got up.

"Signora, you will want to make the siesta. I must not keep you longer."

"No, really; I love sitting out in the garden, and you will find the glare of the sun intolerable if you go so early."

"On the sea there is always a breeze. Indeed, I must not detain you. All our ladies sleep after the colazione until the bathing hour. Do not you?"

"Yes, we lie down. But to-day—"

"You must not break the habit. It is a necessity. My boat will be ready, and I must thank you for a delightful entertainment."

His round eyes were fierce, but he commanded his voice.

"A rive—"

"I will come with you to the house if you really will not stay a little longer."

"Perhaps I may come again?" he said, quickly, with a sudden hardness, a fighting sound in his voice. "One evening in the cool. Or do I bore you?"

"No; do come."

Hermione felt rather guilty, as if they had been inhospitable, she and Vere; though, indeed, only Vere was in fault.

"Come and dine one night, and I shall ask Don Emilio."

As she spoke she looked steadily at her guest.

"He was good enough to introduce us to each other, wasn't he?" she added. "We must all have an evening together, as we did at Frisio's."

The Marchesino bowed.

"With pleasure, Signora."

They came into the house.

As they did so Peppina came down the stairs. When she saw them she murmured a respectful salutation and passed quickly by, averting her wounded cheek. Almost immediately behind her was Vere. The Marchesino looked openly amazed for a moment, then even confused. He stared first at Hermione, then at Vere.

"I am sorry, Madre; I was kept for a moment," the girl said. "Are you coming up-stairs?"

"The Marchese says he must go, Vere. He is determined not to deprive us of our siesta."

"One needs to sleep at this hour in the hot weather," said the Marchesino.

The expression of wonder and confusion was still upon his face, and he spoke slowly.

"Good-bye, Marchese," Vere said, holding out her hand.

He took it and bowed over it and let it go. The girl turned and ran lightly up-stairs.

Directly she was gone the Marchesino said to Hermione:

"Pardon me, Signora, I—I—"

He hesitated. His self-possession seemed to have deserted him for the moment. He looked at Hermione swiftly, searchingly, then dropped his eyes.

"What is it, Marchese?" she asked, wondering what was the matter with him.

He still hesitated. Evidently he was much disturbed. At last he said again:

"Pardon me, Signora. I—as you know, I am Neapolitan. I have always lived in Naples."

"Yes, I know."

"I know Naples like my pocket—"

He broke off.

Hermione waited for him to go on. She had no idea what was coming.

"Yes?" she said, at length to help him.

"Excuse me, Signora! But that girl—that girl who passed by just now—"

"My servant, Peppina."

He stared at her.

"Your servant, Signora?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what she is, where she comes from? But no, it is impossible."

"I know all about Peppina, Marchese," Hermione replied, quietly.

"Truly? Ah!"

His large round eyes were still fixedly staring at her.

"Good-bye, Signora!" he said. "Thank you for a very charming colazione. And I shall look forward with all my heart to the evening you have kindly suggested."

"I shall write directly I have arranged with Don Emilio."

"Thank you! Thank you! A rivederci, Signora."

He cast upon her one more gravely staring look, and was gone.

When he was outside and alone, he threw up his hands and talked to himself for a moment, uttering many exclamations. In truth, he was utterly amazed. Maria Fortunata had spread abroad diligently the fame of her niece's beauty, and the Marchesino, like the rest of the gay young men of Naples, had known of and had misjudged her. He had read in the papers of the violence done to her, and had at once dismissed her from his mind with a muttered "Povera Ragazza!"

She was no longer beautiful.

And now he discovered her living as a servant with the ladies of the island. Who could have put her there? He thought of Emilio's colloquy with Maria Fortunata. But the Signora? A mother? What did it all mean? Even the madness of the English could scarcely be so pronounced as to make such a proceeding as this quite a commonplace manifestation of the national life and eccentricity. He could not believe that.

He stepped into his boat. As the sailors rowed it out from the Pool—the wind had gone down and the sails were useless—he looked earnestly up to the windows of the Casa del Mare, longing to pierce its secrets.

What was Emilio in that house? A lover, a friend, a bad genius? And the Signora? What was she?

The Marchesino was no believer in the virtue of women. But the lack of beauty in Hermione, and her age, rendered him very doubtful as to her role in the life on the island. Vere's gay simplicity had jumped to the eyes. But now she, too, was becoming something of a mystery.

He traced it all to Emilio, and was hot with a curiosity that was linked closely with his passion.

Should he go to see Emilio? He considered the question and resolved not to do so. He would try to be patient until the night of the dinner on the island. He would be birbante, would play the fox, as Emilio surely had done. The Panacci temper should find out that one member of the family could control it, when such control served his purpose.

He was on fire with a lust for action as he made his resolutions. Vere's coolness to him, even avoidance of him, had struck hammer-like blows upon his amour propre. He saw her now—yes, he saw her—coming down the stairs behind Peppina. Had they been together? Did they talk together, the cold, the prudish Signorina Inglese—so he called Vere now in his anger—and the former decoy of Maria Fortunata?

And then a horrible conception of Emilio's role in all this darted into his mind, and for a moment he thought of Hermione as a blind innocent, like his subservient mother, of Vere as a preordained victim. Then the blood coursed through his veins like fire, and he felt as if he could no longer sit still in the boat.

"Avanti! avanti!" he cried to the sailors. "Dio mio! There is enough breeze to sail. Run up the sail! Madonna Santissima! We shall not be to Naples till it is night. Avanti! avanti!"

Then he lay back, crossed his arms behind his head, and, with an effort, closed his eyes.

He was determined to be calm, not to let himself go. He put his fingers on his pulse.

"That cursed fever! I believe it is coming back," he said to himself.

He wondered how soon the Signora would arrange that dinner on the island. He did not feel as if he could wait long without seeing Vere again. But would it ever be possible to see her alone? Emilio saw her alone. His white hairs brought him privileges. He might take her out upon the sea.

The Marchesino still had his fingers on his pulse. Surely it was fluttering very strangely. Like many young Italians he was a mixture of fearlessness and weakness, of boldness and childishness.

"I must go to mamma! I must have medicine—the doctor," he thought, anxiously. "There is something wrong with me. Perhaps I have been looked on by the evil eye."

And down he went to the bottom of a gulf of depression.

CHAPTER XXII

Hermione was very thankful that the Marchesino had gone. She felt that the lunch had been a failure, and was sorry. But she had done her best. Vere and the young man himself had frustrated her, she thought. It was a bore having to entertain any one in the hot weather. As she went up-stairs she said to herself that her guest's addio had been the final fiasco of an unfortunate morning. Evidently he knew something of Peppina, and had been shocked to find the girl in the house. Emile had told her—Hermione—that she was an impulsive. Had she acted foolishly in taking Peppina? She had been governed in the matter by her heart, in which dwelt pity and a passion for justice. Surely the sense of compassion, the love of fair dealing could not lead one far astray. And yet, since Peppina had been on the island the peace of the life there had been lessened. Emile had become a little different, Vere too. And even Gaspare—was there not some change in him?

She thought of Giulia's assertion that the disfigured girl had the evil eye.

She had laughed at the idea, and had spoken very seriously to Giulia, telling her that she was not to communicate her foolish suspicion to the other servants. But certainly the joy of their life in this House of the Sea was not what it had been. And even Vere had had forebodings with which Peppina had been connected. Perhaps the air of Italy, this clear, this radiant atmosphere which seemed created to be the environment of happiness, contained some subtle poison that was working in them all, turning them from cool reason.

She thought of Emile, calling up before her his big frame his powerful face with the steady eyes. And a wave of depression went over her, as she understood how very much she had relied on him since the death of Maurice. Without him she would indeed have been a derelict.

Again that bitter flood of curiosity welled up in her. She wondered where Vere was, but she did not go to the girl's room. Instead, she went to her own sitting-room. Yesterday she had been restless. She had felt driven. To-day she felt even worse. But to-day she knew what yesterday she had not known—Vere's solitary occupation. Why had not Vere told her, confided in her? It was a very simple matter. The only reason why it now assumed an importance to her was because it had been so carefully concealed. Why had not Vere told her all about it, as she told her other little matters of their island life, freely, without even a thought of hesitation?

She sought the reason of this departure which was paining her. But at first she did not find it.

Perhaps Vere wanted to give her a surprise. For a moment her heart grew lighter. Vere might be preparing something to please or astonish her mother, and Emile might be in the secret, might be assisting in some way. But no! Vere's mysterious occupation had been followed too long. And then Emile had not always known what it was. He had only known lately.

Those long reveries of Vere upon the sea, when she lay in the little boat in the shadow cast by the cliffs over the Saint's Pool—they were the prelude to work; imaginative, creative perhaps.

And Vere was not seventeen.

Hermione smiled to herself rather bitterly, thinking of the ignorance, of the inevitable folly of youth. The child, no doubt, had dreams of fame. What clever, what imaginative and energetic child has not such dreams at some period or other? How absurd we all are, thinking to climb to the stars almost as soon as we can see them!

And then the smile died away from Hermione's lips as the great tenderness of the mother within her was moved by the thought of the disappointments that come with a greater knowledge of life. Vere would suffer when she learned the truth, when she knew the meaning of failure.

Quite simply and naturally Hermione was including her child inevitably within the circle of her own disaster.

If Emile knew, why did he not tell Vere what he had told her mother?

But Emile had surely shown much greater interest in Vere just lately than ever before?

Was Emile helping Vere in what she was doing? But if he was, then he must believe in Vere's capacity to do something that was worth doing.

Hermione knew the almost terrible sincerity of Artois in the things of the intellect, his clear, unwavering judgment, his ruthless truthfulness. Nothing would ever turn him from that. Nothing, unless he—

Her face became suddenly scarlet, then pale. A monstrous idea had sprung up in her mind; an idea so monstrous that she strove to thrust it away violently, without even contemplating it. Why had Vere not told her? There must be some good and sufficient reason. Vehemently—to escape from that monstrous idea—she sought it. Why had everything else in her child been revealed to her, only this one thing been hidden from her?

She searched the past, Vere and herself in that past. And now, despite her emotion, her full intelligence was roused up and at work. And presently she remembered that Emile and Vere shared the knowledge of her own desire to create, and her utter failure to succeed in creation. Emile knew the whole naked truth of that. Vere did not. But Vere knew something. Could that mutual knowledge be the reason of this mutual secrecy? As women often do, Hermione had leaped into the very core of the heart of the truth, had leaped out of the void, guided by some strange instinct never alive in man. But, as women very seldom do, she shrank away from the place she had gained. Instead of triumphing, she was afraid. She remembered how often her imagination had betrayed her, how it had created phantoms, had ruined for her the lagging hours. Again and again she had said to herself, "I will beware of it." Now she accused it of playing her false once more, of running wild. Sharply she pulled herself up. She was assuming things. That was her great fault, to assume that things were that which perhaps they were not.

How often Emile had told her not to trust her imagination! She would heed him now. She knew nothing. She did not even know for certain that Vere's flush, Vere's abrupt hesitation at lunch, were a betrayal of the child's secret.

But that she would find out.

Again the fierce curiosity besieged and took possession of her. After all, she was a mother. A mother had rights. Surely she had a right to know what another knew of her child.

"I will ask Vere," she said to herself.

Once before she had said to herself that she would do that, and she had not done it. She had felt that to do it would be a humiliation. But now she was resolved to do it, for she knew more of her own condition and was more afraid of herself. She began to feel like one who has undergone a prolonged strain of work, who believes that it has not been too great and has been capably supported, and who suddenly is aware of a yielding, of a downward and outward movement, like a wide and spreading disintegration, in which brain, nerves, the whole body are involved.

Yet what had been the strain that she had been supporting, that now suddenly she began to feel too much? The strain of a loss. Time should have eased it. But had Time eased it, or only lengthened the period during which she had been forced to carry her load? People ought to get accustomed to things. She knew that it is supposed by many that the human body, the human mind, the human heart can get accustomed—by which is apparently meant can cease passionately and instinctively to strive to repel—can get accustomed to anything. Well she could not. Never could she get accustomed to the loss of love, of man's love. The whole world might proclaim its proverbs. For her they had no truth. For her—and for how many other silent women!

And now suddenly she felt that for years she had been struggling, and that the struggle had told upon her far more than she had ever suspected. Nothing must be added to her burden or she would sink down. The dust would cover her. She would be as nothing—or she would be as something terrible, nameless.

She must ask Vere, do what she had said to herself that she would not do. Unless she had the complete confidence of her child she could not continue to do without the cherishing love she had lost. She saw herself a cripple, something maimed. Hitherto she had been supported by blessed human crutches: by Vere, Emile, Gaspare. How heavily she had leaned upon them! She knew that now. How heavily she must still lean if she were to continue on her way. And a fierce, an almost savage something, desperate and therefore arbitrary, said within her:

"I will keep the little that I have: I will—I will."

"The little!" Had she said that? It was wicked of her to say that. But she had had the wonderful thing. She had held for a brief time the magic of the world within the hollow of her hands, within the shadow of her heart. And the others? Children slip from their parents' lives into the arms of another whose call means more to them than the voices of those who made them love. Friends drift away, scarcely knowing why, divided from each other by the innumerable channels that branch from the main stream of existence. Even a faithful servant cannot be more than a friend.

There is one thing that is great, whose greatness makes the smallness of all the other things. And so Hermione said, "the little that I have," and there was truth in it. And there was as vital a truth in the fact of her whole nature recognizing that little's enormous value to her. Not for a moment did she underrate her possession. Indeed, she had to fight against the tendency to exaggeration. Her intellect said to her that, in being so deeply moved by such a thing as the concealment from her by Vere of something innocent of which Emile knew, she was making a water drop into an ocean. Her intellect said that. But her heart said no.

And the voice of her intellect sank away like the frailest echo that ever raised its spectral imitation of a reality. And the voice of her heart rang out till it filled her world.

And so the argument was over.

She thought she heard a step below, and looked out of the window into the sunshine.

Gaspare was there. It was his hour of repose, and he was smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in white linen, without a coat, and had a white linen hat on his head. He stood near the house, apparently looking out to sea. And his pose was meditative. Hermione watched him. The sight of him reminded her of another question she wished to ask.

Gaspare had one hand in the pocket of his white trousers. With the other he held the cigarette. Hermione saw the wreaths of pale smoke curling up and evaporating in the shining, twinkling air, which seemed full of joyous, dancing atoms. But presently his hand forgot to do its work. The cigarette, only half smoked, went out, and he stood there as if plunged in profound thought. Hermione wondered what he was thinking about.

"Gaspare!"

She said it softly. Evidently he did not hear.

"Gaspare! Gaspare!"

Each time she spoke a little louder, but still he took no notice.

She leaned farther out and called:

"Gaspare!"

This time he heard and started violently, dropped the cigarette, then, without looking up, bent down slowly, recovered it, and turned round.

"Signora?"

The sun shone full on his upturned face, showing to Hermione the dogged look which sometimes came to it when anything startled him.

"I made you jump."

"No, Signora."

"But I did. What were you thinking about?"

"Nothing, Signora. Why are you not asleep?"

He spoke almost as if she injured him by being awake.

"I couldn't sleep to-day. What are you going to do this afternoon?"

"I don't know, Signora. Do you wish me to do anything for you?"

"Well—"

She had a wish to clear things up, to force her life, the lives of those few she cared for, out of mystery into a clear light. She had a desire to chastise thought by strong, bracing action.

"I rather want to send a note to Don Emilio."

"Si, Signora."

His voice did not sound pleased.

"It is too hot to row all the way to Naples. Couldn't you go to the village and take the tram to the hotel—if I write the note?"

"If you like, Signora."

"Or would it be less bother to row as far as Mergellina, and take a tram or carriage from there?

"I can do that, Signora."

He sounded a little more cheerful.

"I think I'll write the note, Gaspare, then. And you might take it some time—whenever you like. You might come and fetch it in five minutes."

"Very well, Signora."

He moved away and she went to her writing-table. She sat down, and slowly, with a good deal of hesitation and thought, she wrote part of a letter asking Emile to come to dine whenever he liked at the island. And now came the difficulty. She knew Emile did not want to meet the Marchesino there. Yet she was going to ask them to meet each other. She had told the Marchesino so. Should she tell Emile? Perhaps, if she did, he would refuse to come. But she could never lay even the smallest trap for a friend. So she wrote on, asking Emile to let her know the night he would come as she had promised to invite the Marchesino to meet him.

"Be a good friend and do this for me," she ended, "even if it bores you. The Marchese lunched here alone with us to-day, and it was a fiasco. I think we were very inhospitable, and I want to wipe away the recollection of our dulness from his mind. Gaspare will bring me your answer."

At the bottom she wrote "Hermione." But just as she was going to seal the letter in its envelope she took it out, and added, "Delarey" to her Christian name.

"Hermione Delarey." She looked at the words for a long time before she rang the bell for Gaspare.

When she gave him the letter, "Are you going by Mergellina?" she asked him.

"Si, Signora."

He stood beside her for a moment; then, as she said nothing more, turned to go out.

"Gaspare, wait one minute," she said, quickly.

"Si, Signora."

"I meant to ask you last night, but—well, we spoke of other things, and it was so late. Have you ever noticed anything about that boy, Ruffo, anything at all, that surprised you?"

"Surprised me, Signora?"

"Surprised you, or reminded you of anything?"

"I don't know what you mean, Signora."

Gaspare's voice was hard and cold. He looked steadily at Hermione, as a man of strong character sometimes looks when he wishes to turn his eyes away from the glance of another, but will not, because of his manhood.

Hermione hesitated to go on, but something drove her to be more explicit.

"Have you never noticed in Ruffo a likeness to—to your Padrone?" she said, slowly.

"My Padrone!"

Gaspare's great eyes dropped before hers, and he stood looking on the floor. She saw a deep flush cover his brown skin.

"I am sure you have noticed it, Gaspare," she said. "I can see you have. Why did you not tell me?"

At that moment she felt angry with herself and almost angry with him. Had he noticed this strange, this subtle resemblance between the fisher-boy and the dead man at once, long before she had? Had he been swifter to see such a thing than she?

"What do you mean, Signora? What are you talking about?"

He looked ugly.

"How can a fisher-boy, a nothing from Mergellina, look like my Padrone?"

Now he lifted his eyes, and they were fierce—or so she thought.

"Signora, how can you say such a thing?"

"Gaspare?" she exclaimed, astonished at his sudden vehemence.

"Signora—scusi! But—but there will never be another like my Padrone."

He opened the door and went quickly out of the room, and when the door shut it was as if an iron door shut upon a furnace.

Hermione stood looking at this door. She drew a long breath.

"But he has seen it!" she said, aloud. "He has seen it."

And Emile?

Had she been a blind woman, she who had so loved the beauty that was dust? She thought of Vere and Ruffo standing together, so youthful, so happy in their simple, casual intercourse.

It was as if Vere had been mysteriously drawn to this boy because of his resemblance to the father she had never seen.

Vere! Little Vere!

Again the mother's tenderness welled up in Hermione's heart, this time sweeping away the reluctance to be humble.

"I will go to Vere now."

She went to the door, as she had gone to it the previous day. But this time she did not hesitate to open it. A strong impulse swept her along, and she came to her child's room eagerly.

"Vere!"

She knocked at the door.

"Vere! May I come in?"

She knocked again. There was no answer.

Then she opened the door and went in. Possibly Vere was sleeping. The mosquito-net was drawn round the bed, but Hermione saw that her child was not behind it. Vere had gone out somewhere.

The mother went to the big window which looked out upon the sea. The green Venetian blind was drawn. She pushed up one of its flaps and bent to look through. Below, a little way out on the calm water, she saw Vere's boat rocking softly in obedience to the small movement that is never absent from the sea. The white awning was stretched above the stern-seats, and under it lay Vere in her white linen dress, her small head, not protected by a hat, supported by a cushion. She lay quite still, one arm on the gunwale of the boat, the other against her side. Hermione could not see whether her eyes were shut or open.

The mother watched her for a long time through the blind.

How much of power was enclosed in that young figure that lay so still, so perfectly at ease, cradled on the great sea, warmed and cherished by the tempered fires of the sun! How much of power to lift up and to cast down, to be secret, to create sorrow, to be merciful! Wonderful, terrible human power!

The watching mother felt just then that she was in the hands of the child.

"Now it's the child's turn."

Surely Vere must be asleep. Such absolute stillness must mean temporary withdrawal of consciousness.

Just as Hermione was thinking this, Vere's left hand moved. The girl lifted it up to her face, and gently and repeatedly rubbed her eyebrow.

Hermione dropped the flap of the blind. The little, oddly natural movement had suddenly made her feel that it was not right to be watching Vere when the child must suppose herself to be unobserved and quite alone with the sea.

As she came away from the window she glanced quickly round the room, and upon a small writing-table at the foot of the bed she saw a number of sheets of paper lying loose, with a piece of ribbon beside them. They had evidently been taken out of the writing-table drawer, which was partially open, and which, as Hermione could see, contained other sheets of a similar kind. Hermione looked, and then looked away. She passed the table and reached the door. When she was there she glanced again at the sheets of paper. They were covered with writing. They drew, they fascinated her eyes, and she stood still, with her hand resting on the door-handle. As a rule it would have seemed perfectly natural to her to read anything that Vere had left lying about, either in her own room or anywhere else. Until just lately her child had never had, or dreamed of having any secret from her. Never had Vere received a letter that her mother had not seen. Secrets simply did not exist between them—secrets, that is, of the child from the mother.

But it was not so now. And that was why those sheets of paper drew and held the mother's eyes.

She had, of course, a perfect right to read them. Or had she—she who had said to Vere, "Keep your secrets"? In those words had she not deliberately relinquished such a right? She stood there thinking, recalling those words, debating within herself this question—and surely with much less than her usual great honesty.

Emile, she was sure, had read the writing upon those sheets of paper.

She did not know exactly why she was certain of this—but she was certain, absolutely certain. She remembered the long-ago days, when she had submitted to him similar sheets. What Emile had read surely she might read. Again that intense and bitter curiosity mingled with something else, a strange, new jealousy in which it was rooted. She felt as if Vere, this child whom she had loved and cared for, had done her a cruel wrong, had barred her out from the life in which she had always been till now the best loved, the most absolutely trusted dweller. Why should she not take that which she ought to have been given?

Again she was conscious of that painful, that piteous sensation of one who is yielding under a strain that has been too prolonged. Something surely collapsed within her, something of the part of her being that was moral. She was no longer a free woman in that moment. She was governed. Or so she felt, perhaps deceiving herself.

She went swiftly and softly over to the table and bent over the sheets.

At first she stood. Then she sat down. She took up the paper, handled it, held it close to her eyes.

Verses! Vere was writing verses. Of course! Every one begins by being a poet. Hermione smiled, almost laughed aloud. Poor little Vere with her poor little secret! There was still that bitterness in the mother, that sense of wrong. But she read on and on. And presently she started and her hand shook.

She had come to a poem that was corrected in Vere's handwriting, and on the margin was written, "Monsieur Emile's idea."

So there had been a conference, and Emile was advising Vere.

Hermione's hand shook so violently that she could not go on reading for a moment, and she laid the paper down. She felt like one who has suddenly unmasked a conspiracy against herself. It was useless for her intellect to deny this conspiracy, for her heart proclaimed it.

Long ago Emile had told her frankly that it was in vain for her to waste her time in creative work, that she had not the necessary gift for it. And now he was secretly assisting her own child—a child of sixteen—to do what he had told her, the mother, not to do. Why was he doing this?

Again the monstrous idea that she had forcibly dismissed from her mind that day returned to Hermione. There is one thing that sometimes blinds the most clear-sighted men, so that they cannot perceive truth.

But—Hermione again bent over the sheets of paper, this time seeking for a weapon against the idea which assailed her. On several pages she found emendations, excisions, on one a whole verse completely changed. And on the margins were pencilled "Monsieur Emile's suggestion"; "Monsieur E.'s advice"; and once, "These two lines invented by Monsieur Emile."

When had Vere and Emile had the opportunity for this long and secret discussion? On the day of the storm they had been together alone. They had had tea together alone. And on the night Emile dined on the island they had been out in the boat together for a long time. All this must have been talked over then.

Yes.

She read on. Had Vere talent? Did her child possess what she had longed for, and had been denied? She strove to read critically, but she was too excited, too moved to do so. All necessary calm was gone. She was painfully upset. The words moved before her eyes, running upward in irregular lines that resembled creeping things, and she saw rings of light, yellow in the middle and edged with pale blue.

She pushed away the sheets of paper, got up and went again to the window. She must look at Vere once more, look at her with this new knowledge, look at her critically, with a piercing scrutiny. And she bent down as before, and moved a section of the blind, pushing it up.

There was no boat beneath her on the sea.

She dropped the blind sharply, and all the blood in her body seemed to make a simultaneous movement away from the region of the heart.

Vere was perhaps already in the house, running lightly up to the room. She would come in and find her mother there. She would guess what her mother had been doing.

Hermione did not hesitate. She crossed the room swiftly, opened the door, and went out. She reached her own room without meeting Vere. But she had not been in it for more than a minute and a half when she heard Vere come up-stairs, the sound of her door open and shut.

Hermione cleared her throat. She felt the need of doing something physical. Then she pulled up her blinds and let the hot sun stream in upon her.

She felt dark just then—black.

In a moment she found that she was perspiring. The sun was fierce—that, of course, must be the reason. But she would not shut the sun out. She must have light around her, although there was none within her.

She was thankful she had escaped in time. If she had not, if Vere had run into the room and found her there, she was sure she would have frightened her child by some strange outburst. She would have said or done something—she did not at all know what—that would perhaps have altered their relations irrevocably. For, in that moment, the sense of self-control, of being herself—so she put it—had been withdrawn from her.

She would regain it, no doubt. She was even now regaining it. Already she was able to say to herself that she was not seeing things in their true proportions, that some sudden crisis of the nerves, due perhaps to some purely physical cause, had plunged her into a folly of feeling from which she would soon escape entirely. She was by nature emotional and unguarded: therefore specially likely to be the victim in mind of any bodily ill.

And then she was not accustomed to be unwell. Her strength of body was remarkable. Very seldom had she felt weak.

She remembered one night, long ago in Sicily, when an awful bodily weakness had overtaken her. But that had been caused by dread. The mind had reacted upon the body. Now, she was sure of it, body had reacted on mind.

Yet she had not been ill.

She felt unequal to the battle of pros and cons that was raging within her.

"I'll be quiet," she thought. "I'll read."

And she took up a book.

She read steadily for an hour, understanding thoroughly all she read, and wondering how she had ever fancied she cared about reading. Then she laid the book down and looked at the clock. It was nearly four. Tea would perhaps refresh her. And after tea? She had loved the island, but to-day she felt almost as if it were a prison. What was there to be done? She found herself wondering for the first time how she had managed to "get through" week after week there. And in a moment her wonder made her realize the inward change in her, the distance that now divided her from Vere, the gulf that lay between them.

A day with a stranger may seem long, but a month with a friend how short! To live with Vere had been like living with a part of herself. But now what would it be like? And when Emile came, and they three were together?

When Hermione contemplated that reunion, she felt that it would be to her intolerable. And yet she desired it. For she wanted to know something, and she was certain that if she, Vere, and Emile could be together, without any fourth person, she would know it.

A little while ago, when she had longed for bracing action, she had resolved to ask Emile to meet the Marchesino. She had felt as if that meeting would clear the air, would drive out the faint mystery which seemed to be encompassing them about. The two men, formerly friends, were evidently in antagonism now. She wanted to restore things to their former footing, or to make the enmity come out into the open, to understand it thoroughly, and to know if she and Vere had any part in it. Her desire had been to throw open windows and let in light.

But now things were changed. She understood, she knew more. And she wanted to be alone with Emile and with Vere. Then, perhaps, she would understand everything.

She said this to herself quite calmly. Her mood was changed. The fire had died down in her, and she felt almost sluggish, although still restless. The monstrous idea had come to her again. She did not vehemently repel it. By nature she was no doubt an impulsive. But now she meant to be a watcher. Before she took up her book and began to read she had been, perhaps, almost hysterical, had been plunged in a welter of emotion in which reason was drowned, had not been herself.

But now she felt that she was herself.

There was something that she wished to know, something that the knowledge she had gained in her child's room that day suggested as a possibility.

She regretted her note to Emile. Why had not she asked him to come alone, to-morrow, or even to-night—yes, to-night?

If she could only be with him and Vere for a few minutes to-night!

CHAPTER XXIII

When Artois received Hermione's letter he asked who had brought it, and obtained from the waiter a fairly accurate description of Gaspare.

"Please ask him to come up," he said. "I want to speak to him."

Two or three minutes later there was a knock at the door and Gaspare walked in, with a large-eyed inquiring look.

"Good-day, Gaspare. You've never seen my quarters before, I think," said Artois, cordially.

"No, Signore. What a beautiful room!"

"Then smoke a cigar, and I'll write an answer to this letter."

"Thank you, Signore."

Artois gave him a cigar, and sat down to answer the letter, while Gaspare went out on to the balcony and stood looking at the bathers who were diving from the high wooden platform of the bath establishment over the way. When Artois had finished writing he joined Gaspare. He had a great wish that day to break down a reserve he had respected for many years, but he knew Gaspare's determined character, his power of obstinate, of dogged silence. Gaspare's will had been strong when he was a boy. The passing of the years had certainly not weakened it. Nevertheless, Artois was moved to make the attempt which he foresaw would probably end in failure.

He gave Gaspare the letter, and said:

"Don't go for a moment. I want to have a little talk with you."

"Si, Signore."

Gaspare put the letter into the inner pocket of his jacket, and stood looking at Artois, holding the cigar in his left hand. In all these years Artois had never found out whether Gaspare liked him or not. He wished now that he knew.

"Gaspare," he said, "I think you know that I have a great regard for your Padrona."

"Si, Signore. I know it."

The words sounded rather cold.

"She has had a great deal of sorrow to bear."

"Si, Signore."

"One does not wish that she should be disturbed in any way—that any fresh trouble should come into her life."

Gaspare's eyes were always fixed steadily upon Artois, who, as he spoke the last words, fancied he saw come into them an expression that was almost severely ironical. It vanished at once as Gaspare said:

"No, Signore."

Artois felt the iron of this faithful servant's impenetrable reserve, but he continued very quietly and composedly:

"You have always stood between the Padrona and trouble whenever you could. You always will—I am sure of that."

"Si, Signore."

"Do you think there is any danger to the Signora's happiness here?"

"Here, Signore?"

Gaspare's emphasis seemed to imply where they were just then standing. Artois was surprised, then for a moment almost relieved. Apparently Gaspare had no thought in common with the strange, the perhaps fantastic thought that had been in his own mind.

"Here—no!" he said, with a smile. "Only you and I are here, and we shall not make the Signora unhappy."

"Chi lo sa?" returned Gaspare.

And again that ironical expression was in his eyes.

"By here I meant here in Naples, where we all are—or on the island, for instance."

"Signore, in this life there is trouble for all."

"But some troubles, some disasters can be avoided."

"It's possible."

"Gaspare"—Artois looked at him steadily, searchingly even, and spoke very gravely—"I respect you for your discretion of many years. But if you know of any trouble, any danger that is near to the Signora, and against which I could help you to protect her, I hope you will trust me and tell me. I think you ought to do that."

"I don't know what you mean, Signore."

"Are you quite sure, Gaspare? Are you quite sure that no one comes to the island who might make the Signora very unhappy?"

Gaspare had dropped his eyes. Now he lifted them, and looked Artois straight in the face.

"No, Signore, I am not sure of that," he said.

There was nothing rude in his voice, but there was something stern. Artois felt as if a strong, determined man stood in his path and blocked the way. But why? Surely they were at cross purposes. The working of Gaspare's mind was not clear to him.

After a moment of silence, he said:

"What I mean is this. Do you think it would be a good thing if the Signora left the island?"

"Left the island, Signore?"

"Yes, and went away from Naples altogether."

"The Signorina would never let the Padrona go. The Signorina loves the island and my Padrona loves the Signorina."

"But the Signorina would not be selfish. If it was best for her mother to go—"

"The Signorina would not think it was best; she would never think it was best to leave the island."

"But what I want to know, Gaspare, is whether you think it would be best for them to leave the island. That's what I want to know—and you haven't told me."

"I am a servant, Signore. I cannot tell such things."

"You are a servant—yes. But you are also a friend. And I think nobody could tell better than you."

"I am sure the Signora will not leave the island till October, Signore. She says we are all to stay until the end of October."

"And now it's July."

"Si, Signore. Now it's July."

In saying the last words Gaspare's voice sounded fatalistic, and Artois believed that he caught an echo of a deep-down thought of his own. With all his virtues Gaspare had an admixture of the spirit of the East that dwells also in Sicily, a spirit that sometimes, brooding over a nature however fine, prevents action, a spirit that says to a man, "This is ordained. This is destiny. This is to be."

"Gaspare," Artois said, strong in this conviction, "I have heard you say, 'e il destino.' But you know we can often get away from things if we are quick-witted."

"Some things, Signore."

"Most things, perhaps. Don't you trust me?"

"Signore!"

"Don't you think, after all these years, you can trust me?"

"Signore, I respect you as I respect my father."

"Well, Gaspare, remember this. The Signora has had trouble enough in her life. We must keep out any more."

"Signore, I shall always do what I can to spare my Padrona. Thank you for the cigar, Signore. I ought to go now. I have to go to Mergellina for the boat."

"To Mergellina?"

Again Artois looked at him searchingly.

"Si, Signore; I left the boat at Mergellina. It is very hot to row all the way here."

"Yes. A rivederci, Gaspare. Perhaps I shall sail round to the island to-night after dinner. But I'm not sure. So you need not say I am coming."

"A rivederci, Signore."

When Gaspare had gone, Artois said to himself, "He does not trust me."

Artois was surprised to realize how hurt he felt at Gaspare's attitude towards him that day. Till now their mutual reserve had surely linked them together. Then silence had been a bond. But there was a change, and the bond seemed suddenly loosened.

"Damn the difference between the nations!" Artois thought. "How can we grasp the different points of view? How can even the cleverest of us read clearly in others of a different race from our own?"

He felt frustrated, as he had sometimes felt frustrated by Orientals. And he knew an anger of the brain as well as an anger of the heart. But this anger roused him, and he resolved to do something from which till now he had instinctively shrunk, strong-willed man though he was. If Gaspare would not help him he would act for himself. Possibly the suspicion, the fear that beset him was groundless. He had put it away from him more than once, had said that it was absurd, that his profession of an imaginative writer rendered him, perhaps, more liable to strange fancies than were other men, that it encouraged him to seek instinctively for drama, and that what a man instinctively and perpetually seeks he will often imagine that he has found. Now he would try to prove what was the truth.

He had written to Hermione saying that he would be glad to dine with her on any evening that suited the Marchesino, that he had no engagements. Why she wished him to meet the Marchesino he did not know. No doubt she had some woman's reason. The one she gave was hardly enough, and he divined another beneath it. Certainly he did not love Doro on the island, but perhaps it was as well that they should meet there once, and get over their little antagonism, an antagonism that Artois thought of as almost childish. Life was not long enough for quarrels with boys like Doro. Artois had refused Hermione's invitation on the sea abruptly. He had felt irritated for the moment, because he had for the moment been unusually expansive, and her announcement that Doro was to be there had fallen upon him like a cold douche. And then he had been nervous, highly strung from overwork. Now he was calm, and could look at things as they were. And if he noticed anything leading him to suppose that the Marchesino was likely to try to abuse Hermione's hospitality he meant to have it out with him. He would speak plainly and explain the English point of view. Doro would no doubt attack him on the ground of his interview with Maria Fortunata. He did not care. Somehow his present preoccupation with Hermione's fate, increased by the visit of Gaspare, rendered his irritation against the Marchesino less keen than it had been. But he thought he would probably visit the island to-night—after another visit which he intended to pay. He could not start at once. He must give Gaspare time to take the boat and row off. For his first visit was to Mergellina.

After waiting an hour he started on foot, keeping along by the sea, as he did not wish to meet acquaintances, and was likely to meet them in the Villa. As he drew near to Mergellina he felt a great and growing reluctance to do what he had come to do, to make inquiries into a certain matter; and he believed that this reluctance, awake within him although perhaps he had scarcely been aware of it, had kept him inactive during many days. Yet he was not sure of this. He was not sure when a faint suspicion had first been born in his mind. Even now he said to himself that what he meant to do, if explained to the ordinary man, would probably seem to him ridiculous, that the ordinary man would say, "What a wild idea! Your imagination runs riot." But he thought of certain subtle things which had seemed like indications, like shadowy pointing fingers; of a look in Gaspare's eyes when they had met his—a hard, defiant look that seemed shutting him out from something; of a look in another face one night under the moon; of some words spoken in a cave with a passion that had reached his heart; of two children strangely at ease in each other's society. And again the thought pricked him, "Is not everything possible—even that?" All through his life he had sought truth with persistence, sometimes almost with cruelty, yet now he was conscious of timidity, almost of cowardice—as if he feared to seek it.

Long ago he had known a cowardice akin to this, in Sicily. Then he had been afraid, not for himself but for another. To-day again the protective instinct was alive in him. It was that instinct which made him afraid, but it was also that instinct which kept him to his first intention, which pushed him on to Mergellina. No safety can be in ignorance for a strong man. He must know. Then he can act.

When Artois reached Mergellina he looked about for Ruffo, but he could not see the boy. He had never inquired Ruffo's second name. He might make a guess at it. Should he? He looked at a group of fishermen who were talking loudly on the sand just beyond the low wall. One of them had a handsome face bronzed by the sun, frank hazel eyes, a mouth oddly sensitive for one of his class. His woolen shirt, wide open, showed a medal resting on his broad chest, one of those amulets that are said to protect the fishermen from the dangers of the sea. Artois resolved to ask this man the question he wished, yet feared to put to some one. Afterwards he wondered why he had picked out this man. Perhaps it was because he looked happy.

Artois caught the man's eye.

"You want a boat, Signore?"

With a quick movement the fellow was beside him on the other side of the wall.

"I'll take your boat—perhaps this evening."

"At what hour, Signore?"

"We'll see. But first perhaps you can tell me something."

"What is it?"

"You live here at Mergellina?"

"Si, Signore."

"Do you know any one called—called Buonavista?"

The eyes of Artois were fixed on the man's face.

"Buonavista—si, Signore."

"You do?"

"Ma si, Signore," said the man, looking at Artois with a sudden flash of surprise. "The family Buonavista, I have known it all my life."

"The family? Oh, then there are many of them?"

The man laughed.

"Enrico Buonavista has made many children, and is proud of it, I can tell you. He has ten—his father before him—"

"Then they are Neapolitans?"

"Neapolitans! No, Signore. They are from Mergellina."

Artois smiled. The tension which had surprised the sailor left his face.

"I understand. But there is no Sicilian here called Buonavista?"

"A Sicilian, Signore? I never heard of one. Are there Buonavistas in Sicily?"

"I have met with the name there once. But perhaps you can tell me of a boy, one of the fishermen, called Ruffo?"

"Ruffo Scarla? You mean Ruffo Scarla, who fishes with Giuseppe—Mandano Giuseppe, Signore?"

"It may be. A young fellow, a Sicilian by birth, I believe."

"Il Siciliano! Si, Signore. We call him that, but he has never been in Sicily, and was born in America."

"That's the boy."

"Do you want him, Signore? But he is not here to-day. He is at sea to-day."

"I did want to speak to him."

"But he is not a boatman, Signore. He does not go with the travellers. He is a fisherman."

"Yes. Do you know his mother?"

"Si, Signore."

"What is her name?"

"Bernari, Signore. She is married to Antonio Bernari, who is in prison."

"In prison? What's he been doing?"

"He is always after the girls, Signore. And now he has put a knife into one."

The man shrugged his shoulders.

"Diavolo! He is jealous. He has not been tried yet, perhaps he never will be. His wife has gone into Naples to-day to see him."

"Oh, she's away?"

"Si, Signore."

"And her name, her Christian name? It's Maria, isn't it?"

"No, Signore, Maddalena—Maddalena Bernari."

Artois said nothing for a minute. Then he added:

"I suppose there are plenty of Maddalenas here in Mergellina?"

The man laughed.

"Si Signore. Marias and Maddalenas—you find them everywhere. Why, my own mamma is Maddalena, and my wife is Maria, and so is my sister."

"Exactly. And your name? I want it, so that when next I take a boat here I can ask for yours."

"Fabiano, Signore, Lari Fabiano, and my boat is the Stella del Mare."

"Thank you, Fabiano."

Artois put a lira into his hand.

"I shall take the Star of the Sea very soon."

"This evening, Signore; it will be fine for sailing this evening."

"If not this evening, another day. A rivederci, Fabiano."

"A rivederci, Signore. Buon passeggio."

The man went back to his companions, and, as Artois walked on began talking eagerly to them, and pointing after the stranger.

Artois did not know what he would do later on in the evening, but he had decided on the immediate future. He would walk up the hill to the village of Posilipo, then turn down to the left, past the entrance to the Villa Rosebery, and go to the Antico Giuseppone, where he could dine by the waterside. It was quiet there, he knew; and he could have a cutlet and a zampaglione, a cup of coffee and a cigar, and sit and watch the night fall. And when it had fallen? Well, he would not be far from the island, nor very far from Naples, and he could decide then what to do.

He followed out this plan, and arrived at the Giuseppone at evening. As he came down the road between the big buildings near the waterside he saw in the distance a small group of boys and men lounging by the three or four boats that lie at the quay, and feared to find, perhaps, a bustle and noise of people round the corner at the ristorante. But when he turned the corner and came to the little tables that were set out in the open air, he was glad to see only two men who were bending over their plates of fish soup. He glanced at them, almost without noticing them, so preoccupied was he with his thoughts, sat down at an adjoining table and ordered his simple meal. While it was being got ready he looked out over the sea.

The two men near him conversed occasionally in low voices. He paid no heed to them. Only when he had dined slowly and was sipping his black coffee did they attract his attention. He heard one of them say to the other in French:

"What am I to do? It would be terrible for me! How am I to prevent it from happening?"

His companion replied:

"I thought you had been wandering all the winter in the desert."

"I have. What has that to do with it?"

"Have you learned its lesson?"

"What lesson?"

"The lesson of resignation, of obedience to the thing that must be."

Artois looked towards the last speaker and saw that he was an Oriental, and that he was very old. His companion was a young Frenchman.

"What do those do who have not learned?" continued the Oriental. "They seek, do they not? They rebel, they fight, they try to avoid things, they try to bring things about. They lift up their hands to disperse the grains of the sand-storm. They lift up their voices to be heard by the wind from the South. They stretch forth their hands to gather the mirage into their bosom. They follow the drum that is beaten among the dunes. They are afraid of life because they know it has two kinds of gifts, and one they snatch at, and one they would refuse. And they are afraid still more of the door that all must enter, Sultan and Nomad—he who has washed himself and made the threefold pilgrimage, and he who is a leper and is eaten by flies. So it is. And nevertheless all that is to come must come, and all that is to go must go at the time appointed; just as the cloud falls and lifts at the time appointed, and the wind blows and fails, and Ramadan is here and is over."

As he ceased from speaking he got up from his chair, and, followed by the young Frenchman, he passed in front of Artois, went down to the waterside, stepped into a boat, and was rowed away into the gathering shadows of night.

Artois sat very still for a time. Then he, too, got into a boat and was rowed away across the calm water to the island.

He found Hermione sitting alone, without a lamp, on the terrace, meditating, perhaps, beneath the stars. When she saw him she got up quickly, and a strained look of excitement came into her face.

"You have come!"

"Yes. You—are you surprised? Did you wish to be alone?"

"No. Will you have some coffee?"

He shook his head.

"I dined at the Giuseppone. I had it there."

He glanced round.

"Are you looking for Vere? She is out on the cliff, I suppose. Shall we go to her?"

He was struck by her nervous uneasiness. And he thought of the words of the old Oriental, which had made upon him a profound impression, perhaps because they had seemed spoken, not to the young Frenchman, but in answer to unuttered thoughts of his own.

"Let us sit here for a minute," he said.

Hermione sat down again in silence. They talked for a little while about trifling things. And then Artois was moved to tell her of the conversation he had that evening overheard, to repeat to her, almost word for word, what the old Oriental had said. When he had finished Hermione was silent for a minute. Then she moved her chair and said, in an unsteady voice:

"I don't think I should ever learn the lesson of the desert. Perhaps only those who belong to it can learn from it."

"If it is so it is sad—for the others."

"Let us go and find Vere," she said.

"Are you sure she is on the cliff?" he asked, as they passed out by the front door.

"I think so. I am almost certain she is."

They went forward, and almost immediately heard a murmur of voices.

"Vere is with some one," said Artois.

"It must be Ruffo. It is Ruffo."

She stood still. Artois stood still beside her. The night was windless. Voices travelled through the dreaming silence.

"Don't be afraid. Sing it to me."

Vere's voice was speaking. Then a boy's voice rang out in the song of Mergellina. The obedient voice was soft and very young, though manly. And it sounded as if it sang only for one person, who was very near. Yet it was impersonal. It asked nothing from, it told nothing to, that person. Simply, and very naturally, it just gave to the night a very simple and a very natural song.

As Artois listened he felt as if he learned what he had not been able to learn that day at Mergellina. Strange as this thing was—if indeed it was—he felt that it must be, that it was ordained to be, it and all that might follow from it. He even felt almost that Hermione must already know it, have divined it, as if, therefore, any effort to hide it from her must be fruitless, or even contemptible, as if indeed all effort to conceal truth of whatever kind was contemptible.

The words of the Oriental had sunk deep into his soul.

When the song was over he turned resolutely away. He felt that those children should not be disturbed. Hermione hesitated for a moment. Then she fell in with his caprice. At the house door he bade her good-bye. She scarcely answered. And he left her standing there alone in the still night.

CHAPTER XXIV

Her unrest was greater than ever, and the desire that consumed her remained ungratified, although Emile had come to the island as if in obedience to her fierce mental summons. But she had not seen him even for a moment with Vere. Why had she let him go? When would he come again? She might ask him to come for a long day, or she might get Vere to ask him.

Vere must surely be longing to have a talk with her secret mentor, with her admirer and inspirer. And then Hermione remembered how often she had encouraged Emile, how they had discussed his work together, how he had claimed her sympathy in difficult moments, how by her enthusiasm she had even inspired him—so at least he had told her. And now he was fulfilling in her child's life an office akin to hers in his life.

The knowledge made her feel desolate, driven out. Yes, she felt as if this secret shared by child and friend had expelled her from their lives. Was that unreasonable? She wished to be reasonable, to be calm.

Calm? She thought of the old Oriental, and of his theory of resignation. Surely it was not for her, that theory. She was of different blood. She did not issue from the loins of the immutable East. And yet how much better it was to be resigned, to sit enthroned above the chances of life, to have conquered fate by absolute submission to its decrees!

Why was her heart so youthful in her middle-aged body? Why did it still instinctively clamor for sympathy, like a child's? Why could she be so easily and so cruelly wounded? It was weak. It was contemptible. She hated herself. But she could only be the thing she at that moment hated.

Her surreptitious act of the afternoon seemed to have altered her irrevocably, to have twisted her out of shape—yet she could not wish it undone, the knowledge gained by it withheld. She had needed to know what Emile knew, and chance had led her to learn it, as she had learned it, with her eyes instead of from the lips of her child.

She wondered what Vere would have said if she had been asked to reveal the secret. She would never know that now. But there were other things that she felt she must know: why Vere had never told her—and something else.

Her act of that day had twisted her out of shape. She was awry, and she felt that she must continue to be as she was, that her fearless honesty was no longer needed by her, could no longer rightly serve her in the new circumstances that others had created for her. They had been secret. She could not be open. She was constrained to watch, to conceal—to be awry, in fact.

Yet she felt guilty even while she said this to herself, guilty and ashamed, and then doubtful. She doubted her new capacity to be furtive. She could watch, but she did not know whether she could watch without showing what she was doing. And Emile was terribly observant.

This thought, of his subtlety and her desire to conceal, made her suddenly realize their altered relations with a vividness that frightened her. Where was the beautiful friendship that had been the comfort, the prop of her bereaved life? It seemed already to have sunk away into the past. She wondered what was in store for her, if there were new sorrows being forged for her in the cruel smithy of the great Ruler, sorrows that would hang like chains about her till she could go no farther. The Egyptian had said: "What is to come will come, and what is to go will go, at the time appointed." And Vere had said she felt as if perhaps there was a cross that must be borne by some one on the island, by "one of us." Was she, Hermione, picked out to bear that cross? Surely God mistook the measure of her strength. If He had He would soon know how feeble she was. When Maurice had died, somehow she had endured it. She had staggered under the weight laid upon her, but she had upheld it. But now she was much older, and she felt as if suffering, instead of strengthening, had weakened her character, as if she had not much "fight" left in her.

"I don't believe I could endure another great sorrow," she said to herself. "I'm sure I couldn't."

Just then Vere came in to bid her good-night.

"Good-night, Vere," Hermione said.

She kissed the girl gently on the forehead, and the touch of the cool skin suddenly made her long to sob, and to say many things. She took her lips away.

"Emile has been here," she said.

"Monsieur Emile!"

Vere looked round.

"But—"

"He has gone."

"Gone! But I haven't seen him!"

Her voice seemed thoroughly surprised.

"He only stayed five minutes or so."

"Oh, Madre, I wish I had known!"

There was a touch of reproach in Vere's tone, and there was something so transparently natural, so transparently innocent and girlish in her disappointment, that it told her mother something she was glad to know. Not that she had doubted it—but she was glad to know.

"We came to look for you."

"Well, but I was only on the cliff, where I always go. I was there having a little talk with Ruffo."

"I know."

"And you never called me, Madre!" Vere looked openly hurt. "Why didn't you?"

In truth, Hermione hardly knew. Surely it had been Emile who had led them away from the singing voice of Ruffo.

"Ruffo was singing."

"A song about Mergellina. Did you hear it? I do like it and the way he sings it."

The annoyance had gone from her face at the thought of the song.

"And when he sings he looks so careless and gay. Did you listen?"

"Yes, for a moment, and then we went away. I think it was Emile who made us go. He didn't want to disturb you, I think."

"I understand."

Vere's face softened. Again Hermione felt a creeping jealousy at her heart. Vere had surely been annoyed with her, but now she knew that it was Emile who had not wished to disturb the tete-a-tete on the cliff she did not mind. She even looked as if she were almost touched. Could the mother be wrong where the mere friend was right? She felt, when Vere spoke and her expression changed, the secret understanding from which she was excluded.

"What is the matter, Madre?"

"The matter! Nothing. Why?"

"You looked so odd for a minute. I thought—"

But she did not express what she had thought, for Hermione interrupted her by saying:

"We must get Emile to come for a long day. I wish you would write him a note to-morrow morning, Vere. Write for me and ask him to come on Thursday. I have a lot to do in the morning. Will you save me the trouble?" She tried to speak, carelessly. "I've a long letter to send to Evelyn Townley," she added.

"Of course, Madre. And I'll tell Monsieur Emile all I think of him for neglecting us as he has. Ah! But I remember; he's been working."

"Yes, he's been working; and one must forgive everything to the worker, mustn't one?"

"To such a worker as Monsieur Emile is, yes. I do wish you'd let me read his books, Madre."

For a moment Hermione hesitated, looking at her child.

"Why are you so anxious to read them all of a sudden?" she asked.

"Well, I'm growing up and—and I understand things I used not to understand."

Her eyes fell for a moment before her mother's, and there was a silence, in which the mother felt some truth withheld. Vere looked up again.

"And I want to appreciate Monsieur Emile properly—as you do, Madre. It seems almost ridiculous to know him so well, and not to know him really at all."

"But you do know him really."

"I'm sure he puts most of his real self into his work."

Hermione remembered her conception of Emile Artois long ago, when she only knew him through two books; that she had believed him to be cruel, that she had thought her nature must be in opposition to his. Vere did not know that side of "Monsieur Emile."

"Vere, it is true you are growing up," she said, speaking rather slowly, as if to give herself time for something. "Perhaps I was wrong the other day in what I said. You may read Emile's books if you like."

"Madre!"

Vere's face flushed with eager pleasure.

"Thank you, Madre!"

She went up to bed radiant.

When she had gone Hermione stood where she was. She had just done a thing that was mean, or at least she had done a thing from a mean, a despicable motive. She knew it as the door shut behind her child, and she was frightened of herself. Never before had she been governed by so contemptible a feeling as that which had just prompted her. If Emile ever knew, or even suspected what it was, she felt that she could never look into his face again with clear, unfaltering eyes. What madness was upon her? What change was working within her? Repulsion came, and with it the desire to combat at once, strongly, the new, the hateful self which had frightened her.

She hastened after Vere, and in a moment was knocking at the child's door.

"Who's there? Who is it?"

"Vere!" called the mother.

As she called she tried the door, and found it locked.

"Madre! It's you!"

"Yes. May I come in?"

"One tiny moment."

The voice within sounded surely a little startled and uneven, certainly not welcoming. There was a pause. Hermione heard the rustling of paper, then a drawer shut sharply.

Vere was hiding away her poems!

When Hermione understood that she felt the strong, good impulse suddenly shrivel within her, and a bitter jealousy take its place. Vere came to the door and opened it.

"Oh, come in, Madre! What is it?" she asked.

In her bright eyes there was the look of one unexpectedly disturbed. Hermione glanced quickly at the writing-table.

"You—you weren't writing my note to Monsieur Emile?" she said.

She stepped into the room. She wished she could force Vere to tell her about the poems, but without asking. She felt as if she could not continue in her present condition, excluded from Vere's confidence. Yet she knew now that she could never plead for it.

"No, Madre. I can do it to-morrow."

Vere looked and sounded surprised, and the mother felt more than ever like an intruder. Yet something dogged kept her there.

"Are you tired, Vere?" she asked.

"Not a bit."

"Then let us have a little talk."

"Of course."

Vere shut the door. Hermione knew by the way she shut it that she wanted to be alone, to go on with her secret occupation. She came back slowly to her mother, who was sitting on a chair by the bedside. Hermione took her hand, and Vere pushed up the edge of the mosquito-curtain and sat down on the bed.

"About those books of Emile's—" Hermione began.

"Oh, Madre, you're not going to—But you've promised!"

"Yes."

"Then I may?"

"Why should you wish to read such books? They will probably make you sad, and—and they may even make you afraid of Emile."

"Afraid! Why?"

"I remember long ago, before I knew him, I had a very wrong conception of him, gained from his books."

"Oh, but I know him beforehand. That makes all the difference."

"A man like Emile has many sides."

"I think we all have, Madre. Don't you?"

Vere looked straight at her mother. Hermione felt that a moment had come in which, perhaps, she could force the telling of that truth which already she knew.

"I suppose so, Vere; but we need not surely keep any side hidden from those we love, those who are nearest to us."

Vere looked a little doubtful—even, for a moment, slightly confused.

"N—o?" she said.

She seemed to consider something. Then she added:

"But I think it depends. If something in us might give pain to any one we love, I think we ought to try to hide that. I am sure we ought."

Hermione felt that each of them was thinking of the same thing, even speaking of it without mentioning it. But whereas she knew that Vere was doing so, Vere could not know that she was. So Vere was at a disadvantage. Vere's last words had opened the mother's eyes. What she had guessed was true. This secret of the poems was kept from her because of her own attempt to create and its failure. Abruptly she wondered if Vere and Emile had ever talked that failure over. At the mere thought of such a conversation her whole body tingled. She got up from her chair.

"Well, good-night, Vere," she said.

And she left the room, leaving her child amazed.

Vere did not understand why her mother had come, nor why, having come, she abruptly went away. There was something the matter with her mother. She had felt that for some time. She was more conscious than ever of it now. Around her mother there was an atmosphere of uneasiness in which she felt herself involved. And she was vaguely conscious of the new distance between them, a distance daily growing wider. Now and then, lately, she had felt almost uncomfortable with her mother, in the sitting-room when she was saying good-night, and just now when she sat on the bed. Youth is terribly quick to feel hostility, however subtle. The thought that her mother could be hostile to her had never entered Vere's head. Nevertheless, the mother's faint and creeping hostility—for at times Hermione's feeling was really that, thought she would doubtless have denied it even to herself—disagreeably affected the child.

"What can be the matter with Madre?" she thought.

She went over to the writing-table, where she had hastily shut up her poems on hearing the knock at the door, but she did not take them out again. Instead she sat down and wrote the note to Monsieur Emile. As she wrote the sense of mystery, of uneasiness, departed from her, chased away, perhaps, by the memory of Monsieur Emile's kindness to her and warm encouragement, by the thought of having a long talk with him again, of showing him certain corrections and developments carried out by her since she had seen him. The sympathy of the big man meant a great deal to her, more even than he was aware of. It lifted up her eager young heart. It sent the blood coursing through her veins with a new and ardent strength. Hermione's enthusiasm had been inherited by Vere, and with it something else that gave it a peculiar vitality, a power of lasting—the secret consciousness of talent.

Now, as she wrote her letter, she forgot all her uneasiness, and her pen flew.

At last she sighed her name—"Vere."

She was just going to put the letter into its envelope when something struck her, and she paused. The she added:

"P.S.—Just now Madre gave me leave to read your books."

CHAPTER XXV

The words of the old Oriental lingered in the mind of Artois. He was by nature more fatalistic than Hermione, and moreover he knew what she did not. Long ago he had striven against a fate. With the help of Gaspare he had conquered it—or so he had believed till now. But now he asked himself whether he had not only delayed its coming. If his suspicion were well founded,—and since his last visit to the island he felt as if it must be,—then surely all he had done with Gaspare would be in vain at the last.

If his suspicion were well founded, then certain things are ordained. They have to happen for some reason, known only to the hidden Intelligence that fashions each man's character, that develops it in joy or grief, that makes it glad with feasting, or forces it to feed upon the bread of tears.

Did Gaspare know? If the truth were what Artois suspected, and Gaspare did know it, what would Gaspare do?

That was a problem which interested Artois intensely.

The Sicilian often said of a thing "E il Destino." Yet Artois believed that for his beloved Padrona he would fight to the death. He, Artois, would leave this fight against destiny to the Sicilian. For him the Oriental's philosophy; for him resignation to the inevitable, whatever it might be.

He said to himself that to do more than he had already done to ward off the assaults of truth would be impious. Perhaps he ought never to have done anything. Perhaps it would have been far better to have let the wave sweep over Hermione long ago. Perhaps even in that fight of his there had been secret selfishness, the desire that she should not know how by his cry from Africa her happy life had been destroyed. And perhaps he was to be punished some day for that.

He did not know. But he felt, after all these years, that if to that hermitage of the sea Fate had really found the way he must let things take their course. And it seemed to him as if the old Oriental had been mysteriously appointed to come near him just at that moment, to make him feel that this was so. The Oriental had been like a messenger sent to him out of that East which he loved, which he had studied, but from which, perhaps, he had not learned enough.

Vere's letter came. He read it with eagerness and pleasure till he came to the postscript. But that startled him. He knew that Vere had never read his books. He thought her far too young to read them. Till lately he had almost a contempt for those who write with one eye on "la jeune fille." Now he could conceive writing with a new pleasure something that Vere might read. But those books of his! Why had Hermione suddenly given that permission? He remembered Peppina. Vere must have told her mother of the scene with Peppina, and how her eyes had been opened to certain truths of life, how she had passed from girlhood to womanhood through that gate of knowledge. And Hermione must have thought that it was useless to strive to keep Vere back.

But did he wish Vere to read all that he had written?

On Thursday he went over to the island with mingled eagerness and reluctance. That little home in the sea, washed by blue waters, rooted by blue skies, sun-kissed and star-kissed by day and night, drew and repelled him. There was the graciousness of youth there, of youth and promise; but there was tragedy there, too, in the heart of Hermione, and in Peppina, typified by the cross upon her cheek. And does not like draw like?

For a moment he saw the little island with a great cloud above it. But when he landed and met Vere he felt the summer, and knew that the sky was clear.

Hermione was not on the island, Vere told him. She had left many apologies, and would be home for lunch. She had had to go in to Naples to see the dentist. A tooth had troubled her in the night. She had gone by tram. As Vere explained Artois had a moment of surprise, a moment of suspicion—even of vexation. But it passed when Vere said:

"I'm afraid poor Madre suffered a great deal. She looked dreadful this morning, as if she hadn't slept all night."

"Poveretta!" said Artois.

He looked earnestly at Vere. This was the first time they had met since the revelation of Peppina. What the Marchesino had seen Artois saw more plainly, felt more strongly than the young Neapolitan had felt. But he looked at Vere, too, in search of something else, thinking of Ruffo, trying to probe into the depth of human mysteries, to find the secret spring that carried child to child.

"What do you want, Monsieur Emile?"

"I want to know how the work goes," he answered, smiling.

She flushed a little.

"And I want to tell you something," he added. "My talk with you roused me up. Vere, you set me working as I have not worked for a long while."

A lively pleasure showed in her face.

"Is that really true? But then I must be careful, or you will never come to see us any more. You will always be shut up in the hotel writing."

They mounted the cliff together and, without question or reply, as by a mutual instinct, turned towards the seat that faced Ischia, clear to-day, yet romantic with the mystery of heat. When they had sat down Vere added:

"And besides, of course, I know that it is Madre who encourages you when you are depressed about your work. I have heard you say so often."

"Your mother has done a great deal for me," said Artois, seriously—"far more than she will ever know."

There was a sound of deep, surely of eternal feeling in his voice, which suddenly touched the girl to the quick.

"I like to hear you say that—like that," she said, softly. "I think Madre does a great deal for us all."

If Hermione could have heard them her torn heart might perhaps have ceased to bleed. It had been difficult for her to do what she had done—to leave the island that morning. She had done it to discipline her nature, as Passionists scourge themselves by night before the altar. She had left Emile alone with Vere simply because she hated to do it.

The rising up of jealousy in her heart had frightened her. All night she had lain awake feeling this new and terrible emanation from her soul, conscious of this monster that lifted up its head and thrust it forth out of the darkness.

But one merit she had. She was frank with herself. She named the monster before she strove to fight it, to beat it back into the darkness from which it was emerging.

She was jealous, doubly jealous. The monopolizing instinct of strong-natured and deeply affectionate women was fiercely alive in her. Always, no doubt, she had had it. Long ago, when first she was in Sicily alone, she had dreamed of a love in the South—far away from the world. When she married she had carried her Mercury to the exquisite isolation of Monte Amato. And when that love was taken from her, and her child came and was at the age of blossom, she had brought her child to this isle, this hermitage of the sea. Emile, too, her one great friend, she had never wished to share him. She had never cared much to meet him in society. Her instinct was to have him to herself, to be with him alone in unfrequented places. She was greedy or she was timid. Which was it? Perhaps she lacked self-confidence, belief in her own attractive power. Life in the world is a fight. Woman fight for their lovers, fight for their friends, with other women: those many women who are born thieves, who are never happy unless they are taking from their sisters the possessions those sisters care for most. Hermione could never have fought with other women for the love or the friendship of a man. Her instinct, perhaps, was to carry her treasure out of all danger into the wilderness.

Two treasures she had—Vere her child, Emile her friend. And now she was jealous of each with the other. And the enormous difference in their ages made her jealousy seem the more degrading. Nevertheless, she could not feel that it was unnatural. By a mutual act they had excluded her from their lives, had withdrawn from her their confidence while giving it to each other. And their reason for doing this—she was sure of it now—was her own failure to do something in the world of art.

She was jealous of Vere because of that confidence given to Emile, and of Emile because of his secret advice and help to Vere—advice and help which he had not given to the mother, because he had plainly seen that to do so would be useless.

And when she remembered this Hermione was jealous, too, of the talent Vere must have, a talent she had longed for, but which had been denied to her. For even if Emile… and then again came the most hateful suspicion of all—but Emile could not lie about the things of art.

Had they spoken together of her failure? Again and again she asked herself the question. They must have spoken. They had spoken. She could almost hear their words—words of regret or of pity. "We must not hurt her. We must keep it from her. We must temper the wind to the shorn lamb." The elderly man and the child had read together the tragedy of her failure. To the extremes of life, youth and age, she had appeared an object of pity.

And then she thought of her dead husband's reverence of her intellect, boyish admiration of her mental gifts; and an agony of longing for his love swept over her again, and she felt that he was the only person who had been able to love her really, and that now he was gone there was no one.

At that moment she forgot Gaspare. Her sense of being abandoned, and of being humiliated, swept out many things from her memory. Only Maurice had loved her really. Only he had set her on high, where even the humblest woman longs to be set by some one. Only he had thought her better, braver, more worshipful, more loveable, than any other woman. Such love, without bringing conceit to the creature loved, gives power, creates much of what it believes in. The lack of any such love seems to withdraw the little power that there is.

Hermione, feeling in this humiliation of the imagination that she was less than nothing, clung desperately to the memory of him who had thought her much. The dividing years were gone. With a strange, a beautiful and terrible freshness, the days of her love came back. She saw Maurice's eyes looking at her with that simple, almost reverent admiration which she had smiled at and adored.

And she gripped her memory. She clung to it feverishly as she had never clung to it before. She told herself that she would live in it as in a house of shelter. For there was the desolate wind outside.

And she thought much of Ruffo, and with a strange desire—to be with him, to search for the look she loved in him. For a moment with him she had seemed to see her Mercury in the flesh. She must watch for his return.

When the morning came she began her fight. She made her excuse, and left the morning free for Emile to be with Vere.

Two dreary hours she spent in Naples. The buzzing city affected her like a nightmare. Coming back through Mergellina, she eagerly looked for Ruffo. But she did not see him. Nor had she seen him in the early morning, when she passed by the harbor where the yachts were lying in the sun.

Gaspare came with the boat to take her over from the nearest village to the island.

"Don Emilio has come?" she asked him, as she stepped into the boat.

"Si, Signora. He has been on the island a long time."

Gaspare sat down facing his Padrona and took the oars. As he rowed the boat out past the ruined "Palace of the Spirits" he looked at Hermione, and it seemed to her that his eyes pitied her.

Could Gaspare see what she was feeling, her humiliation, her secret jealousy? She felt as if she were made of glass. But she returned his gaze almost sternly, and said:

"What's the matter, Gaspare? Why do you look at me like that?"

"Signora!"

He seemed startled, and slightly reddened, then looked hurt and almost sulky.

"May I not look at you, Signora?" he asked, rather defiantly. "Have I the evil eye?"

"No—no, Gaspare! Only—only you looked at me as if something were the matter. Do I look ill?"

She asked the question with a forced lightness, with a smile. He answered, bluntly:

"Si, Signora. You look very ill."

She put up her hand to her face instinctively, as if to feel whether his words were true.

"But I'm perfectly well," she said.

"You look very ill, Signora," he returned.

"I'm a little bit tired, perhaps."

He said no more, and rowed steadily on for a while. But presently she found him looking gravely at her again.

"Signora," he began, "the Signorina loves the island."

"Yes, Gaspare."

"Do you love it?"

The question startled her. Had he read her thoughts in the last days?

"Don't you think I love it?" she asked.

"You go away from it very often, Signora."

"But I must occasionally go in to Naples!" she protested.

"Si, Signora."

"Well, but mustn't I?"

"Non lo so, Signora. Perhaps we have been here long enough. Perhaps we had better go away from here."

He spoke slowly, and with something less than his usual firmness, as if in his mind there was uncertainty, some indecision or some conflict of desires.

"Do you want to go away?" she said.

"It is not for me to want, Signora."

"I don't think the Signorina would like to go, Gaspare. She hates the idea of leaving the island."

"The Signorina is not every one," he returned.

Habitually blunt as Gaspare was, Hermione had never before heard him speak of Vere like this, not with the least impertinence, but with a certain roughness. To-day it did not hurt her. Nor, indeed, could it ever have hurt her, coming from some one so proven as Gaspare. But to-day it even warmed her, for it made her feel that some one was thinking exclusively of her—was putting her first. She longed for some expression of affection from some one. She felt that she was starving for it. And this feeling made her say:

"How do you mean, Gaspare?"

"Signora, it is for you to say whether we shall go away or stay here."

"You—you put me first, Gaspare?"

She was ashamed of herself for saying it. But she had to say it.

"First, Signora? Of course you are first."

He looked genuinely surprised.

"Are you not the Padrona?" he added. "It is for you to command."

"Yes. But I don't quite mean that."

She stopped. But she had to go on:

"I mean, would you rather do what I wanted than what any one else wanted?"

"Si, Signora—much rather."

There was more in his voice than in his words.

"Thank you, Gaspare," she said.

"Signora," he said, "if you think we had better leave the island, let us leave it. Let us go away."

"Well, but I have never said I wished to go. I am—" she paused. "I have been very contented to be here."

"Va bene, Signora."

When they reached the island Hermione felt nervous—almost as if she were to meet strangers who were critical, who would appraise her and be ready to despise her. She told herself that she was mad to feel like that; but when she thought of Emile and Vere talking of her failure—of their secret combined action to keep from her the knowledge of the effort of the child—that seemed just then to her a successful rivalry concealed—she could not dismiss the feeling.

She dreaded to meet Emile and Vere.

"I wonder where they are," she said, as she got out. "Perhaps they are on the cliff, or out in the little boat. I'll go into the house."

"Signora, I will go to the seat and see if they are there."

"Oh, don't bother—" she began.

But he ran off, springing up the steps with a strong agility, like that of a boy.

She hurried after him and went into the house. After what he had said in the boat she wished to look at herself in the glass, to see if there was anything strange or painful, anything that might rouse surprise, in her appearance. She gained her bedroom, and went at once to the mirror.

Hermione was not by nature at all a self-conscious woman. She knew that she was plain, and had sometimes, very simply, regretted it. But she did not generally think about her appearance, and very seldom now wondered what others were thinking of it. When Maurice had been with her she had often indeed secretly compared her ugliness with his beauty. But a great love breeds many regrets as well as many joys. And that was long ago. It was years since she had looked at herself in the glass with any keen feminine anxiety, any tremor of fear, or any cruel self-criticism. But now she stood for a long time before the glass, quite still, looking at her reflection with wide, almost with staring, eyes.

It was true what Gaspare said. She saw that she was looking ill, very different from her usual strong self. There was not a thread of white in her thick hair, and this fact, combined with the eagerness of her expression, the strong vivacity and intelligence that normally shone in her eyes, deceived many people as to her age. But to-day her face was strained, haggard, and feverish. Under the brown tint that the sunrays had given to her complexion there seemed to lurk a sickly white, which was most markedly suggested at the corner of the mouth. The cheek-bones seemed unusually prominent. And the eyes held surely a depth of uneasiness, of—

Hermione approached her face to the mirror till it almost touched the glass. The reflected eyes drew hers. She gazed into them with a scrutiny into which she seemed to be pouring her whole force, both of soul and body. She was trying to look at her nature, to see its shape, its color, its expression, so that she might judge of what it was capable—whether for good or evil. The eyes into which she looked both helped her and frustrated her. They told her much—too much. And yet they baffled her. When she would know all, they seemed to substitute themselves for that which she saw through them, and she found herself noticing their size, their prominence, the exact shade of their brown hue. And the quick human creature behind them was hidden from her.

But Gaspare was right. She did look ill. Emile would notice it directly.

She washed her face with cold water, then dried it almost cruelly with a rough towel. Having done this, she did not look again into the glass, but went at once down-stairs. As she came into the drawing-room she heard voices in the garden. She stood still and listened. They were the voices of Vere and Emile talking tirelessly. She could not hear what they said. Had she been able to hear it she would not have listened. She could only hear the sound made by their voices, that noise by which human beings strive to explain, or to conceal, what they really are. They were talking seriously. She heard no sounds of laughter. Vere was saying most. It seemed to Hermione that Vere never talked so much and so eagerly to her, with such a ceaseless vivacity. And there was surely an intimate sound in her voice, a sound of being warmly at ease, as if she spoke in an atmosphere of ardent sympathy.

Again the jealousy came in Hermione, acute, fierce, and travelling—like a needle being moved steadily, point downwards, through a network of quivering nerves.

"Vere!" she called out. "Vere! Emile!"

Was her voice odd, startling?

They did not hear her. Emile was speaking now. She heard the deep, booming sound of his powerful voice, that seemed expressive of strength and will.

"Vere! Emile!"

As she called again she went towards the window. She felt passionately excited. The excitement had come suddenly to her when they had not heard her first call.

"Emile! Emile!" she repeated. "Emile!"

"Madre!"

"Hermione!"

Both voices sounded startled.

"What's the matter?"

Vere appeared at the window, looking frightened.

"Hermione, what is it?"

Emile was there beside her. And he, too, looked anxious, almost alarmed.

"I only wanted to let you know I had come back," said Hermione, crushing down her excitement and forcing herself to smile.

"But why did you call like that?"

Vere spoke.

"Like what? What do you mean, figlia mia?"

"It sounded—"

She stopped and looked at Artois.

"It frightened me. And you, Monsieur Emile?"

"I, too, was afraid for a moment that something unpleasant had happened."

"You nervous people! Isn't it lunch-time?"

As they looked at her she felt they had been talking about her, about her failure. And she felt, too, as if they must be able to see in her eyes that she knew the secret Vere had wished to keep from her and thought she did not know. Emile had given her a glance of intense scrutiny, and the eyes of her child still questioned her with a sort of bright and searching eagerness.

"You make me feel as if I were with detectives," she said, laughing, but uneasily. "There's really nothing the matter."

"And your tooth, Madre? Is it better?"

"Yes, quite well. I am perfectly well. Let us go in."

Hermione had said to herself that if she could see Emile and Vere together, without any third person, she would know something that she felt she must know. When she was with them she meant to be a watcher. And now her whole being was strung to attention. But it seemed to her that for some reason they, too, were on the alert, and so were not quite natural. And she could not be sure of certain things unless the atmosphere was normal. So she said to herself now, though before she had had the inimitable confidence of woman in certain detective instincts claimed by the whole sex. At one moment the thing she feared—and her whole being recoiled from the thought of it with a shaking disgust—the thing she feared seemed to her fact. Then something occurred to make her distrust herself. And she felt that betraying imagination of hers at work, obscuring all issues, tricking her, punishing her.

And when the meal was over she did not know at all. And she felt as if she had perhaps been deliberately baffled—not, of course, by Vere, of whose attitude she was not, and never had been, doubtful, but by Emile.

When they got up from the table Vere said:

"I'm going to take the siesta."

"You look remarkably wide awake, Vere," Artois said, smiling.

"But I'm going to, because I've had you all to myself the whole morning. Now it's Madre's turn. Isn't it, Madre?"

The girl's remark showed her sense of their complete triple intimacy, but it emphasized to Hermione her own cruel sense of being in the wilderness. And she even felt vexed that it should be supposed she wanted Emile's company. Nevertheless, she restrained herself from making any disclaimer. Vere went up-stairs, and she and Artois went out and sat down under the trellis. But with the removal of Vere a protection and safety-valve seemed to be removed, and neither Hermione nor Emile could for a moment continue the conversation. Again a sense of humiliation, of being mindless, nothing in the eyes of Artois came to Hermione, diminishing all her powers. She was never a conceited, but she had often been a self-reliant woman. Now she felt a humbleness such as she knew no one should ever feel—a humbleness that was contemptible, that felt itself incapable, unworthy of notice. She tried to resist it, but when she thought of this man, her friend, talking over her failure with her child, in whom he must surely believe, she could not. She felt "Vere can talk to Emile better than I can. She interests him more than I." And then her years seemed to gather round her and whip her. She shrank beneath the thongs of age, which had not even brought to her those gifts of the mind with which it often partially replaces the bodily gifts and graces it is so eager to remove.

"Hermione."

"Yes, Emile."

She turned slowly in her chair, forcing herself to face him.

"Are you sure you are not feeling ill?"

"Quite sure. Did you have a pleasant morning with Vere?"

"Yes. Oh"—he sat forward in his chair—"she told me something that rather surprised me—that you had told her she might read my books."

"Well?"

Hermione's voice was rather hard.

"Well, I never meant them for 'la jeune fille.'"

"You consider Vere—"

"Is she not?"

She felt he was condemning her secretly for her permission to Vere. What would he think if he knew her under-reason for giving it?

"You don't wish Vere to read your books, then?"

"No. And I ventured to tell her so."

Hermione felt hot.

"What did she say?"

"She said she would not read them."

"Oh."

She looked up and met his eyes, and was sure she read condemnation in them.

"After I had told Vere—" she began.

She was about to defend herself, to tell him how she had gone to Vere's room intending to withdraw the permission given; but suddenly she realized clearly that she, a mother, was being secretly taken to task by a man for her conduct to her child.

That was intolerable.

And Vere had yielded to Emile's prohibition, though she had eagerly resisted her mother's attempt to retreat from the promise made. That was more intolerable.

She sat without saying anything. Her knees were trembling under her thin summer gown. Artois felt something of her agitation, perhaps, for he said, with a kind of hesitating diffidence, very rare in him:

"Of course, my friend, I would not interfere between you and Vere, only, as I was concerned, as they were my own writings that were in question—" He broke off. "You won't misunderstand my motives?" he concluded.

"Oh no."

He was more conscious that she was feeling something acutely.

"I feel that I perfectly understand why you gave the permission at this particular moment," he continued, anxious to excuse her to herself and to himself.

"Why?" Hermione said, sharply.

"Wasn't it because of Peppina?"

"Peppina?"

"Yes; didn't you—"

He looked into her face and saw at once that he had made a false step, that Vere had not told her mother of Peppina's outburst.

"Didn't I—what?"

He still looked at her.

"What?" she repeated. "What has Peppina to do with it?"

"Nothing. Only—don't you remember what you said to me about not keeping Vere in cotton-wool?"

She knew that he was deceiving her. A hopeless, desperate feeling of being in the dark rushed over her. What was friendship without sincerity? Nothing—less than nothing. She felt as if her whole body stiffened with a proud reserve to meet the reserve with which he treated her. And she felt as if her friend of years, the friend whose life she had perhaps saved in Africa, had turned in that moment into a stranger, or—even into an enemy. For this furtive withdrawal from their beautiful and open intimacy was like an act of hostility. She was almost dazed for an instant. Then her brain worked with feverish activity. What had Emile meant? Her permission to Vere was connected in his mind with Peppina. He must know something about Vere and Peppina that she did not know. She looked at him, and her face, usually so sensitive, so receptive, so warmly benign when it was turned to his, was hard and cold.

"Emile," she said, "what was it you meant about Peppina? I think I have a right to know. I brought her into the house. Why should Peppina have anything to do with my giving Vere permission to read your books?"

Artois' instinct was not to tell what Vere had not told, and therefore had not wished to be known. Yet he hated to shuffle with Hermione. He chose a middle course.

"My friend," he said quietly, but with determination, "I made a mistake. I was following foolishly a wrong track. Let us say no more about it. But do not be angry with me about the books. I think my motive in speaking as I did to Vere was partly a selfish one. It is not only that I wish Vere to be as she is for as long a time as possible, but that I—well, don't think me a great coward if I say that I almost dread her discovery of all the cruel knowledge that is mine, and that I have, perhaps wrongly, brought to the attention of the world."

Hermione was amazed.

"You regret having written your books!" she said.

"I don't know—I don't know. But I think the happy confidence, the sweet respect of youth, makes one regret a thousand things. Don't you, Hermione? Don't you think youth is often the most terrible tutor age can have?"

She thought of Ruffo singing, "Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate"—and suddenly she felt that she could not stay any longer with Artois just then. She got up.

"I don't feel very well," she said.

Artois sprang up and came towards her with a face full of concern. But she drew back.

"I didn't sleep last night—and then going into Naples—I'll go to my room and lie down. I'll keep quiet. Vere will look after you. I'll be down at tea."

She went away before he could say or do anything. For some time he was alone. Then Vere came. Hermione had not told her of the episode, and she had only come because she thought the pretended siesta had lasted long enough. When Artois told her about her mother, she wanted to run away at once, and see what was the matter—see if she could do something. But Artois stopped her.

"I should leave her to rest," he said. "I—I feel sure she wishes to be alone."

Vere was looking at him while he spoke, and her face caught the gravity of his, reflected it for a moment, then showed an uneasiness that deepened into fear. She laid her hand on his arm.

"Monsieur Emile, what is the matter with Madre?"

"Only a headache, I fancy. She did not sleep last night, and—"

"No, no, the real matter, Monsieur Emile."

"What do you mean, Vere?"

The girl looked excited. Her own words had revealed to her a feeling of which till then she had only been vaguely aware.

"Madre has seemed different lately," she said—"been different. I am sure she has. What is it?"

As the girl spoke, and looked keenly at him with her bright, searching eyes, a thought came, like a flash, upon Artois—a thought that almost frightened him. He could not tell it to Vere, and almost immediately he thrust it away from his mind. But Vere had seen that something had come to him.

"You know what it is!" she said.

"I don't know."

"Monsieur Emile!"

Her voice was full of reproach.

"Vere, I am telling you the truth," he said, earnestly. "If there is anything seriously troubling your mother I do not know what it is. She has sorrows, of course. You know that."

"This is something fresh," the girl said. She thrust forward her little chin decisively. "This is something new."

"It cannot be that," Artois said to himself. "It cannot be that."

To Vere he said: "Sleeplessness is terribly distressing."

"Well—but only one night."

"Perhaps there have been others."

In reply Vere said:

"Monsieur Emile, you remember this morning, when we were in the garden, and mother called?"

"Yes."

"Do you know, the way she called made me feel frightened?"

"We were so busy talking that the sudden sound startled us."

"No, it wasn't that."

"But when we came your mother was smiling—she was perfectly well. You let your imagination—"

"No, Monsieur Emile, indeed I don't."

He did not try any more to remove her impression. He saw that to do so would be quite useless.

"I should like to speak to Gaspare," Vere said, after a moment's thought.

"Gaspare! Why?"

"Perhaps you will laugh at me! But I often think Gaspare understands Madre better than any of us, Monsieur Emile."

"Gaspare has been with your mother a very long time."

"Yes, and in his way he is very clever. Haven't you noticed it?"

Artois did not answer this. But he said:

"Follow your instincts, Vere. I don't think they will often lead you wrong."

At tea-time Hermione came from her bedroom looking calm and smiling. There was something deliberate about her serenity, and her eyes were tired, but she said the little rest had done her good. Vere instinctively felt that her mother did not wish to be observed, or to have any fuss made about her condition, and Artois took Vere's cue. When tea was over, Artois said:

"Well, I suppose I ought to be going."

"Oh no," Hermione said. "We asked you for a long day. That means dinner."

The cordiality in her voice sounded determined, and therefore formal. Artois felt chilled. For a moment he looked at her doubtfully.

"Well, but, Hermione, you aren't feeling very well."

"I am much better now. Do stay. I shall rest, and Vere will take care of you."

It struck him for the first time that she was becoming very ready to substitute Vere for herself as his companion. He wondered if he had really offended or hurt her in any way. He even wondered for a moment whether she was not pleased at his spending the summer in Naples—whether, for some reason, she had wished, and still wished, to be alone with Vere.

"Perhaps Vere will get sick of looking after an—an old man," he said.

"You are not an old man, Monsieur Emile. Don't tout!"

"Tout?"

"Yes, for compliments about your youth. You meant me, you meant us both, to say how young you are."

She spoke gayly, laughingly, but he felt she was cleverly and secretly trying to smooth things out, to cover up the difficulty that had intruded itself into their generally natural and simple relations.

"And your mother says nothing," said Artois, trying to fall in with her desire, and to restore their wonted liveliness. "Don't you look upon me as almost a boy, Hermione?"

"I think sometimes you seem wonderfully young," she said.

Her voice suggested that she wished to please him, but also that she meant what she said. Yet Artois had never felt his age more acutely than when she finished speaking.

"I am a poor companion for Vere," he said, almost bitterly. "She ought to be with friends of her own age."

"You mean that I am a poor companion for you, Monsieur Emile. I often feel how good you are to put up with me in the way you do."

The gayety had gone from her now, and she spoke with an earnestness that seemed to him wonderfully gracious. He looked at her, and his eyes thanked her gently.

"Take Emile out in the boat, Vere," Hermione said, "while I read a book till dinner time."

At that moment she longed for them to be gone. Vere looked at her mother, then said:

"Come along, Monsieur Emile. I'm sorry for you, but Madre wants rest."

She led the way out of the room.

Hermione was on the sofa. Before he followed Vere, Artois went up to her and said:

"You are sure you won't come out with us, my friend? Perhaps the air on the sea would do you good."

"No, thank you, Emile; I really think I had better stay quietly here."

"Very well."

He hesitated for a moment, then he went out and left her. But she had seen a question in his eyes.

When he had gone, Hermione took up a book, and read for a little while, always listening for the sound of oars. She was not sure Vere and Emile would go out in the boat, but she thought they would. If they came out to the open sea beyond the island it was possible that she might hear them. Presently, as she did not hear them, she got up. She wanted to satisfy herself that they were at sea. Going to the window she looked out. But she saw no boat, only the great plain of the radiant waters. They made her feel alone—why, she did not know then. But it was really something of the same feeling which had come to her long ago during her first visit to Sicily. In the contemplation of beauty she knew the need of love, knew it with an intimacy that was cruel.

She came away from the window and went to the terrace. From there she could not see the boat. Finally she went to the small pavilion that overlooked the Saint's Pool. Leaning over the parapet, she perceived the little white boat just starting around the cliff towards the Grotto of Virgil. Vere was rowing. Hermione saw her thin figure, so impregnated with the narrow charm of youth, bending backward and forward to the oars, Emile's big form leaning against the cushions as if at ease. From the dripping oars came twinkling lines of light, that rayed out and spread like the opened sticks of a fan upon the sea. Hugging the shore, the boat slipped out of sight.

"Suppose they had gone forever—gone out of my life!"

Hermione said that to herself. She fancied she still could see the faint commotion in the water that told where the boat had passed. Now it was turning into the Grotto of Virgil. She felt sure of that. It was entering the shadows where she had shown to Emile not long ago the very depths of her heart.

How could she have done that? She grew hot as she thought of it. In her new and bitter reserve she hated to think of his possession that could never be taken from him, the knowledge of her hidden despair, her hidden need of love. And by that sensation of hatred of his knowledge she measured the gulf between them. When had come the very first narrow fissure she scarcely knew. But she knew how to-day the gulf had widened.

The permission of hers to Vere to read Emile's books! And Emile's authority governing her child, substituted surely for hers! The gulf had been made wider by her learning that episode; and the fact that secretly she felt her permission ought never to have been given caused her the more bitterness. Vere had yielded to Emile because he had been in the right. Instinctively her child had known which of the two with whom she had to deal was swayed by an evil mood, and which was thinking rightly, only for her.

Could Vere see into her mother's heart?

Hermione had a moment of panic. Then she laughed at her folly.

And she thought of Peppina, of that other secret which certainly existed, but which she had never suspected till that day.

The boat was gone, and she knew where. She went back into the house and rang the bell. Giulia came.

"Oh, Giulia," Hermione said, "will you please ask Peppina to come to my sitting-room. I want to speak to her for a moment."

"Si, Signora."

Giulia looked at her Padrona, then added:

"Signora, I am sure I was right. I am sure that girl has the evil eye."

"Giulia, what nonsense! I have told you often that such ideas are silly. Peppina has no power to do us harm. Poor girl, we ought to pity her."

Giulia's fat face was very grave and quite unconvinced.

"Signora, since she is here the island is not the same. The Signorina is not the same, you are not the same, the French Signore is not the same. Even Gaspare is different. One cannot speak with him now. Trouble is with us all, Signora."

Hermione shook her head impatiently. But when Giulia was gone she thought of her words about Gaspare. Words, even the simplest, spoken just before some great moment of a life, some high triumph, or deep catastrophe, stick with resolution in the memory. Lucrezia had once said of Gaspare on the terrace before the Casa del Prete: "One cannot speak with him to-day." That was on the evening of the night on which Maurice's dead body was found. Often since then Hermione had thought that Gaspare had seemed to have a prevision of the disaster that was approaching.

And now Giulia said of him: "One cannot speak with him now."

The same words. Was Gaspare a stormy petrel?

There came a knock at the door of the sitting-room, to which Hermione had gone to wait for the coming of Peppina.

"Come in."

The door opened and the disfigured girl entered, looking anxious.

"Come in, Peppina. It's all right. I only want to speak to you for a moment."

Hermione spoke kindly, but Peppina still looked nervous.

"Si, Signora," she murmured.

And she remained standing near the door, looking down.

"Peppina," Hermione said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth without being afraid."

"Si, Signora."

"You remember, when I took you, I told you not to say anything to my daughter, the Signorina, about your past life, your aunt, and—and all you had gone through. Have you said anything?"

Peppina looked more frightened.

"Signora," she began. "Madonna! It was not my fault, it was not my fault!"

She raised her voice, and began to gesticulate.

"Hush, Peppina. Now don't be afraid of me."

"You are my preserver, Signora! My saint has forgotten me, but you—"

"I will not leave you to the streets. You must trust me. And now tell me—quietly—what have you told the Signorina?"

And presently Peppina was induced to be truthful, and Hermione knew of the outburst in the night, and that "the foreign Signore" had known of it from the moment of its happening.

"The Signorina was so kind, Signora, that I forgot. I told her all!—I told her all—I told her—"

Once Peppina had begun to be truthful she could not stop. She recalled—or seemed to—the very words she had spoken to Vere, all the details of her narration.

"And the foreign Signore? Was he there, too?" Hermione asked, at the end.

"No, Signora. He went away. The Signorina told him to go away and leave us."

Hermione dismissed Peppina quietly.

"Please don't say anything about this conversation, Peppina," she said, as the agitated girl prepared to go. "Try to obey me this time, will you?"

She spoke very kindly but very firmly.

"May the Madonna take out my tongue if I speak, Signora!" Peppina raised her hand.

As she was going out Hermione stared at the cross upon her cheek.

CHAPTER XXVI

Artois stayed to dine. The falling of night deepened Hermione's impression of the gulf which was now between them, and which she was sure he knew of. When darkness comes to intimacy it seems to make that intimacy more perfect. Now surely it caused reserve, restraint, to be more complete. The two secrets which Hermione now knew, but which were still cherished as secrets by Vere and Artois, stood up between the mother and her child and friend, inexorably dividing them.

Hermione was strung up to a sort of nervous strength that was full of determination. She had herself in hand, like a woman of the world who faces society with the resolution to deceive it. While Vere and Artois had been out in the boat she had schooled herself. She felt more competent to be the watcher of events. She even felt calmer, for knowledge increased almost always brings an undercurrent of increased tranquility, because of the sense of greater power that it produces in the mind. She looked better. She talked more easily.

When dinner was over they went as usual to the garden, and when they were there Hermione referred to the projected meeting with the Marchesino.

"I made a promise," she said. "I must keep it."

"Of course," said Artois. "But it seems to me that I am always being entertained, and that I am inhospitable—I do nothing in return. I have a proposal to make. Monday will be the sixteenth of July, the festa of the Madonna del Carmine—Santa Maria del Carmine. It is one of the prettiest of the year, they tell me. Why should not you and Vere come to dine at the Hotel, or in the Galleria, with me? I will ask Panacci to join us, and we will all go on afterwards to see the illuminations, and the fireworks, and the sending up of the fire-balloons. What do you say?"

"Would you like it, Vere?"

"Immensely, Madre."

She spoke quietly, but she looked pleased at the idea.

"Won't the crowd be very bad, though?" asked Hermione.

"I'll get tickets for the enclosure in the Piazza. We shall have seats there. And you can bring Gaspare, if you like. Then you will have three cavaliers."

"Yes, I should like Gaspare to come," said Hermione.

There was a sound of warmth in her hitherto rather cold voice when she said that.

"How you rely on Gaspare!" Artois said, almost as if with a momentary touch of vexation.

"Indeed I do," Hermione answered.

Their eyes met, surely almost with hostility.

"Madre knows how Gaspare adores her," said Vere, gently. "If there were any danger he'd never hesitate. He'd save Madre if he left every other human being in the world to perish miserably—including me."

"Vere!"

"You know quite well he would, Madre."

They talked a little more. Presently Vere seemed to be feeling restless. Artois noticed it, and watched her. Once or twice she got up, without apparent reason. She pulled at the branches of the fig-trees. She gathered a flower. She moved away, and leaned upon the wall. Finally, when her mother and Artois had fallen into conversation about some new book, she slipped very quietly away.

Hermione and Artois continued their conversation, though without much animation. At length, however, some remark of Hermione led Artois to speak of the book he was writing. Very often and very openly in the days gone by she had discussed with him his work. Now, feeling the barrier between them, he fancied that perhaps it might be removed more easily by such another discussion. And this notion of his was not any proof of want of subtlety on his part. Without knowing why, Hermione felt a lack of self-confidence, a distressing, an almost unnatural humbleness to-day. He partially divined the feeling. Possibly it sprang from their difference of opinion on the propriety of Vere's reading his books. He thought it might be so. And he wanted to oust Hermione gently from her low stool and to show her himself seated there. Filled with this idea, he began to ask her advice about the task upon which he was engaged. He explained the progress he had made during the days when he was absent from the island and shut perpetually in his room. She listened in perfect silence.

They were sitting near each other, but not close together, for Vere had been between them. It was dark under the fig-trees. They could see each other's faces, but not quite clearly. There was a small breeze which made the trees move, and the leaves rustled faintly now and then, making a tiny noise which joined the furtive noise of the sea, not far below them.

Artois talked on. As his thoughts became more concentrated upon the book he grew warmer. Having always had Hermione's eager, even enthusiastic sympathy and encouragement in his work, he believed himself to have them now. And in his manner, in his tone, even sometimes in his choice of words, he plainly showed that he assumed them. But presently, glancing across at Hermione, he was surprised by the expression on her face. It seemed to him as if a face of stone had suddenly looked bitterly satirical. He was so astonished that the words stopped upon his lips.

"Go on, Emile," she said, "I am listening."

The expression which had startled him was gone. Had it ever been? Perhaps he had been deceived by the darkness. Perhaps the moving leaves had thrown their little shadows across her features. He said to himself that it must be so—that his friend, Hermione, could never have looked like that. Yet he was chilled. And he remembered her passing by in the tram at Posilipo, and how he had stood for a moment and watched her, and seen upon her face a furtive look that he had never seen there before, and that had seemed to contradict her whole nature as he knew it.

Did he know it?

Never before had he asked himself this question. He asked it now. Was there living in Hermione some one whom he did not know, with whom he had had no dealings, had exchanged no thoughts, had spoken no words?

"Go on, Emile," she said again.

But he did not. For once his brain was clouded, and he felt confused. He had completely lost the thread of his thoughts.

"I can't," he said, abruptly.

"Why not?"

"I've forgotten. I've not thoroughly worked the thing out. Another time. Besides—besides, I'm sure I bore you with my eternal talk about my work. You've been such a kind, such a sympathetic friend and encourager that—"

He broke off, thinking of that face. Was it possible that through all these years Hermione had been playing a part with him, had been pretending to admire his talent, to care for what he was doing, when really she had been bored by it? Had the whole thing been a weariness to her, endured perhaps because she liked him as a man? The thought cut him to the very quick, seared his self-respect, struck a blow at his pride which made it quiver, and struck surely also a blow at something else.

His life during all these years—what would it have been without Hermione's friendship? Was he to learn that now?

He looked at her. Now her face was almost as usual, only less animated than he had seen it.

"Your work could never bore me. You know it," she said.

The real Hermione sounded in her voice when she said that, for the eternal woman deep down in her had heard the sound almost of helplessness in his voice, had felt the leaning of his nature, strong though it was, on her, and had responded instantly, inevitably, almost passionately. But then came the thought of his secret intercourse with Vere. She saw in the dark words: "Monsieur Emile's idea." "Monsieur Emile's suggestion." She remembered how Artois had told her that she could never be an artist. And again the intensely bitter feeling of satire, that had set in her face the expression which had startled him, returned, twisting, warping her whole nature.

"I am to encourage you—you who have told me that I can do nothing!"

That was what she had been feeling. And, as by a search-light, she had seen surely for a moment the whole great and undying selfishness of man, exactly as it was. And she had seen surely, also, the ministering world of women gathered round about it, feeding it, lest it should fail and be no more. And she had seen herself among them!

"Where can Vere have gone to?" he said.

There had been a pause. Neither knew how long it had lasted.

"I should not wonder if she is on the cliff," said Hermione. "She often goes there at this hour. She goes to meet Ruffo."

The name switched the mind of Artois on to a new and profoundly interesting train of thought.

"Ruffo," he began slowly. "And you think it wise—?"

He stopped. To-night he no longer dared frankly to speak his mind to Hermione.

"I was at Mergellina the other day," he said. "And I saw Ruffo with his mother."

"Did you. What is she like?"

"Oh, like many middle-aged women of the South, rather broad and battered-looking, and probably much older in appearance than in years."

"Poor woman! She has been through a great deal."

Her voice was quite genuine now. And Artois said to himself that the faint suspicion he had had was ill-founded.

"Do you know anything about her?"

"Oh yes. I had a talk with Ruffo the other night. And he told me several things."

Each time Hermione mentioned Ruffo's name it seemed to Artois that her voice softened, almost that she gave the word a caress. He longed to ask her something, but he was afraid to.

He would try not to interfere with Fate. But he would not hasten its coming—if it were coming. And he knew nothing. Perhaps the anxious suspicion which had taken up its abode in his mind, and which, without definite reason, seemed gradually changing into conviction was erroneous. Perhaps some day he would laugh at himself, and say to himself, "I was mad to dream of such a thing."

"Those women often have a bad time," he said.

"Few women do not, I sometimes think."

He said nothing, and she went on rather hastily, as if wishing to cover her last words.

"Ruffo told me something that I did not know about Peppina. His step-father was the man who cut that cross on Peppina's face."

"Perdio!" said Artois.

He used the Italian exclamation at that moment quite naturally. Suddenly he wished more than ever before that Hermione had not taken Peppina to live on the island.

"Hermione," he said, "I wish you had not Peppina here."

"Still because of Vere?" she said.

And now she was looking at him steadily.

"I feel that she comes from another world, that she had better keep away from yours. I feel as if misfortune attended her."

"It is odd. Even the servants say she has the evil eye. But, if she has, it is too late now. Peppina has looked upon us all."

"Perhaps that old Eastern was right." Artois could not help saying it. "Perhaps all that is to be is ordained long beforehand. Do you think that, Hermione?"

"I have sometimes thought it, when I have been depressed. I have sometimes said to myself, 'E il destino!'"

She remembered at that moment her feeling on the day when she returned from the expedition with Vere to Capri—that perhaps she had returned to the island to confront some grievous fate. Had Artois such a thought, such a prevision? Suddenly she felt frightened, like a child when, at night, it passes the open door of a room that is dark.

She moved and got up from her chair. Like the child, when it rushes on and away, she felt in her panic the necessity of physical activity.

Artois followed her example. He was glad to move.

"Shall we go and see what Vere is doing?" he said.

"If you like. I feel sure she is with Ruffo."

They went towards the house. Artois felt a deep curiosity, which filled his whole being, to know what Hermione's exact feeling towards Ruffo was.

"Don't you think," he said, "that perhaps it is a little dangerous to allow Vere to be so much with a boy from Mergellina?"

"Oh no."

In her tone there was the calm of absolute certainty.

"Well, but we don't know so very much about him."

"Do you think two instincts could be at fault?"

"Two instincts?"

"Vere's and mine?"

"Perhaps not. Then your instinct—"

He waited. He was passionately interested.

"Ruffo is all right," Hermione answered.

It seemed to him as if she had deliberately used that bluff expression to punish his almost mystical curiosity. Was she warding him off consciously?

They passed through the house and came out on its further side, but they did not go immediately to the cliff top. Both of them felt certain the two children must be there, and both of them, perhaps, were held back for a moment by a mutual desire not to disturb their innocent confidences. They stood upon the bridge, therefore, looking down into the dimness of the Pool. From the water silence seemed to float up to them, almost visibly, like a lovely, delicate mist—silence, and the tenderness of night, embracing their distresses.

The satire died out of Hermione's poor, tormented heart. And Artois for a moment forgot the terrible face half seen in the darkness of the trees.

"There is the boat. He is here."

Hermione spoke in a low voice, pointing to the shadowy form of a boat upon the Pool.

"Yes."

Artois gazed at the boat. Was it indeed a Fate that came by night to the island softly across the sea, ferried by the ignorant hands of men? He longed to know. And Hermione longed to know something, too: whether Artois had ever seen the strange likeness she had seen, whether Maurice had ever seemed to gaze for a moment at him out of the eyes of Ruffo. But to-night she could not ask him that. They were too far away from each other. And because of the gulf between them her memory had suddenly become far more sacred, far more necessary to her even, than it had been before.

It had been a solace, a beautiful solace. But now it was much more than that—now it was surely her salvation.

As she felt that, a deep longing filled her heart to look again on Ruffo's face, to search again for the expression that sent back the years. But she wished to do that without witnesses, to be alone with the boy, as she had been alone with him that night upon the bridge. And suddenly she was impatient of Vere's intercourse with him. Vere could not know what the tender look meant, if it came. For she had never seen her father's face.

"Let us go to the cliff," Hermione said, moved by this new feeling of impatience.

She meant to interrupt the children, to get rid of Vere and Emile, and have Ruffo to herself for a moment. Just then she felt as if he were nearer, far nearer, to her than they were: they who kept things from her, who spoke of her secretly, pitying her.

And again that evening she came into acute antagonism with her friend. For the instinct was still alive in him not to interrupt the children. The strange suspicion that had been born and had lived within him, gathered strength, caused him to feel almost as if they might be upon holy ground, those two so full of youth, who talked together in the night; as if they knew mysteriously things that were hidden from their elders, from those wiser, yet far less full of the wisdom that is eternal, the wisdom in instinct, than themselves. There is always something sacred about children. And he had never lost the sense of it amid the dust of his worldly knowledge. But about these children, about them or within them, there floated, perhaps, something that was mystic, something that was awful and must not be disturbed. Hermione did not feel it. How could she? He himself had withheld from her for many years the only knowledge that could have made her share his present feeling. He could tell her nothing. Yet he could not conceal his intense reluctance to go to that seat upon the cliff.

"But it's delicious here. I love the Pool at night, don't you? Look at the Saint's light, how quietly it shines!"

She took her hands from the rail. His attempt at detention irritated her whole being. She looked at the light. On the night of the storm she had felt as if it shone exclusively for her. That feeling was dead. San Francesco watched, perhaps, over the fishermen. He did not watch over her.

And yet that night she, too, had made the sign of the cross when she knew that the light was shining.

She did not answer Artois' remark, and he continued, always for the children's sake, and for the sake of what he seemed to divine secretly at work in them:

"This Pool is a place apart, I think. The Saint has given his benediction to it."

He was speaking at random to keep Hermione there. And yet his words seemed chosen by some one for him to say.

"Surely good must come to the island over that waterway."

"You think so?"

Her stress upon the pronoun made him reply:

"Hermione, you do not think me the typical Frenchman of this century, who furiously denies over a glass of absinthe the existence of the Creator of the world?"

"No. But I scarcely thought you believed in the efficacy of a plaster Saint."

"Not of the plaster—no. But don't you think it possible that truth, emanating from certain regions and affecting the souls of men, might move them unconsciously to embody it in symbol? What if this Pool were blessed, and men, feeling that it was blessed, put San Francesco here with his visible benediction?"

He said to himself that he was playing with his imagination, as sometimes he played with words, half-sensuously and half-aesthetically; yet he felt to-night as if within him there was something that might believe far more than he had ever suspected it would be possible for him to believe.

And that, too, seemed to have come to him from the hidden children who were so near.

"I don't feel at all as if the Pool were blessed," said Hermione. She sighed.

"Let us go to the cliff," she said, again, this time with a strong impatience.

He could not, of course, resist her desire, so they moved away, and mounted to the summit of the island.

The children were there. They could just see them in the darkness, Vere seated upon the wooden bench, Ruffo standing beside her. Their forms looked like shadows, but from the shadows voices came.

When he saw them, Artois stood still. Hermione was going on. He put his hand upon her arm to stop her. She sent an almost sharp inquiry to him with her eyes.

"Don't you think," he said—"don't you think it is a pity to disturb them?"

"Why?"

"They seem so happy together."

He glanced at her for sympathy, but she gave him none.

"Am I to have nothing?" she thought. And a passion of secret anger woke up in her. "Am I to have nothing at all? May I not even speak to this boy, in whom I have seen Maurice for a moment—because if I do I may disturb some childish gossip?"

Her eyes gave to Artois a fierce rebuke.

"I beg your pardon, Hermione," he said, hastily. "Of course if you really want to talk to Ruffo—"

"I don't think Vere will mind," she said.

Her lips were actually trembling, but her voice was calm.

They walked forward.

When they were close to the children they both saw there was a third figure on the cliff. Gaspare was at a little distance. Hermione could see the red point of his cigarette gleaming.

"Gaspare's there, too," she said.

"Yes."

"Why is he there?" Artois thought.

And again there woke up in him an intense curiosity about Gaspare.

Ruffo had seen them, and now he took off his cap. And Vere turned her head and got up from the seat.

Neither the girl nor the boy gave any explanation of their being together. Evidently they did not think it necessary to do so. Hermione was the first to speak.

"Good-evening, Ruffo," she said.

Artois noticed a peculiar kindness and gentleness in her voice when she spoke to the boy, a sound apart, that surely did not come into her voice even when it spoke to Vere.

"Good-evening, Signora." He stood with his cap in his hand. "I have been telling the Signorina what you have done for my poor mamma, Signora. I did not tell her before because I thought she knew. But she did not know."

Vere was looking at her mother with a shining of affection in her eyes.

At this moment Gaspare came up slowly, with a careless walk.

Artois watched him.

"About the little money, you mean?" said Hermione, rather hastily.

"Si, Signora. When I gave it to my poor mamma she cried again. But that was because you were so kind. And she said to me, 'Ruffo, why should a strange lady be so kind to me? Why should a strange lady think about me?' she said. 'Ruffino,' she said, 'it must be Santa Maddalena who has sent her here to be good to me.' My poor mamma!"

"The Signora does not want to be bothered with all this!" It was Gaspare who had spoken, roughly, and who now pushed in between Ruffo and those who were listening to his simple narrative.

Ruffo looked surprised, but submissive. Evidently he respected Gaspare, and the two understood each other. And though Gaspare's words were harsh, his eyes, as they looked at Ruffo, seemed to contradict them. Nevertheless, there was excitement, a strung-up look in his face.

"Gaspare!" said Vere.

Her eyes shot fire.

"Signorina?"

"Madre does like to hear what Ruffo has to say. Don't you, Madre?"

Gaspare looked unmoved. His whole face was full of a dogged obstinacy. Yet he did not forget himself. There was nothing rude in his manner as he said, before Hermione could reply:

"Signorina, the Signora does not know Ruffo's mother, so such things cannot interest her. Is it not so, Signora?"

Hermione was still governed by the desire to be alone for a little while with Ruffo, and the sensation of intense reserve—a reserve that seemed even partially physical—that she felt towards Artois made her dislike Ruffo's public exhibition of a gratitude that, expressed in private, would have been sweet to her. Instead, therefore, of agreeing with Vere, she said, in rather an off-hand way:

"It's all right, Ruffo. Thank you very much. But we must not keep Don Emilio listening to my supposed good deeds forever. So that's enough."

Vere reddened. Evidently she felt snubbed. She said nothing, but she shot a glance of eager sympathy at Ruffo, who stood very simply looking at Hermione with a sort of manly deference, as if all that she said, or wished, must certainly be right. Then she moved quietly away, pressing her lips rather firmly together, and went slowly towards the house. After a moment's hesitation, Artois followed her. Hermione remained by Ruffo, and Gaspare stayed doggedly with his Padrona.

Hermione wished he would go. She could not understand his exact feeling about the fisher-boy's odd little intimacy with them. Her instinct told her that secretly he was fond of Ruffo. Yet sometimes he seemed to be hostile to him, to be suspicious of him, as of some one who might do them harm. Or, perhaps, he felt it his duty to be on guard against all strangers who approached them. She knew well his fixed belief that she and Vere depended entirely on him, felt always perfectly safe when he was near. And she liked to have him near—but not just at this moment. Yet she did not feel that she could ask him to go.

"Thank you very much for your gratitude, Ruffo," she said. "You mustn't think—"

She glanced at Gaspare.

"I didn't want to stop you," she continued, trying to steer an even course. "But it's a very little thing. I hope your mother is getting on pretty well. She must have courage."

As she said the last sentence she thought it came that night oddly from her lips.

Gaspare moved as if he felt impatient, and suddenly Hermione knew an anger akin to Vere's, an anger she had scarcely ever felt against Gaspare.

She did not show it at first, but went on with a sort of forced calmness and deliberation, a touch even perhaps of obstinacy that was meant for Gaspare.

"I am interested in your mother, you know, although I have not seen her. Tell me how she is."

Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but something held him silent; and as he listened to Ruffo's carefully detailed reply, delivered with the perfect naturalness of one sure of the genuine interest taken in his concerns by his auditors, his large eyes travelled from the face of the boy to the face of his Padrona with a deep and restless curiosity. He seemed to inquire something of Ruffo, something of Hermione, and then, at the last, surely something of himself. But when Ruffo had finished, he said, brusquely:

"Signora, it is getting very late. Will not Don Emilio be going? He will want to say good-night, and I must help him with the boat."

"Run and see if Don Emilio is in a hurry, Gaspare. If he is I'll come."

Gaspare looked at her, hesitating.

"What's the matter?" she exclaimed, her secret irritation suddenly getting the upper hand in her nature. "Are you afraid that Ruffo will hurt me?"

"No, Signora."

As Vere had reddened, he reddened, and he looked with deep reproach at his Padrona. That look went to Hermione's heart; she thought, "Am I going to quarrel with the one true and absolutely loyal friend I have?" She remembered Vere's words in the garden about Gaspare's devotion to her, a devotion which she felt like a warmth round about her life.

"I'll come with you, Gaspare," she said, with a revulsion of feeling. "Good-night, Ruffo."

"Good-night, Signora."

"Perhaps we shall see you to-morrow."

She was just going to turn away when Ruffo bent down to kiss her hand. Since she had given charity to his mother it was evident that his feeling for her had changed. The Sicilian in him rose up to honor her like a Padrona.

"Signora," he said, letting go her hand. "Benedicite e buon riposo."

He was being a little whimsical, was showing to her and to Gaspare that he knew how to be a Sicilian. And now he looked from one to the other to see how they took his salutation; looked gently, confidentially, with a smile dawning in his eyes under the deference and the boyish affection and gratitude.

And again it seemed to Hermione for a moment that Maurice stood there before her in the night. Her impulse was to catch Gaspare's arm, to say to him, "Look! Don't you see your Padrone?"

She did not do this, but she did turn impulsively to Gaspare. And as she turned she saw tears start into his eyes. The blood rushed to his temples, his forehead. He put up his hand to his face.

"Signora," he said, "are you not coming?"

He cleared his throat violently. "I have taken a cold," he muttered.

He caught hold of his throat with his left hand, and again cleared his throat.

"Madre di Dio!"

He spoke very roughly.

But his roughness did not hurt Hermione; for suddenly she felt far less lonely and deserted. Gaspare had seen what she had seen—she knew it.

As they went back to the house it seemed to her that she and Gaspare talked together.

And yet they spoke no words.

CHAPTER XXVII

Neither Artois nor the Marchesino visited the island during the days that elapsed before the Festa of the Madonna del Carmine. But Artois wrote to tell Hermione that the Marchesino had accepted his invitation, and that he hoped she and Vere would be at the Hotel des Etrangers punctually by eight o'clock on the night of the sixteenth. He wrote cordially, but a little formally, and did not add any gossip or any remarks about his work to the few sentences connected with the projected expedition. And Hermione replied as briefly to his note. Usually, when she wrote to Artois, her pen flew, and eager thoughts, born of the thought of him, floated into her mind. But this time it was not so. The energies of her mind in connection with his mind were surely failing. As she put the note into its envelope, she had the feeling of one who had been trying to "make" conversation with an acquaintance, and who had not been successful, and she found herself almost dreading to talk with Emile.

Yet for years her talks with him had been her greatest pleasure, outside of her intercourse with Vere and her relations with Gaspare.

The change that had come over their friendship, like a mist over the sea, was subtle, yet startling in its completeness. She wondered if he saw and felt this mist as definitely as she did, if he regretted the fair prospect it had blotted out, if he marvelled at its coming.

He was so acute that he must be aware of the drooping of their intimacy. To what could he attribute it? And would he care to fight against the change?

She remembered the days when she had nursed him in Kairouan. She felt again the hot dry atmosphere. She heard the ceaseless buzzing of the flies. How pale his face had been, how weak his body! He had returned to the weakness of a child. He had depended upon her. That fact, that he had for a time utterly depended upon her, had forged a new link in their friendship, the strongest link of all. At least she had felt it to be so. For she was very much of a woman, and full of a secret motherliness.

But perhaps he had forgotten all that.

In these days she often felt as if she did not understand men at all, as if their natures were hidden from her, and perhaps, of necessity, from all women.

"We can't understand each other."

She often said that to herself, and partly to comfort herself a little. She did not want to be only one of a class of women from whom men's natures were hidden.

And yet it was not true.

For Maurice, at least, she had understood. She had not feared his gayeties, his boyish love of pleasure, his passion for the sun, his joy in the peasant life, his almost fierce happiness in the life of the body. She had feared nothing in him, because she had felt that she understood him thoroughly. She had read the gay innocence of his temperament rightly, and so she had never tried to hold him back from his pleasures, to keep him always with her, as many women would have done.

And she clung to the memory of her understanding of Maurice as she faced the mist that had swept up softly and silently over that sea and sky which had been clear. He had been simple. There was nothing to dread in cleverness, in complexity. One got lost in a nature that was full of winding paths. Just then, and for the time, she forgot her love of, even her passion for, mental things. The beauty of the straight white road appealed to her. She saw it leading one onward to the glory of the sun.

Vere and she did not see very much of each other during these days. They met, of course, at meals, and often for a few minutes at other times. But it seemed as if each tacitly, and almost instinctively, sought to avoid any prolonged intercourse with the other. Hermione was a great deal in her sitting-room, reading, or pretending to read. And Vere made several long expeditions upon the sea in the sailing-boat with Gaspare and a boy from the nearest village, who was hired as an extra hand.

Hermione had a strange feeling of desertion sometimes, when the white sail of the boat faded on the blue and she saw the empty sea. She would watch the boat go out, standing at the window and looking through the blinds. The sailor-boy pulled at the oars. Vere was at the helm, Gaspare busy with the ropes. They passed quite close beneath her. She saw Vere's bright and eager face looking the way they were going, anticipating the voyage; Gaspare's brown hands moving swiftly and deftly. She saw the sail run up, the boat bend over. The oars were laid in their places now. The boat went faster through the water. The forms in it dwindled. Was that Vere's head, or Gaspare's? Who was that standing up? The fisher-boy? What were they now, they and the boat that held them? Only a white sail on the blue, going towards the sun.

And how deep was the silence that fell about the house, how deep and hollow! She saw her life then like a cavern that was empty. No waters flowed into it. No lights played in its recesses. No sounds echoed through it.

She looked up into the blue, and remembered her thought, that Maurice had been taken by the blue. Hark! Was there not in the air the thin sound of a reed flute playing a tarantella? She shut her eyes, and saw the gray rocks of Sicily. But the blue was too vast. Maurice was lost in it, lost to her forever. And she gazed up into it again, with the effort to travel through it, to go on and on and on. And it seemed as if her soul ached from that journey.

The sail had dipped down below the horizon. She let fall the blind. She sat down in the silence.

Vere was greatly perplexed about her mother. One day in the boat she followed her instinct and spoke to Gaspare about her. Hermione and she between them had taught Gaspare some English. He understood it fairly well, and could speak it, though not correctly, and he was very proud of his knowledge. Because of the fisher-boy, Vere said what she had to say slowly in English. Gaspare listened with the grave look of learning that betokened his secret sensation of being glorified by his capacities. But when he grasped the exact meaning of his Padroncina's words, his expression changed. He shook his head vigorously.

"Not true!" he said. "Not true! No matter—there is no matter with my Padrona."

"But Gaspare—"

Vere protested, explained, strong in her conviction of the change in her mother.

But Gaspare would not have it. With energetic gestures he affirmed that his Padrona was just as usual. But Vere surprised a look in his eyes which told her he was watching her to see if he had deceived her. Then she realized that for some reason of his own Gaspare did not wish her to know that he had seen the change, wished also to detach her observation from her mother.

She wondered why this was.

Her busy mind could not arrive at any conclusion in the matter, but she knew her mother was secretly sad. And she knew that she and her mother were no longer at ease with each other. This pained her, and the pain was beginning to increase. Sometimes she felt as if her mother disliked something in her, and did not choose to say so, and was irritated by the silence that she kept. But what could it be? She searched among her doings carefully. Had she failed in anything? Certainly she had not been lacking in love. And her knowledge of that seemed simply to exclude any possibility of serious shortcomings. And her mother?

Vere remembered how her mother had once longed to have a son, how she had felt certain she was going to have a son. Could it be that? Could her mother be dogged by that disappointment? She felt chilled to the heart at that idea. Her warm nature protested against it. The love she gave to her mother was so complete that it had always assumed the completeness of that which it was given in return. But it might be so, Vere supposed. It was possible. She pondered over this deeply, and when she was with her mother watched for signs that might confirm or dispel her fears. And thus she opposed to the mother's new watchfulness the watchfulness of the child. And Hermione noticed it, and wondered whether Vere had any suspicion of the surreptitious reading of her poems.

But that was scarcely possible.

Hermione had not said a word to Vere of her discovery that Peppina had done what she had been told not to do—related the story of her fate. Almost all delicate-minded mothers and daughters find certain subjects difficult, if not impossible of discussion, even when an apparent necessity of their discussion arrives in the course of life. The present reserve between Hermione and Vere rendered even the idea of any plain speaking about the revelation of Peppina quite insupportable to the mother. She could only pretend to ignore that it had ever been made. And this she did. But now that she knew of it she felt very acutely the difference it had made in Vere. That difference was owing to her own impulsive action. And Emile knew the whole truth. She understood now what he had been going to say about Peppina and Vere when they had talked about the books.

He did condemn her in his heart. He thought she was not a neglectful, but a mistaken mother. He thought her so impulsive as to be dangerous, perhaps, even to those she loved best. Almost she divined that curious desire of his to protect Vere against her. And yet without her impulsive nature he himself might long ago have died.

She could not help at this time dwelling secretly on one or two actions of hers, could not help saying to herself now and then: "I have been some good in the world. I am capable of unselfishness sometimes. I did leave my happiness for Emile's sake, because I had a great deal of friendship and was determined to live up to it. My impulses are not always crazy and ridiculous."

She did this, she was obliged to do it, to prevent the feeling of impotence from overwhelming her. She had to do it to give herself strength to get up out of the dust. The human creature dares not say to itself, "You are nothing." And now Hermione, feeling the withdrawal from her of her friend, believing in the withdrawal from her of her child, spoke to herself, pleading her own cause to her own soul against invisible detractors.

One visitor the island had at this time. Each evening, when the darkness fell, the boat of Ruffo's employer glided into the Pool of San Francesco. And the boy always came ashore while his companions slept. Since Hermione had been charitable to his mother, and since he had explained to her about his Patrigno and Peppina, he evidently had something of the ready feeling that springs up in Sicilians in whom real interest has been shown—the feeling of partly belonging to his benefactor. There is something dog-like in this feeling. And it is touching and attractive because of the animalism of its frankness and simplicity. And as the dog who has been kindly, tenderly treated has no hesitation in claiming attention with a paw, or in laying its muzzle upon the knee of its benefactor, so Ruffo had no hesitation in relating to Hermione all the little intimate incidents of his daily life, in crediting her with an active interest in his concerns. There was no conceit in this, only a very complete boyish simplicity.

Hermione found in this new attitude of Ruffo's a curious solace for the sudden loneliness of soul that had come upon her. Originally Ruffo's chief friendship had obviously been for Vere, but now Vere, seeing her mother's new and deep interest in the boy, gave way a little to it, yet without doing anything ostentatious, or showing any pique. Simply she would stay in the garden, or on the terrace, later than usual, till after Ruffo was sure to be at the island, and let her mother stroll to the cliff top. Or, if she were there with him first, she would soon make an excuse to go away, and casually tell her mother that he was there alone or with Gaspare. And all this was done so naturally that Hermione did not know it was deliberate, but merely fancied that perhaps Vere's first enthusiasm for the fisher-boy was wearing off, that it had been a child's sudden fancy, and that it was lightly passing away.

Vere rather wondered at her mother's liking for Ruffo, although she herself had found him so attractive, and had drawn her mother's attention to his handsome face and bold, yet simple bearing. She wondered, because she felt in it something peculiar, a sort of heat and anxiety, a restlessness, a watchfulness; attributes which sprang from the observation of that resemblance to the dead man which drew her mother to Ruffo, but of which her mother had never spoken to her.

Nor did Hermione speak of it again to Gaspare. He had almost angrily denied it, but since the night of Artois' visit she knew that he had seen it, been startled, moved by it, almost as she had been.

She knew that quite well. Yet Gaspare puzzled her. He had become moody, nervous, and full of changes. She seemed to discern sometimes a latent excitement in him. His temper was uneven. Giulia had said that one could not speak with him. Since that day she had grumbled about him again, but discreetly, with a certain vagueness. For all the servants thoroughly appreciated his special position in the household as the "cameriere di confidenza" of the Padrona. One thing which drew Hermione's special attention was his extraordinary watchfulness of her. When they were together she frequently surprised him looking at her with a sort of penetrating and almost severe scrutiny which startled her. Once or twice, indeed, she showed that she was startled.

"What's the matter, Gaspare?" she said, one day. "Do I look ill again?"

For she had remembered his looking at her in the boat.

"No, Signora," he answered, this time, quickly. "You are not looking ill to-day."

And he moved off, as if anxious to avoid further questioning.

Another time she thought that there was something wrong with her dress, or her hair, and said so.

"Is there anything wrong with me?" she exclaimed. "What is it?" And she instinctively glanced down at her gown, and put up her hands to her head.

And this time he had turned it off with a laugh, and had said:

"Signora, you are like the Signorina! Once she told me I was—I was"—he shook his head—"I forget the word. But I am sure it was something that a man could never be. Per dio!"

And then he had gone off into a rambling conversation that had led Hermione's attention far away from the starting-point of their talk.

Vere, too, noticed the variations of his demeanor.

"Gaspare was very 'jumpy' to-day in the boat," she said, one evening, after returning from a sail; "I wonder what's the matter with him. Do you think he can be in love, Madre?"

"I don't know. But he is fidanzato, Vere, with a girl in Marechiaro, you remember?"

"Yes, but that lasts forever. When I speak of it he always says: 'There is plenty of time, Signorina. If one marries in a hurry, one makes two faces ugly!' I should think the girl must be sick of waiting."

Hermione was sure that there was some very definite reason for Gaspare's curious behavior, but she could not imagine what it was. That it was not anything to do with his health she had speedily ascertained. Any small discipline of Providence in the guise of a cold in the head, or a pain in the stomach, despatched him promptly to the depths. But he had told her that he was perfectly well and "made of iron," when she had questioned him on the subject.

She supposed time would elucidate the mystery, and meanwhile she knew it was no use troubling about it. Years had taught her that when Gaspare chose to be silent not heaven nor earth could make him speak.

Although Vere could not know why Ruffo attracted her mother, Hermione knew that Gaspare must understand, at any rate partially, why she cared so much to be with him. During the days between the last visit of Artois and the Festa of the Madonna del Carmine her acquaintance with the boy had progressed so rapidly that sometimes she found herself wondering what the days had been like before she knew him, the evenings before his boat slipped into the Saint's Pool, and his light feet ran up from the water's edge to the cliff top. Possibly, had Ruffo come into her life when she was comparatively happy and at ease, she would never have drawn so closely to him, despite the resemblance that stirred her to the heart. But he came when she was feeling specially lonely and sad; and when he, too, was in trouble. Both wanted sympathy. Hermione gave Ruffo hers in full measure. She could not ask for his. But giving had always been her pleasure. It was her pleasure now. And she drew happiness from the obvious and growing affection of the boy. Perfectly natural at all times, he kept back little from the kind lady of the island. He told her the smallest details of his daily life, his simple hopes and fears, his friendships and quarrels, his relations with the other fishermen of Mergellina, his intentions in the present, his ambitions for the future. Some day he hoped to be the Padrone of a boat of his own. That seemed to be the ultimate aim of his life. Hermione smiled as she heard it, and saw his eyes shining with the excitement of anticipation. When he spoke the word "Padrone," his little form seemed to expand with authority and conscious pride. He squared his shoulders. He looked almost a man. The pleasures of command dressed all his person, as flags dress a ship on a festival day. He stood before Hermione a boy exuberant.

And she thought of Maurice bounding down the mountain-side to the fishing, and rousing the night with his "Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Morettina bella—Ciao!"

But Ruffo was sometimes reserved. Hermione could not make him speak of his father. All she knew of him was that he was dead. Sometimes she gave Ruffo good advice. She divined the dangers of Naples for a lad with the blood bounding in his veins, and she dwelt upon the pride of man's strength, and how he should be careful to preserve it, and not dissipate it before it came to maturity. She did not speak very plainly, but Ruffo understood, and answered her with the unconscious frankness that is characteristic of the people of the South. And at the end of his remarks he added:

"Don Gaspare has talked to me about that. Don Gaspare knows much, Signora."

He spoke with deep respect. Hermione was surprised by this little revelation. Was Gaspare secretly watching over the boy? Did he concern himself seriously with Ruffo's fate? She longed to question Gaspare. But she knew that to do so would be useless. Even with her Gaspare would only speak freely of things when he chose. At other times he was calmly mute. He wrapped himself in a cloud. She wondered whether he had ever given Ruffo any hints or instructions as to suitable conduct when with her.

Although Ruffo was so frank and garrulous about most things, she noticed that if she began to speak of his mother or his Patrigno, his manner changed, and he became uncommunicative. Was this owing to Gaspare's rather rough rebuke upon the cliff before Artois and Vere? Or had Gaspare emphasized that by further directions when alone with Ruffo? She tried deftly to find out, but the boy baffled her. But perhaps he was delicate about money, unlike Neapolitans, and feared that if he talked too much of his mother the lady of the island would think he was "making misery," was hoping for another twenty francs. As to his Patrigno, the fact that Peppina was living on the island made that subject rather a difficult one. Nevertheless, Hermione could not help suspecting that Gaspare had told the boy not to bother her with any family troubles.

She had not offered him money again. The giving of the twenty francs had been a sudden impulse to help a suffering woman, less because she was probably in poverty than because she was undoubtedly made unhappy by her husband. Since she had suffered at the hands of death, Hermione felt very pitiful for women. She would gladly have gone to see Ruffo's mother, have striven to help her more, both materially and morally. But as to a visit—Peppina seemed to bar the way. And as to more money help—she remembered Gaspare's warning. Perhaps he knew something of the mother that she did not know. Perhaps the mother was an objectionable, or even a wicked woman.

But when she looked at Ruffo she could not believe that. And then several times he had spoken with great affection of his mother.

She left things as they were, taking her cue from the boy in despite of her desire. And here, as in some other directions, she was secretly governed by Gaspare.

Only sometimes did she see in Ruffo's face the look that had drawn her to him. The resemblance to Maurice was startling, but it was nearly always fleeting. She could not tell when it was coming, nor retain it when it came. But she noticed that it was generally when Ruffo was moved by affection, by a sudden sympathy, by a warm and deferent impulse that the look came in him. And again she thought of the beautiful obedience that springs directly from love, of Mercury poised for flight to the gods, his mission happily accomplished.

She wondered if Artois had ever thought of it when he was with Ruffo. But she felt now that she could never ask him.

And, indeed, she cherished her knowledge, her recognition, as something almost sacred, silently shared with Gaspare.

To no one could that look mean what it meant to her. To no other heart could it make the same appeal.

And so in those few days between Hermione and the fisher-boy a firm friendship was established.

And to Hermione this friendship came like a small ray of brightly golden light, falling gently in a place that was very dark.

CHAPTER XXVIII

When the Marchesino received the invitation of Artois to dine with him and the ladies from the island on the night of the Festa of the Madonna del Carmine he was again ill in bed with fever. But nevertheless he returned an immediate acceptance. Then he called in the family doctor, and violently demanded to be made well, "perfectly well," by the evening of the sixteenth. The doctor, who guessed at once that some amorous adventure was on foot, promised to do his best, and so ingeniously plied his patient with drugs and potions that on the sixteenth Doro was out of bed, and busily doing gymnastics to test his strength for the coming campaign.

Artois' invitation had surprised him. He had lost all faith in his friend, and at first almost suspected an ambush. Emilio had not invited him out of love—that was certain. But perhaps the ladies of the island had desired his presence, his escort. He was a Neapolitan. He knew the ways of the city. That was probably the truth. They wanted him, and Emilio had been obliged to ask him.

He saw his opportunity. His fever, coming at such a time, had almost maddened him, and during the days of forced inaction the Panacci temper had been vigorously displayed in the home circle. As he lay in bed his imagination ran riot. The day and the night were filled with thoughts and dreams of Vere. And always Emilio was near her, presiding over her doings with a false imitation of the paternal manner.

But now at the last the Marchesino saw his opportunity to strike a blow at Emilio. Every year of his life since he was a child he had been to the festa in honor of the Madonna del Carmine. He knew the crowd that assembled under the prison walls and beneath Nuvolo's tall belfry, the crowds that overflowed into the gaunt Square of the Mercato and streamed down the avenues of fire into the narrow side streets. In those crowds it would be easy to get lost. Emilio, when he heard his friend's voice singing, had hidden with the Signorina in the darkness of a cave. He might be alone with the Signorina when he would. The English ladies trusted his white hairs. Or the English ladies did not care for the convenances. Since he had found Peppina in the Casa del Mare, the Marchesino did not know what to think of its Padrona. And now he was too reckless to care. He only knew that he was in love, and that circumstances so far had fought against him. He only knew that he had been tricked, and that he meant to trick Emilio in return. His anxiety to revenge himself on Emilio was quite as keen as his desire to be alone with Vere. The natural devilry of his temperament, a boy's devilry, not really wicked, but compounded of sensuality, vanity, the passion for conquest, and the determination to hold his own against other males and to shine in his world's esteem, was augmented by the abstinence from his usual life. The few days in the house seemed to him a lifetime already wasted. He meant to make up for it, and he did not care at whose expense, so long as some of the debt was paid by Emilio.

On the sixteenth he issued forth into life again in a mood that was dangerous. The fever that had abandoned his body was raging in his mind. He was in the temper which had governed his papa on the day of the slapping of Signora Merani's face in the Chiaia.

The Marchesino always thought a great deal about his personal appearance, but his toilet on the night of the sixteenth was unusually prolonged. On several matters connected with it he was undecided. Should he wear a waistcoat of white pique or one of black silk? Should he put on a white tie, or a black? And what about rings?

He loved jewelry, as do most Neapolitans, both male and female, and had quantities of gaudy rings, studs, sleeve links, and waistcoat buttons. In his present mood he was inclined to adorn himself with as many of them as possible. But he was not sure whether the English liked diamonds and rubies on a man. He hesitated long, made many changes, and looked many times in the glass. At last he decided on a black tie, a white waistcoat with pearl buttons, a pearl shirt-stud surrounded with diamonds, pearl and diamond sleeve-links, and only three rings—a gold snake, a seal ring, and a ring set with turquoises. This was a modest toilet, suited, surely to the taste to the English, which he remembered to have heard of as sober.

He stood long before the mirror when he was ready, and had poured over his handkerchief a libation of "Rose d'amour."

Certainly he was a fine-looking fellow—his natural sincerity obliged him to acknowledge it. Possibly his nose stuck out too much to balance perfectly the low forehead and the rather square chin. Possibly his cheek-bones were too prominent. But what of that? Women always looked at a man's figure, his eyes, his teeth, his mustaches. And he had a splendid figure, enormous gray eyes, large and perfectly even white teeth between lips that were very full and very red, and blond mustaches whose turned-up points were like a cry of victory.

He drew himself up from the hips, enlarged his eyes by opening them exaggeratedly, stretched his lips till his teeth were well exposed, and vehemently twisted the ends of his mustaches.

Yes, he was a very handsome fellow, and boyish-looking, too—but not too boyish.

It really was absurd of Emilio to think of cutting him out with a girl—Emilio, an old man, all beard and brains! As if any living woman really cared for brains! Impertinence, gayety, agility, muscle—that was what women loved in men. And he had all they wanted.

He filled his case with cigarettes, slipped on a very smart fawn-colored coat, cocked a small-brimmed black bowler hat over his left ear, picked up a pair of white gloves and a cane surmounted by a bunch of golden grapes, and hurried down-stairs, humming "Lili Kangy," the "canzonetta birichina" that was then the rage in Naples.

The dinner was to be at the Hotel des Etrangers. On consideration, Artois had decided against the Galleria. He had thought of those who wander there, of Peppina's aunt, of certain others. And then he had thought of Vere. And his decision was quickly taken. When the Marchesino arrived, Artois was alone in his sitting-room. The two men looked into each other's eyes as they met, and Artois saw at once that Doro was in a state of suppressed excitement and not in a gentle mood. Although Doro generally seemed full of good-humor, and readiness to please and to be pleased, he could look very cruel. And when, in rare moments, he did so, his face seemed almost to change its shape: the cheek-bones to become more salient, the nose sharper, the eyes catlike, the large but well-shaped mouth venomous instead of passionate. He looked older and also commoner directly his insouciance departed from him, and one could divine a great deal of primitive savagery beneath his lively grace and boyish charm.

But to-night, directly he spoke to Artois, his natural humor seemed to return. He explained his illness, which accounted for his not having come as usual to see his friend, and drew a humorous picture of a Panacci in a bed surrounded by terror-stricken nurses.

"And you, Emilio, what have you been doing?" he concluded.

"Working," said Artois.

He pointed to the writing-table, on which lay a pile of manuscript.

The Marchesino glanced at it carelessly, but the two vertical lines suddenly appeared in his forehead just above the inside corners of his eyes.

"Work! work!" he said. "You make me feel quite guilty, amico mio. I live for happiness, for love, but you—you live for duty."

He put his arm through his friend's with a laugh, and drew him towards the balcony.

"Nevertheless," he added, "even you have your moments of pleasure, haven't you?"

He pressed Artois' arm gently, but in the touch of his fingers there was something that seemed to hint a longing to close them violently and cause a shudder of pain.

"Even you have moments when the brain goes to sleep and—and the body wakes up. Eh, Emilio? Isn't it true?"

"My dear Doro, when have I claimed to be unlike other men?"

"No, no! But you workers inspire reverence, you know. We, who do not work, we see your pale faces, your earnest eyes, and we think—mon Dieu, Emilio!—we think you are saints. And then, if, by chance, one evening we go to the Galleria, and find it is not so, that you are like ourselves, we are glad."

He began to laugh.

"We are glad; we feel no longer at a disadvantage."

Again he pressed Artois' arm gently.

"But, amico mio, you are deceptive, you workers," he said. "You take us all in. We are children beside you, we who say all we feel, who show when we hate and when we love. We are babies. If I ever want to become really birbante, I shall become a worker."

He spoke always lightly, laughingly; but Artois understood the malice at his heart, and hesitated for a moment whether to challenge it quietly and firmly, or whether laughingly, to accept the sly imputations of secrecy, of hypocrisy, in a "not-worth-while" temper. If things developed—and Artois felt that they must with such a protagonist as the Marchesino—a situation might arise in which Doro's enmity must come out into the open and be dealt with drastically. Till then was it not best to ignore it, to fall in with his apparent frivolity? Before Artois could decide—for his natural temper and an under-sense of prudence and contempt pulled different ways—the Marchesino suddenly released his arm, leaned over the balcony rail, and looked eagerly down the road. A carriage had just rattled up from the harbor of Santa Lucia only a few yards away.

"Ecco!" he exclaimed. "Ecco! But—but who is with them?"

"Only Gaspare," replied Artois.

"Gaspare! That servant who came to the Guiseppone? Oh, no doubt he has rowed the ladies over and will return to the boat?"

"No, I think not. I think the Signora will bring him to the Carmine."

"Why?" said the Marchesino, sharply.

"Why not? He is a strong fellow, and might be useful in a crowd."

"Are we not strong? Are we not useful?"

"My dear Doro, what's the matter?"

"Niente—niente!"

He tugged at his mustaches.

"Only I think the Signora might trust to us."

"Tell her so, if you like. Here she is."

At this moment the door opened and Hermione came in, followed by Vere.

As Artois went to welcome them he was aware of a strange mixture of sensations, which made these two dear and close friends, these intimates of his life, seem almost new. He was acutely conscious of the mist of which Hermione had thought. He wondered about her, as she about him. He saw again that face in the night under the trellis. He heard the voice that had called to him and Vere in the garden. And he knew that enmity, mysterious yet definite, might arise even between Hermione and him; that even they two—inexorably under the law that has made all human beings separate entities, and incapable of perfect fusion—might be victims of misunderstanding, of ignorance of the absolute truth of personality. Even now he was companioned by the sudden and horrible doubt which had attacked him in the garden: that perhaps she had been always playing a part when she had seemed to be deeply interested in his work, that perhaps there was within her some one whom he did not know, had never even caught a glimpse of until lately, once when she was in the tram going to the Scoglio di Frisio, and once the last time they had met. And yet this was the woman who had nursed him in Africa—and this was the woman against whose impulsive actions he had had the instinct to protect Vere—the Hermione Delarey whom he had known for so many years.

Never before had he looked at Hermione quite as he looked at her to-night. His sense of her strangeness woke up in him something that was ill at ease, doubtful, almost even suspicious, but also something that was quivering with interest.

For years this woman had been to him "dear Hermione," "ma pauvre amie," comrade, sympathizer, nurse, mother of Vere.

Now—what else was she? A human creature with a heart and brain capable of mystery; a soul with room in it for secret things; a temple whose outside he had seen, but whose god, perhaps, he had never seen.

And Vere was involved in her mother's strangeness, and had her own strangeness too. Of that he had been conscious before to-night. For Vere was being formed. The plastic fingers were at work about her, moulding her into what she must be as a woman.

But Hermione! She had been a woman so long.

Perhaps, too, she was standing on the brink of a precipice. That suspicion, that fear, not to be banished by action, added to the curiosity, as about an unknown land, that she aroused.

And the new and vital sense of Hermione's strangeness which was alive in Artois was met by a feeling in her that was akin to it, only of the feminine sex.

Their eyes encountered like eyes that say, "What are you?"

After swift greeting they went down-stairs to dine in the public room. As there were but few people in the house, the large dining-room was not in use, and their table was laid in the small restaurant that looks out on the Marina, and was placed close to the window.

"At last we are repeating our partie carree of the Guiseppone," said Artois, as they sat down.

He felt that as host he must release himself from subtleties and under-feelings, must stamp down his consciousness of secret inquiries and of desires or hatreds half-concealed. He spoke cheerfully, even conventionally.

"Yes, but without the storm," said Hermione, in the same tone. "There is no feeling of electricity in the air to-night."

Even while she spoke she felt as if she were telling a lie which was obvious to them all. And she could not help glancing hastily round. She met the large round eyes of the Marchesino, eyes without subtlety though often expressive.

"No, Signora," he said, smiling at her, rather obviously to captivate her by the sudden vision of his superb teeth—"La Bruna is safe to-night."

"La Bruna?"

"The Madonna del Carmine."

They talked of the coming festa.

Vere was rather quiet, much less vehement in appearance and lively in manner than she had been at the Marchesino's dinner. Artois thought she looked definitely older than she had then, though even then she had played quite well the part of a little woman of the world. There was something subdued in her eyes to-night which touched him, because it made him imagine Vere sad. He wondered if she were still troubled about her mother, if she had fulfilled her intention and asked Gaspare what he thought. And he longed to ask her, to know what Gaspare had said. The remembrance of Gaspare made him say to Hermione:

"I gave orders that Gaspare was to have a meal here. Did they tell you?"

"Yes. He has gone to the servants' room."

The Marchesino's face changed.

"Your Gaspare seems indispensable, Signora," he said to Hermione in his lightest, most boyish manner—a manner that the determination in his eyes contradicted rather crudely. "Do you take him everywhere, like a little dog?"

"I often take him,—but not like a little dog, Marchese," Hermione said, quietly.

"Signora, I did not mean—Here in Naples, we use that expression for anything, or any one, we like to have always with us."

"I see. Well, call Gaspare a watch-dog if you like," she answered, with a smile; "he watches over me carefully."

"A watch-dog, Signora! But do you like to be watched? Is it not unpleasant?"

He was speaking now to get rid of the impression his first remark had evidently made upon her.

"I think it depends how," she replied. "If Gaspare watches me it is only to protect me—I am sure of that."

"But, Signora, do you not trust Don Emilio, do you not trust me, to be your watch-dogs to-night at the festa?"

There was a little pressure in his voice, but he still preserved his light and boyish manner. And now he turned to Vere.

"Speak for us, Signorina! Tell the Signora that we will take care of her to-night, that there is no need of the faithful Gaspare."

Vere looked at him gravely. She had wondered a little why her mother had brought Gaspare, why, at least, she had not left him free till they returned to the boat at Santa Lucia. But her mother wanted him to come with them, and that was enough for her. She opened her lips, and Artois thought she was going to snub her companion. But perhaps she suddenly changed her mind, for she only said:

"Who would trust you, Marchese?"

She met his eyes with a sort of child's impertinence. She had abruptly become the Vere of the Scoglio di Frisio.

"Who would take you for a watch-dog?"

"Ma—Signorina!"

"As a seal—yes, you are all very well! But—"

The young man was immediately in the seventh Heaven. The Signorina remembered his feats in the water. All his self-confidence returned, all his former certainty that the Signorina was secretly devoted to him. His days of doubt and fury were forgotten. His jealousy of Emilio vanished in a cloud of happy contempt for the disabilities of age, and he began to talk to Vere with a vivacity that was truly Neapolitan. When the Marchesino was joyous he had charm, the charm that emanates from the bounding life that flows in the veins of youth. Even the Puritan feels, and fears, the grace that is Pagan. The Marchesino had a Pagan grace. And now it returned to him and fell about him like a garment, clothing body and soul. And Vere seemed to respond to it. She began to chatter, too. She talked lightly, flicking him with little whips of sarcasm that did not hurt, but only urged him on. The humor of a festa might begin to flow from these two.

And again, instead of infecting Artois, it seemed to set him apart, to rebuke silently his gifts, his fame—to tell him that they were useless, that they could do nothing for him.

The Marchesino was not troubled with an intellect. Yet with what ease he found words to play with the words of Vere! His Latin vivacity seemed a perfect substitute for thought, for imagination, for every subtlety. He bubbled like champagne. And when champagne winks and foams at the edge of the shining glass, do the young think of, or care for, the sober gravity, the lingering bouquet of claret, even if it be Chateau Margaux?

As Artois half listened to the young people, while he talked quietly with Hermione, playing the host with discretion, he felt the peculiar cruelty which ordains that the weapons of youth, even if taken up and used by age with vigor and competence, shall be only reeds in those hands whose lines tell of the life behind.

Yet how Vere and he had laughed together on the day of his return from Paris! One gust of such mutual laughter is worth how many days of earnest talk!

Vere was gleaming with fun to-night.

The waiters, as they went softly about the table, looked at her with kind eyes. Secretly they were enjoying her gayety because it was so pretty. Her merriment was as airy as the flight of a bird.

The Marchesino was entranced. Did she care for that?

Artois wondered secretly, and was not sure. He had a theory that all women like to feel their power over men. Few men have not this theory. But there was in Vere something immensely independent, that seemed without sex, and that hinted at a reserve not vestal, but very pure—too pure, perhaps, to desire an empire which is founded certainly upon desire.

And the Marchesino was essentially and completely the young animal; not the heavy, sleek, and self-contented young animal that the northern countries breed, but the frolicsome, playful, fiery young animal that has been many times warmed by the sun.

Hermione felt that Artois' mood to-night echoed his mood at Frisio's, and suddenly she thought once more of the visitors' book and of what he had written there, surely in a moment of almost heated impulse. And as she thought of it she was moved to speak of her thought. She had so many secret reserves from Emile now that this one she could dispense with.

"You remember that night when I met you on the sea?" she said to him.

He looked away from Vere and answered:

"Yes. What about it?"

"When I was at the Scoglio di Frisio I looked again over that wonderful visitors' book."

"Did you?"

"Yes. And I saw what you had written."

Their eyes met. She wondered if by the expression in hers he divined why she had made that expedition, moved by what expectation, by what curiosity. She could tell nothing by his face, which was calm and inscrutable.

After an instant's pause he said:

"Do you know from whom those words come?"

"No. Are they your own?"

"Victor Hugo's. Do you like them?"

But her eyes were asking him a question, and he saw it.

"What is it?" he said.

"Why did you write them?" she said.

"I had to write something. You made me."

"Vere suggested it first."

He looked again at Vere, but only for a moment. She was laughing at something the Marchesino was saying.

"Did she?—Oh! Take some of that salade a la Russe. I gave the chef the recipe for it.—Did she?"

"Don't you remember?"

"Those words were in my head. I put them down."

"Are you fond of them?"

Her restless curiosity was still quite unsatisfied.

"I don't know. But one has puzzled about conscience. Hasn't one?"

He glanced at the Marchesino, who was bending forward to Vere, and illustrating something he was telling her by curious undulating gestures with both hands that suggested a flight.

"At least some of us have," he continued. "And some never have, and never will."

Hermione understood the comment on their fellow-guest.

"Do you think that saying explains it satisfactorily?" she said.

"I believe sometimes we know a great deal more than we know we know," he answered. "That sounds like some nonsense game with words, but it's the best way to put it. Conscience seems to speak out of the silence. But there may be some one in the prompter's box—our secret knowledge."

"But is it knowledge of ourselves, or of others?"

"Which do you think?"

"Of ourselves, I suppose. I think we generally know far less of others than we believe ourselves to know."

She expressed his thought of her earlier in the evening.

"Probably. And nevertheless we may know things of them that we are not aware we know—till after we have instinctively acted on our knowledge."

Their eyes met again. Hermione felt in that moment as if he knew why she had given Vere the permission to read his books.

But still she did not know whether he had written that sentence in the book at Frisio's carelessly, or prompted by some violent impulse to express a secret thought or feeling of the moment.

"Things good or evil?" she said, slowly.

"Perhaps both."

The Marchesino burst into a laugh. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head, and holding the table with his two hands. His white teeth gleamed.

"What is the joke?" asked Artois.

Vere turned her head.

"Oh, nothing. It's too silly. I can't imagine why the Marchesino is so much amused by it."

Artois felt shut out. But when Vere and he had laughed over the tea-table in a blessed community of happy foolishness, who could have understood their mirth? He remembered how he had pitied the imagined outsider.

He turned again to Hermione, but such conversation as theirs, and indeed all serious conversation, now seemed to him heavy, portentous, almost ludicrous. The young alone knew how to deal with life, chasing it as a child chases a colored air-ball, and when it would sink, and fall and be inert, sending it with a gay blow soaring once more towards the blue.

Perhaps Hermione had a similar thought, or perhaps she knew of it in him. At any rate, for a moment she had nothing to say. Nor had he. And so, tacitly excluded, as it seemed, from the merriment of the young ones, the two elders remained looking towards each other in silence, sunk in a joint exile.

Presently Artois began to fidget with his bread. He pulled out some of the crumb from his roll, and pressed it softly between his large fingers, and scattered the tiny fragments mechanically over the table-cloth near his plate. Hermione watched his moving hand. The Marchesino was talking now. He was telling Vere about a paper-chase at Capodimonte, which had started from the Royal Palace. His vivacity, his excitement made a paper-chase seem one of the most brilliant and remarkable events in a brilliant and remarkable world. He had been the hare. And such a hare! Since hares were first created and placed in the Garden of Eden there had been none like unto him. He told of his cunning exploits.

The fingers of Artois moved faster. Hermione glanced at his face. Its massiveness looked heavy. The large eyes were fixed upon the table-cloth. His hand just then was more expressive. And as she glanced at it again something very pitiful awoke in her, something pitiful for him and for herself. She felt that very often lately she had misunderstood him—she had been confused about him. But now, in this moment, she understood him perfectly.

He pulled some more crumb out of his roll.

She was fascinated by his hand. Much as it had written, it had never written more clearly on paper than it was writing now.

But suddenly she felt as if she could not look at it any more, as if it was intolerable to look at it. And she turned towards the open window.

"What is it?" Artois asked her. "Is there too much air for you?"

"Oh no. It isn't that. I was only thinking what a quantity of people pass by, and wondering where they were all going, and what they were all thinking and hoping. I don't know why they should have come into my head just then. I suppose it will soon be time for us to start for the festa."

"Yes. We'll have coffee in my sitting-room—when they are ready." He looked again at Vere and the Marchesino.

"Have we all finished? I thought we would go and have coffee up-stairs. What do you say, Vere?"

He spoke cheerfully.

"Yes; do let us."

They all got up. As Hermione and Vere moved towards the door Artois leaned out of the window for a moment.

"You needn't be afraid. There will be no storm to-night, Emilio!" said the Marchesino, gayly—almost satirically.

"No—it's quite fine."

Artois drew in. "We ought to have a perfect evening," he added, quietly.

CHAPTER XXIX

"How are we going to drive to the Carmine?" said Artois to Hermione, when she had taken her cloak and was ready to go down.

"We must have two carriages."

"Yes."

"Vere and I will go in one, with Gaspare on the box, and you and the Marchese can follow in the other."

"Signora," said the Marchesino, drawing on his white gloves, "you still do not trust us? You are still determined to take the watch-dog? It is cruel of you. It shows a great want of faith in Emilio and in me."

"Gaspare must come."

The Marchesino said no more, only shrugged his shoulders with an air of humorous resignation which hid a real chagrin. He knew how watchful a Sicilian can be, how unyielding in attention to his mistresses, if he thinks they need protection.

But perhaps this Gaspare was to be bribed.

Instinctively the Marchesino put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, and began to feel the money there.

Yes, there was a gold piece.

"Come, Panacci!"

Emilio's hand touched his shoulder, and he followed the ladies out of the room.

Emilio had called him "Panacci." That sounded almost like a declaration of war. Well, he was ready. At dinner his had been the triumph, and Emilio knew it. He meant his triumph to be a greater one before the evening was over. The reappearance of the gay child in Vere, grafted upon the comprehending woman whom he had seen looking out of her eyes on the day of his last visit to the island, had put the finishing touch to the amorous madness of the Marchesino. He dreamed Vere an accomplished coquette. He believed that her cruelty on the night of his serenade, that her coldness and avoidance of him on the day of the lunch, were means devised to increase his ardor. She had been using Emilio merely as an instrument. He had been a weapon in her girlish hands. That was the suitable fate of the old—usefulness.

The Marchesino was in a fever of anticipation. Possibly Vere would play into his hands when they got to the festa. If not, he must manage things for himself. The Signora, of course, would make Emilio her escort. Vere would naturally fall to him, the Marchesino.

But there was the fifth—this Gaspare.

When they came out to the pavement the Marchesino cast a searching glance at the Sicilian, who was taking the cloaks, while the two carriages which had been summoned by the hotel porter were rattling up from the opposite side of the way. Gaspare had saluted him, but did not look at him again. When Hermione and Vere were in the first carriage, Gaspare sprang on to the box as a matter of course. The Marchesino went to tell the coachman which way to drive to the Carmine. When he had finished he looked at Gaspare and said:

"There will be a big crowd. Take care the Signora does not get hurt in it."

He laid a slight emphasis on the word "Signora," and put his hand significantly into his waistcoat-pocket.

Gaspare regarded him calmly.

"Va bene, Signor Marchese," he replied. "I will take care of the Signora and the Signorina."

The Marchesino turned away and jumped into the second carriage with Emilio, realizing angrily that his gold piece would avail him nothing.

As they drove off Artois drew out some small square bits of paper.

"Here's your ticket for the enclosure," he said, giving one to the Marchesino.

"Grazie. But we must walk about. We must show the ladies the fun in the Mercato. It is very dull to stay all the evening in the enclosure."

"We will do whatever they like, of course."

"Keep close to the other carriage! Do you hear?" roared the Marchesino to the coachman.

The man jerked his head, cracked his whip, pulled at his horse's mouth. They shot forward at a tremendous pace, keeping close by the sea at first, then turning to the left up the hill towards the Piazza del Plebiscito. The Marchesino crossed his legs, folded his arms, and instinctively assumed the devil-may-care look characteristic of the young Neapolitan when driving through his city.

"Emilio," he said, after a moment, looking at Artois out of the corners of his eyes without moving his head, "when I was at the island the other day, do you know whom I saw in the house?"

"No."

"A girl of the town. A bad girl. You understand?"

"Do you mean a girl with a wounded cheek?"

"Yes. How can the Signora have her there?"

"The Signora knows all about her," said Artois, dryly.

"She thinks so!"

"What do you mean?"

"If the Signora really knew, could she take such a girl to live with the Signorina?"

The conversation was rapidly becoming insupportable to Artois.

"This is not our affair," he said.

"I do not say it is. But still, as I am a Neapolitan, I think it a pity that some one does not explain to the Signora how impossible—"

"Caro mio!" Artois exclaimed, unable to endure his companion's obvious inclination to pose as a protector of Vere's innocence. "English ladies do not care to be governed. They are not like your charming women. They are independent and do as they choose. You had much better not bother your head about what happens on the island. Very soon the Signora may be leaving it and going away from Naples."

"Davvero?"

The Marchesino turned right round in the little carriage, forgetting his pose.

"Davvero? No. I don't believe it. You play with me. You wish to frighten me."

"To frighten you! I don't understand what you mean. What can it matter to you? You scarcely know these ladies."

The Marchesino pursed his lips together. But he only said, "Si, si." He did not mean to quarrel with Emilio yet. To do so might complicate matters with the ladies.

As they entered the Via del Popolo, and drew near to the Piazza di Masaniello, his excitement increased, stirred by the sight of the crowds of people, who were all streaming in the same direction past the iron rails of the port, beyond which, above the long and ghostly sheds that skirt the sea, rose the tapering masts of vessels lying at anchor. Plans buzzed in his head. He called upon all his shrewdness, all his trickiness of the South. He had little doubt of his capacity to out-manoeuvre Emilio and the Signora. And if the Signorina were favorable to him, he believed that he might even get the better of Gaspare, in whom he divined a watchful hostility. But would the Signorina help him? He could not tell. How can one ever tell what a girl will do at a given moment?

With a jerk the carriage drew up beneath the walls of the prison that frowns upon the Piazza di Masaniello, and the Marchesino roused himself to the battle and sprang out. The hum of the great crowd already assembled, the brilliance of the illuminations that lit up the houses, Nuvolo's tower, the façade of the Church of the Carmine, and the adjoining monastery, the loud music of the band that was stationed in the Kiosk before the enclosure, stirred his young blood. As he went quickly to help Hermione and Vere, he shot a glance almost of contempt at the gray hairs of Emilio, who was getting out of the carriage slowly. Artois saw the glance and understood it. For a moment he stood still. Then he paid the coachman and moved on, encompassed by the masses of people who were struggling gayly towards the centre of the square, intent upon seeing the big doll that was enthroned there dressed as Masaniello.

"We had better go into the enclosure. Don't you think so?" he said to Hermione.

"If you like. I am ready for anything."

"We can walk about afterwards. Perhaps the crush will be less when the fire-balloon has gone up."

The Marchesino said nothing, and they gained the enclosure, where rows of little chairs stood on the short grass that edges the side of the prison that looks upon the Piazza. Gaspare, who on such occasions was full of energy and singularly adroit, found them good places in a moment.

"Ecco, Signora! Ecco, Signorina!"

"Madre, may I stand on my chair?"

"Of course, Signorina. Look! Others are standing!"

Gaspare helped his Padroncina up, then took his place beside her, and stood like a sentinel. Artois had never liked him better than at that moment. Hermione, who looked rather tired, sat down on her chair. The loud music of the band, the lines of fire that brought the discolored houses into sharp relief, and that showed her with a distinctness that was fanciful and lurid the moving faces of hundreds of strangers, the dull roar of voices, and the heat that flowed from the human bodies, seemed to mingle, to become concrete, to lie upon her spirit like a weight. Artois stood by her, leaning on his stick and watching the crowd with his steady eyes. The Marchesino was looking up at Vere, standing in a position that seemed to indicate a longing that she should rest her hand upon his shoulder.

"You will fall, Signorina!" he said. "Be careful. Let me—"

"I am quite safe."

But she dropped one hand to the shoulder of Gaspare.

The Marchesino moved, almost as if he were about to go away. Then he lit a cigarette and spoke to Hermione.

"You look tired, Signora. You feel the heat. It is much fresher outside, when one is walking. Here, under the prison walls, it is always like a furnace in summer. It is unwholesome. It puts one into a fever."

Hermione looked at him, and saw a red spot burning on each side of his face near his cheek-bones.

"Perhaps it would be better to walk," she said, doubtfully.

Her inclination was for movement, for her fatigue was combined with a sensation of great restlessness.

"What do you say, Vere?" she added.

"Oh, I should love to go among the people and see everything," she answered, eagerly.

The Marchesino's brow cleared.

"Let us go, Emilio! You hear what the Signorina says."

"Very well," said Artois.

His voice was reluctant, even cold. Vere glanced at him quickly.

"Would you rather stay here, Monsieur Emile?" she said.

"No, Vere, no. Let us go and see the fun."

He smiled at her.

"We must keep close together," he added, looking at the Marchesino. "The crowd is tremendous."

"But they are all in good humor," he answered, carelessly. "We Neapolitans, we are very gay, that is true, but we do not forget our manners when we have a festa. There is nothing to fear. This is the best way out. We must cross the Mercato. The illuminations of the streets beyond are always magnificent. The Signorina shall walk down paths of fire, but she shall not be burned."

He led the way with Vere, going in front to disarm the suspicion which he saw plainly lurking in Emilio's eyes. Artois followed with Hermione, and Gaspare came last. The exit from the enclosure was difficult, as many people were pouring in through the narrow opening, and others, massed together outside the wooden barrier, were gazing at the seated women within; but at length they reached the end of the Piazza, and caught a glimpse of the Masaniello doll, which faced a portrait of the Madonna del Carmine framed in fire. Beyond, to the right, above the heads of the excited multitude, rose the pale-pink globe of the fire-balloon, and as for a moment they stood still to look at it the band struck up a sonorous march, the balloon moved sideways, swayed, heeled over slightly like a sailing-yacht catching the breeze beyond the harbor bar, recovered itself, and lifted the blazing car above the gesticulating arms of the people. A long murmur followed it as it glided gently away, skirting the prodigious belfry with the apparent precaution of a living thing that longed for, and sought, the dim freedom of the sky. The children instinctively stretched out their arms to it. All faces were lifted towards the stars, as if a common aspiration at that moment infected the throng, a universal, though passing desire to be free of the earth, to mount, to travel, to be lost in the great spaces that encircle terrestrial things. At the doors of the trattorie the people, who had forsaken their snails, stood to gaze, many of them holding glasses of white wine in their hands. The spighe arrosto, the watermelons, were for a moment forgotten on the stalls of their vendors, who ceased from shouting to the passers-by. There was a silence in which was almost audible the human wish for wings. Presently the balloon, caught by some vagrant current of air, began to travel abruptly, and more swiftly, sideways, passing over the city towards its centre. At once the crowd moved in the same direction. Aspiration was gone. A violence of children took its place, and the instinct to follow where the blazing toy led. The silence was broken. People called and gesticulated, laughed and chattered. Then the balloon caught fire from the brazier beneath it. A mass of flames shot up. A roar broke from the crowd and it pressed more fiercely onward, each unit of it longing to see where the wreck would fall. Already the flames were sinking towards the city.

"Where are Vere and the Marchesino?"

Hermione had spoken. Artois, whose imagination had been fascinated by the instincts of the crowd, and whose intellect had been chained to watchfulness during its strange excitement, looked sharply round.

"Vere—isn't she here?"

He saw at once that she was gone. But he saw, too, that Gaspare was no longer with them. The watch-dog had been more faithful than he.

"They must be close by," he added. "The sudden movement separated us, no doubt."

"Yes. Gaspare has vanished too!"

"With them," Artois said.

He spoke with an emphasis that was almost violent.

"But—you didn't see—" began Hermione.

"Don't you know Gaspare yet?" he asked.

Their eyes met. She was startled by the expression in his.

"You don't think—" she began.

She broke off.

"I think Gaspare knows his Southerner," Artois replied. "We must look for them. They are certain to have gone with the crowd."

They followed the people into the Mercato. The burning balloon dropped down and disappeared.

"It has fallen into the Rettifilo!" cried a young man close to them.

"Macche!" exclaimed his companion.

"I will bet you five lire—"

He gesticulated furiously.

"We shall never find them," Hermione said.

"We will try to find them."

His voice startled her now, as his eyes had startled her. A man in the crowd pressed against her roughly. Instinctively she caught hold of Artois' arm.

"Yes, you had better take it," he said.

"Oh, it was only—"

"No, take it."

And he drew her hand under his arm.

The number of people in the Mercato was immense, but it was possible to walk on steadily, though slowly. Now that the balloon had vanished the crowd had forgotten it, and was devoting itself eagerly to the pleasures of the bar. In the tall and barrack-like houses candles gleamed in honor of Masaniello. The streets that led away towards the city's heart were decorated with arches of little lamps, with columns and chains of lights, and the pedestrians passing through them looked strangely black in this great frame of fire. From the Piazza before the Carmine the first rocket rose, and, exploding, showered its golden rain upon the picture of the Virgin.

"Perhaps they have gone back into the Piazza."

Hermione spoke after a long silence, during which they had searched in vain. Artois stood still and looked down at her. His face was very stern.

"We sha'n't find them," he said.

"In this crowd, of course, it is difficult, but—"

"We sha'n't find them."

"At any rate, Gaspare is with them."

"How do you know that?"

The expression in his face frightened her.

"But you said you were sure—"

"Panacci was too clever for us; he may have been too clever for Gaspare."

Hermione was silent for a moment. Then she said:

"You surely don't think the Marchese is wicked?"

"He is young, he is Neapolitan, and to-night he is mad. Vere has made him mad."

"But Vere was only gay at dinner as any child—"

"Don't think I am blaming Vere. If she has fascination, she cannot help it."

"What shall we do?"

"Will you let me put you into a cab? Will you wait in my room at the hotel until I come back with Vere? I can search for her better alone. I will find her—if she is here."

Their eyes met steadily as he finished speaking, and he saw, or thought he saw, in hers a creeping menace, as if she had the intention to attack or to defy him.

"I am Vere's mother," she said.

"Let me take you to a cab, Hermione."

He spoke coldly, inexorably. This moment of enforced inactivity was a very difficult one for him. And the violence that was blazing within him made him fear that if Hermione did not yield to his wish he might lose his self-control.

"You can do nothing," he added.

Her eyes left his, her lips quivered. Then she said:

"Take me, then."

She did not look at him again until she was in a cab and Artois had told the driver to go to the Hotel Royal. Then she glanced at him with a strange expression of acute self-consciousness which he had never before seen on her face.

"You don't believe that—that there is any danger to Vere?" she said, in a low voice. "You cannot believe that."

"I don't know."

She leaned forward, and her face changed.

"Go and bring her back to me."

The cabman drove off, and Artois was lost in the crowd.

He never knew how long his search lasted, how long he heard the swish and the bang of rockets, the vehement music of the band, the cries and laughter of the people, the sound of footsteps as if a world were starting on some pilgrimage; how long he saw the dazzling avenues of fire stretching away into the city's heart; how long he looked at the faces of strangers, seeking Vere's face. He was excessively conscious of almost everything except of time. It might have been two hours later, or much less, when he felt a hand upon his arm, turned round, and saw Gaspare beside him.

"Where is the Signora?"

"Gone to the hotel? And the Signorina?"

Gaspare looked at Artois with a sort of heavy gloom, then looked down to the ground.

"You have lost her?"

"Si."

There was a dulness of fatalism in his voice.

Artois did not reproach him.

"Did you lose them when the balloon went up?" he asked.

"Macche! It was not the balloon!" Gaspare said, fiercely.

"What was it?"

Artois felt suddenly that Gaspare had some perfect excuse for his inattention.

"Some one spoke to me. When I—when I had finished the Signorina and that Signore were gone."

"Some one spoke to you. Who was it?"

"It was Ruffo."

Artois stared at Gaspare.

"Ruffo! Was he alone?"

"No, Signore."

"Who was with him?"

"His mother was with him."

"His mother. Did you speak to her?"

"Si, Signore."

There was a silence between them. It was broken by a sound of bells.

"Signore, it is midnight."

Artois drew out his watch quickly. The hands pointed to twelve o'clock. The crowd was growing thinner, was surely melting away.

"We had better go to the hotel," Artois said. "Perhaps they are there. If they are not there—"

He did not finish the sentence. They found a cab and drove swiftly towards the Marina. All the time the little carriage rattled over the stony streets Artois expected Gaspare to speak to him, to tell him more, to tell him something tremendous. He felt as if the Sicilian were beset by an imperious need to break a long reserve. But, if it were so, this reserve was too strong for its enemy. Gaspare's lips were closed. He did not say a word till the cabman drew up before the hotel.

As Artois got out he knew that he was terribly excited. The hall was almost dark, and the night concierge came from his little room on the right of the door to turn on the light and accompany Artois to the lift.

"There is a lady waiting in your room, Signore," he said.

Artois, who was walking quickly towards the lift, stopped. He looked at Gaspare.

"A lady!" he said.

"Shall I go back to the Piazza, Signore?"

He half turned towards the swing door.

"Wait a minute. Come up-stairs first and see the Signora."

The lift ascended. As Artois opened the door of his sitting-room he heard a woman's dress rustle, and Hermione stood before them.

"Vere?" she said.

She laid her hand on his arm.

"Gaspare!"

There was a sound of reproach in her voice. She took her hand away from Artois.

"Gaspare?" she repeated, interrogatively.

"Signora!" he answered, doggedly.

He did not lift his eyes to hers.

"You have lost the Signorina?"

"Si, Signora."

He attempted no excuse, he expressed no regret.

"Gaspare!" Hermione said.

Suddenly Artois put his hand on Gaspare's shoulder. He said nothing, but his touch told the Sicilian much—told him how he was understood, how he was respected, by this man who had shared his silence.

"We thought they might be here," Artois said.

"They are not here."

Her voice was almost hard, almost rebuking. She was still standing in the door-space.

"I will go back and look again, Signora."

"Si," she said.

She turned back into the room. Artois held out his hand to Gaspare:

"Signore?"

Gaspare looked surprised, hesitating, then moved. He took the out-stretched hand, grasped it violently, and went away.

Artois shut the sitting-room door and went towards Hermione.

"You are staying?" she said.

By her intonation he could not tell whether she was glad or almost angrily astonished.

"They may come here immediately," he said. "I wish to see Panacci—when he comes."

She looked at him quickly.

"It must be an accident," she said. "I can't—I won't believe that—no one could hurt Vere."

He said nothing.

"No one could hurt Vere," she repeated.

He went out on to the balcony and stood there for two or three minutes, looking down at the sea and at the empty road. She did not follow him, but sat down upon the sofa near the writing-table. Presently he turned round.

"Gaspare has gone."

"It would have been better if he had never come!"

"Hermione," he said, "has it come to this, that I must defend Gaspare to you?"

"I think Gaspare might have kept with Vere, ought to have kept with Vere."

Artois felt a burning desire to make Hermione understand the Sicilian, but he only said, gently:

"Some day, perhaps, you will know Gaspare's character better, you will understand all this."

"I can't understand it now. But—oh, if Vere—No, that's impossible, impossible!"

She spoke with intense vehemence.

"Some things cannot happen," she exclaimed, with a force that seemed to be commanding destiny.

Artois said nothing. And his apparent calm seemed to punish her, almost as if he struck her with a whip.

"Why don't you speak?" she said.

She felt almost confused by his silence.

He went out again to the balcony, leaned on the railing and looked over. She felt that he was listening with his whole nature for the sound of wheels. She felt that she heard him listening, that she heard him demanding the sound. And as she looked at his dark figure, beyond which she saw the vagueness of night and some stars, she was conscious of the life in him as she had never been conscious of it before, she was conscious of all his manhood terribly awake.

That was for Vere.

A quarter of an hour went by. Artois remained always on the balcony, and scarcely moved. Hermione watched him, and tried to learn a lesson; tried to realize without bitterness and horror that in the heart of man everything has been planted, and that therefore nothing which grows there should cause too great amazement, too great condemnation, or the absolute withdrawal of pity; tried to face something which must completely change her life, sweeping away more than mere illusions, sweeping away a long reverence which had been well founded, and which she had kept very secret in her heart, replacing its vital substance with a pale shadow of compassion.

She watched him, and she listened for the sound of wheels, until at last she could bear it no longer.

"Emile, what are we to do? What can we do?" she said, desperately.

"Hush!" he said.

He held up his hand. They both listened and heard far off the noise of a carriage rapidly approaching. He looked over the road. The carriage rattled up. She heard it stop, and saw him bend down. Then suddenly he drew himself up, turned, and came into the room.

"They have come," he said.

He went to the door and opened it, and stood by it.

And his face was terrible.

CHAPTER XXX

Two minutes later there was the sound of steps coming quickly down the uncarpeted corridor, and Vere entered, followed, but not closely, by the Marchesino. Vere went up at once to her mother, without even glancing at Artois.

"I am so sorry, Madre," she said, quietly. "But—but it was not my fault."

The Marchesino had paused near the door, as if doubtful of Vere's intentions. Now he approached Hermione, pulling off his white gloves.

"Signora," he said, in a hard and steady voice, but smiling boyishly, "I fear I am the guilty one. When the balloon went up we were separated from you by the crowd, and could not find you immediately. The Signorina wished to go back to the enclosure. Unfortunately I had lost the tickets, so that we should not have been readmitted. Under these circumstances I thought the best thing was to show the Signorina the illuminations, and then to come straight back to the hotel. I hope you have not been distressed. The Signorina was of course perfectly safe with me."

"Thank you, Marchese," said Hermione, coldly. "Emile, what are we to do about Gaspare?"

"Gaspare?" asked Vere.

"He has gone back to the Piazza to search for you again."

"Oh!"

She flushed, turned away, and went up to the window. Then she hesitated, and finally stepped out on to the balcony.

"You had better spend the night in the hotel," said Artois.

"But we have nothing!"

"The housemaid can find you what is necessary in the morning."

"As to our clothes—that doesn't matter. Perhaps it will be the best plan."

Artois rang the bell. They waited in silence till the night porter came.

"Can you give these two ladies rooms for the night?" said Artois. "It is too late for them to go home by boat, and their servant has not come back yet."

"Yes, sir. The ladies can have two very good rooms."

"Good-night, Emile," said Hermione. "Good-night, Marchese. Vere!"

Vere came in from the balcony.

"We are going to sleep here, Vere. Come!"

She went out.

"Good-night, Monsieur Emile," Vere said to Artois, without looking at him.

She followed her mother without saying another word.

Artois looked after them as they went down the corridor, watched Vere's thin and girlish figure until she turned the corner near the staircase, walking slowly and, he thought, as if she were tired and depressed. During this moment he was trying to get hold of his own violence, to make sure of his self-control. When the sound of the footsteps had died completely away he drew back into the room and shut the door.

The Marchesino was standing near the window. When he saw the face of Artois he sat down in an arm-chair and put his hat on the floor.

"You don't mind if I stay for a few minutes, Emilio?" he said. "Have you anything to drink? I am thirsty after all this walking in the crowd."

Artois brought him some Nocera and lemons.

"Do you want brandy, whiskey?"

"No, no. Grazie."

He poured out the Nocera gently, and began carefully to squeeze some lemon-juice into it, holding the fruit lightly in his strong fingers, and watching the drops fall with a quiet attention.

"Where have you been to-night?"

The Marchesino looked up.

"In the Piazza di Masaniello."

"Where have you been?"

"I tell you—the Piazza, the Mercato, down one or two streets to see the illuminations. What's the matter, caro mio? Are you angry because we lost you in the crowd?"

"You intended to lose us in the crowd before we left the hotel to-night."

"Not at all, amico mio. Not at all."

His voice hardened again, the furrows appeared on his forehead.

"Now you are lying," said Artois.

The Marchesino got up and stood in front of Artois. The ugly, cat-like look had come into his face, changing it from its usual boyish impudence to a hardness that suggested age. At that moment he looked much older than he was.

"Be careful, Emilio!" he said. "I am Neapolitan, and I do not allow myself to be insulted."

His gray eyes contracted.

"You did not mean to get lost with the Signorina?" said Artois.

"One leaves such things to destiny."

"Destiny! Well, to-night it is your destiny to go out of the Signorina's life forever."

"How dare you command me? How dare you speak for these ladies?"

Suddenly Artois went quite white, and laid his hand on the Marchesino's arm.

"Where have you been? What have you been doing all this time?" he said.

Questions blazed in his eyes. His hand closed more firmly on the Marchesino.

"Where did you take that child? What did you say to her? What did you dare to say?"

"I! And you?" said the Marchesino, sharply.

He threw out his hand towards the face of Artois. "And you—you!" he repeated.

"I?"

"Yes—you! What have you said to her? Where have you taken her? I at least am young. My blood speaks to me. I am natural, I am passionate. I know what I am, what I want; I know it; I say it; I am sincere. I—I am ready to go naked into the sun before the whole world, and say, 'There! There! This is Isidoro Panacci; and he is this—and this—and this! Like it or hate it—that does not matter! It is not his fault. He is like that. He is made like that. He is meant to be like that, and he is that—he is that!' Do you hear? That is what I am ready to do. But you—you—! Ah, Madonna! Ah, Madre benedetta!"

He threw up both his hands suddenly, looked at the ceiling and shook his head sharply from side to side. Then he slapped his hands gently and repeatedly against his knees, and a grim and almost venerable look came into his mobile face.

"The great worker! The man of intellect! The man who is above the follies of that little Isidoro Panacci, who loves a beautiful girl, and who is proud of loving her, and who knows that he loves her, that he wants her, that he wishes to take her! Stand still!"—he suddenly hissed out the words. "The man with the white hairs who might have had many children of his own, but who prefers to play papa—caro papa, Babbo bello!—to the child of another on a certain little island. Ah, buon Dio! The wonderful writer, respected and admired by all; by whose side the little Isidoro seems only a small boy from college, about whom nobody need bother! How he is loved, and how he is trusted on the island! Nobody must come there but he and those whom he wishes. He is to order, to arrange all. The little Isidoro—he must not come there. He must not know the ladies. He is nothing; but he is wicked. He loves pleasure. He loves beautiful girls! Wicked, wicked Isidoro! Keep him out! Keep him away! But the great writer—with the white hairs—everything is allowed to him because he is Caro Papa. He may teach the Signorina. He may be alone with her. He may take her out at night in the boat."—His cheeks were stained with red and his eyes glittered.—"And when the voice of that wicked little Isidoro is heard—Quick! Quick! To the cave! Let us escape! Let us hide where it is dark, and he will never find us! Let us make him think we are at Nisida! Hush! the boat is passing. He is deceived! He will search all night till he is tired! Ah—ah—ah! That is good! And now back to the island—quick!—before he finds out!"—He thrust out his arm towards Artois.—"And that is my friend!" he exclaimed. "He who calls himself the friend of the little wicked Isidoro. P—!"—He turned his head and spat on to the balcony.—"Gran Dio! And this white-haired Babbo! He steals into the Galleria at night to meet Maria Fortunata! He puts a girl of the town to live with the Signorina upon the island, to teach her—"

"Stop!" said Artois.

"I will not stop!" said the Marchesino, furiously. "To teach the Signorina all the—"

Artois lifted his hand.

"Do you want me to strike you on the mouth?" he said.

"Strike me!"

Artois looked at him with a steadiness that seemed to pierce.

"Then—take care, Panacci. You are losing your head."

"And you have lost yours!" cried the Marchesino. "You, with your white hairs, you are mad. You are mad about the 'child.' You play papa, and all the time you are mad, and you think nobody sees it. But every one sees it, every one knows it. Every one knows that you are madly in love with the Signorina."

Artois had stepped back.

"I—in love!" he said.

His voice was contemptuous, but his face had become flushed, and his hands suddenly clinched themselves.

"What! you play the hypocrite even with yourself! Ah, we Neapolitans, we may be shocking; but at least we are sincere! You do not know!—then I will tell you. You love the Signorina madly, and you hate me because you are jealous of me—because I am young and you are old. I know it; the Signora knows it; that Sicilian—Gaspare—he knows it! And now you—you know it!"

He suddenly flung himself down on the sofa that was behind him. Perspiration was running down his face, and even his hands were wet with it.

Artois said nothing, but stood where he was, looking at the Marchesino, as if he were waiting for something more which must inevitably come. The Marchesino took out his handkerchief, passed it several times quickly over his lips, then rolled it up into a ball and shut it up in his left hand.

"I am young and you are old," he said. "And that is all the matter. You hate me, not because you think I am wicked and might do the Signorina harm, but because I am young. You try to keep the Signorina from me because I am young. You do not dare to let her know what youth is, really, really to know, really, really to feel. Because, if once she did know, if once she did feel, if she touched the fire"—he struck his hand down on his breast—"she would be carried away, she would be gone from you forever. You think, 'Now she looks up to me! She reverences me! She admires me! She worships me as a great man!' And if once, only once she touched the fire—ah!"—he flung out both his arms with a wide gesture, opened his mouth, then shut it, showing his teeth like an animal.—"Away would go everything—everything. She would forget your talent, she would forget your fame, she would forget your thoughts, your books, she would forget you, do you hear?—all, all of you. She would remember only that you are old and she is young, and that, because of that, she is not for you. And then"—his voice dropped, became cold and serious and deadly, like the voice of one proclaiming a stark truth—"and then, if she understood you, what you feel, and what you wish, and how you think of her—she would hate you! How she would hate you!"

He stopped abruptly, staring at Artois, who said nothing.

"Is it not true?" he said.

He got up, taking his hat and stick from the floor.

"You do not know! Well—think! And you will know that it is true. A rivederci, Emilio!"

His manner had suddenly become almost calm. He turned away and went towards the door. When he reached it he added:

"To-morrow I shall ask the Signora to allow me to marry the Signorina."

Then he went out.

The gilt clock on the marble table beneath the mirror struck the half-hour after one. Artois looked at it and at his watch, comparing them. The action was mechanical, and unaccompanied by any thought connected with it. When he put his watch back into his pocket he did not know whether its hands pointed to half-past one or not. He carried a light chair on to the balcony, and sat down there, crossing his legs, and leaning one arm on the rail.

"If she touched the fire." Those words of the Marchesino remained in the mind of Artois—why, he did not know. He saw before him a vision of a girl and of a flame. The flame aspired towards the girl, but the girl hesitated, drew back—then waited.

What had happened during the hours of the Festa? Artois did not know. The Marchesino had told him nothing, except that he—Artois—was madly in love with Vere. Monstrous absurdity! What trivial nonsense men talked in moments of anger, when they desired to wound!

And to-morrow the Marchesino would ask Vere to marry him. Of course Vere would refuse. She had no feeling for him. She would tell him so. He would be obliged to understand that for once he could not have his own way. He would go out of Vere's life, abruptly, as he had come into it.

He would go. That was certain. But others would come into Vere's life. Fire would spring up round about her, the fire of love of men for a girl who has fire within her, the fire of the love of youth for youth.

Youth! Artois was not by nature a sentimentalist—and he was not a fool. He knew how to accept the inevitable things life cruelly brings to men, without futile struggling, without contemptible pretence. Quite calmly, quite serenely, he had accepted the snows of middle age. He had not secretly groaned or cursed, railed against destiny, striven to defy it by travesty, as do many men. He had thought himself to be "above" all that—until lately. But now, as he thought of the fire, he was conscious of an immense sadness that had in it something of passion, or a regret that was, for a moment, desperate, bitter, that seared, that tortured, that was scarcely to be endured. It is terrible to realize that one is at a permanent disadvantage, which time can only increase. And just then Artois felt that there was nothing, that there could never be anything, to compensate any human being for the loss of youth.

He began to wonder about the people of the island. The Marchesino had spoken with a strange assurance. He had dared to say:

"You love the Signorina. I know it; the Signora knows it; Gaspare—he knows it. And now you—you know it."

Was it possible that his deep interest in Vere, his paternal delight in her talent, in her growing charm, in her grace and sweetness, could have been mistaken for something else, for the desire of man for woman? Vere had certainly never for a moment misunderstood him. That he knew as surely as he knew that he was alive. But Gaspare and Hermione? He fell into deep thought, and presently he was shaken by an emotion that was partly disgust and partly anxiety. He got up from his chair and looked out into the night. The weather was exquisitely still, the sky absolutely clear. The sea was like the calm that dwells surely in the breast of God. Naples was sleeping in the silence. But he was terribly awake, and it began to seem to him as if he had, perhaps, slept lately, slept too long. He was a lover of truth, and believed himself to be a discerner of it. The Marchesino was but a thoughtless, passionate boy, headstrong, Pagan, careless of intellect, and immensely physical. Yet it was possible that he had been enabled to see a truth which Artois had neither seen nor suspected. Artois began to believe it possible, as he remembered many details of the conduct of Hermione and of Gaspare in these last summer days. There had been something of condemnation sometimes in the Sicilian's eyes as they looked into his. He had wondered what it meant. Had it meant—that? And that night in the garden with Hermione—

With all the force and fixity of purpose he fastened his mind upon Hermione, letting Gaspare go.

If what the Marchesino had asserted were true—not that—but if Hermione had believed it to be true, much in her conduct that had puzzled Artois was made plain. Could she have thought that? Had she thought it? And if she had—? Always he was looking out to the stars, and to the ineffable calm of the sea. But now their piercing brightness, and its large repose, only threw into a sort of blatant relief in his mind its consciousness of the tumult of humanity. He saw Hermione involved in that tumult, and he saw himself. And Vere?

Was it possible that in certain circumstances Vere might hate him? It was strange that to-night Artois found himself for the first time considering the Marchesino seriously, not as a boy, but as a man who perhaps knew something of the world and of character better than he did. The Marchesino had said:

"If she understood you—how she would hate you."

But surely Vere and he understood each other very well.

He looked out over the sea steadily, as he wished, as he meant, to look now at himself, into his own heart and nature, into his own life. Upon the sea, to the right and far off, a light was moving near the blackness of the breakwater. It was the torch of a fisherman—one of those eyes of the South of which Artois had thought. His eyes became fascinated by it, and he watched it with intensity. Sometimes it was still. Then it travelled gently onward, coming towards him. Then it stopped again. Fire—the fire of youth. He thought of the torch as that; as youth with its hot strength, its beautiful eagerness, its intense desires, its spark-like hopes, moving without fear amid the dark mysteries of the world and of life; seeking treasure in the blackness, the treasure of an answering soul, of a completing nature, of the desired and desirous heart, seeking its complement of love—the other fire.

He looked far over the sea. But there was no other fire upon it.

And still the light came on.

And now he thought of it as Vere.

She was almost a child, but already her fire was being sought, longed for. And she knew it, and must be searching, too, perhaps without definite consciousness of what she was doing, instinctively. She was searching there in the blackness, and in her quest she was approaching him. But where he stood it was all dark. There was no flame lifting itself up that could draw her flame to it. The fire that was approaching would pass before him, would go on, exploring the night, would vanish away from his eyes. Elsewhere it would seek the fire it needed, the fire it would surely find at last.

And so it was. The torch came on, passed softly by, slipped from his sight beneath the bridge of Castel dell' Uovo.

When it had gone Artois felt strangely deserted and alone, strangely unreconciled with life. And he remembered his conversation with Hermione in Virgil's Grotto; how he had spoken like one who scarcely needed love, having ambition and having work to do, and being no longer young.

To-night he felt that every one needs love first—that all the other human needs come after that great necessity. He had thought himself a man full of self-knowledge, full of knowledge of others. But he had not known himself. Perhaps even now the real man was hiding somewhere, far down, shrinking away for fear of being known, for fear of being dragged up into the light.

He sought for this man, almost with violence.

A weariness lay beneath his violence to-night, a physical fatigue such as he sometimes felt after work. It had been produced, no doubt, by the secret anger he had so long controlled, the secret but intense curiosity which was not yet satisfied, and which still haunted him and tortured him. This curiosity he now strove to expel from his mind, telling himself that he had no right to it. He had wished to preserve Vere just as she was, to keep her from all outside influences. And now he asked the real man why he had wished it? Had it been merely the desire of the literary godfather to cherish a pretty and promising talent? Or had something of the jealous spirit so brutally proclaimed to him that night by the Marchesino really entered into the desire? This torturing curiosity to know what had happened at the Festa surely betrayed the existence of some such spirit.

He must get rid of it.

He began to walk slowly up and down the little balcony, turning every instant like a beast in a cage. It seemed to him that the real man had indeed lain in hiding, but that he was coming forth reluctantly into the light.

Possibly he had been drifting without knowing it towards some nameless folly. He was not sure. To-night he felt uncertain of himself and of everything, almost like an ignorant child facing the world. And he felt almost afraid of himself. Was it possible that he, holding within him so much of the knowledge, so much of pride, could ever draw near to a crazy absurdity, a thing that the whole world would laugh at and despise? Had he drawn near to it. Was he near it now?

He thought of all his recent intercourse with Vere, going back mentally to the day in spring when he arrived in Naples. He followed the record day by day until he reached that afternoon when he had returned from Paris, when he came to the island to find Vere alone, when she read to him her poems. Very pitilessly, despite the excitement still raging within him, he examined that day, that night, recalling every incident, recalling every feeling the incidents of those hours had elicited from his heart. He remembered how vexed he had been when Hermione told him of the engagement for the evening. He remembered the moments after the dinner, his sensation of loneliness when he listened to the gay conversation of Vere and the Marchesino, his almost irritable anxiety when she had left the restaurant and gone out to the terrace in the darkness. He had felt angry with Panacci then. Had he not always felt angry with Panacci for intruding into the island life?

He followed the record of his intercourse with Vere until he reached the Festa of that night, until he reached the moment in which he was pacing the tiny balcony while the night wore on towards dawn.

That was the record of himself with Vere.

He began to think of Hermione. How had all this that he had just been telling over in his mind affected her? What had she been thinking of it—feeling about it? And Gaspare?

Even now Artois did not understand himself, did not know whither his steps might have tended had not the brutality of the Marchesino roused him abruptly to this self-examination, this self-consideration. He did not fully understand himself, and he wondered very much how Hermione and the Sicilian had understood him—judged him.

Artois had a firm belief in the right instincts of sensitive but untutored natures, especially when linked with strong hearts capable of deep love and long fidelity. He did not think that Gaspare would easily misread the character or the desires of one whom he knew well. Hermione might. She was tremendously emotional and impulsive, and might be carried away into error. But there was a steadiness in Gaspare which was impressive, which could not be ignored.

Artois wondered very much what Gaspare had thought.

There was a tap at the door, and Gaspare came in, holding his soft hat in his hand, and looking tragic and very hot and tired.

"Oh, Gaspare!" said Artois, coming in from the balcony, "they have come back."

"Lo so, Signore."

"And they are sleeping here for the night."

"Si, Signore."

Gaspare looked at him as if inquiring something of him.

"Sit down a minute," said Artois, "and have something to drink. You must spend the night here, too. The porter will give you a bed."

"Grazie, Signore."

Gaspare sat down by the table, and Artois gave him some Nocera and lemon-juice. He would not have brandy or whiskey, though he would not have refused wine had it been offered to him.

"Where have you been?" Artois asked him.

"Signore, I have been all over the Piazza di Masaniello and the Mercato. I have been through all the streets near by. I have been down by the harbor. And the Signorina?"

He stared at Artois searchingly above his glass. His face was covered with perspiration.

"I only saw her for a moment. She went to bed almost immediately."

"And that Signore?"

"He has gone home."

Gaspare was silent for a minute. Then he said:

"If I had met that Signore—" He lifted his right hand, which was lying on the table, and moved it towards his belt.

He sighed, and again looked hard at Artois.

"It is better that I did not meet him," he said, with naïve conviction. "It is much better. The Signorina is not for him."

Artois was sitting opposite to him, with the table between them.

"The Signorina is not for him," repeated Gaspare, with a dogged emphasis.

His large eyes were full of a sort of cloudy rebuke and watchfulness. And as he met them Artois felt that he knew what Gaspare had thought. He longed to say, "You are wrong. It is not so. It was never so." But he only said:

"The Signore Marchese will know that to-morrow."

And as he spoke the words he was conscious of an immense sensation of relief which startled him. He was too glad when he thought of the final dismissal of the Marchesino.

Gaspare nodded his head and put his glass to his lips. When he set it down again it was empty. He moved to get up, but Artois detained him.

"And so you met Ruffo to-night?" he said.

Gaspare's expression completely changed. Instead of the almost cruel watcher, he became the one who felt that he was watched.

"Si, Signore."

"Just when the balloon went up?"

"Si, Signore. They were beside me in the crowd."

"Was he alone with his mother?"

"Si, Signore. Quite alone."

"Gaspare, I have seen Ruffo's mother."

Gaspare looked startled.

"Truly, Signore?"

"Yes. I saw her with him one day at the Mergellina. She was crying."

"Perhaps she is unhappy. Her husband is in prison."

"Because of Peppina."

"Si."

"And to-night you spoke to her for the first time?"

Artois laid a strong emphasis on the final words.

"Signore, I have never met her with Ruffo before."

The two men looked steadily at each other. A question that could not be evaded, a question that would break like a hammer upon a mutual silence of years, was almost upon Artois' lips. Perhaps Gaspare saw it, for he got up with determination.

"I am going to bed now, Signore. I am tired. Buona notte, Signore."

He took up his hat and went out.

Artois had not asked his question. But he felt that it was answered.

Gaspare knew. And he knew.

And Hermione—did Fate intend that she should know?

CHAPTER XXXI

It was nearly dawn when Artois fell asleep. He did not wake till past ten o'clock. The servant who brought his breakfast handed him a note, and told him that the ladies of the island had just left the hotel with Gaspare. As Artois took the note he was conscious of a mingled feeling of relief and disappointment. This swift, almost hurried departure left him lonely, yet he could not have met Hermione and Vere happily in the light of morning. To-day he felt a self-consciousness that was unusual in him, and that the keen eyes of women could not surely fail to observe. He wanted a little time. He wanted to think quietly, calmly, to reach a decision that he had not reached at night.

Hermione and Vere had a very silent voyage. Gaspare's tragic humor cast a cloud about his mistresses. He had met them in the morning with a look of heavy, almost sullen scrutiny in his great eyes, which seemed to develop into a definite demand for information. But he asked nothing. He made no allusion to the night before. To Vere his manner was almost cold. When they were getting into the boat at Santa Lucia she said, with none of her usual simplicity and self-possession, but like one making an effort which was repugnant:

"I'm very sorry about last night, Gaspare."

"It doesn't matter, Signorina."

"Did you get back very late?"

"I don't know, Signora. I did not look at the hour."

She looked away from him and out to sea.

"I am very sorry," she repeated.

And he again said:

"It doesn't matter, Signorina."

It was nearly noon when they drew near to the island. The weather was heavily hot, languidly hot even upon the water. There was a haze hanging over the world in which distant objects appeared like unsubstantial clouds, or dream things impregnated with a mystery that was mournful. The voice of a fisherman singing not far off came to them like the voice of Fate, issuing from the ocean to tell them of the sadness that was the doom of men. Behind them Naples sank away into the vaporous distance. Vesuvius was almost blotted out, Capri an ethereal silhouette. And their little island, even when they approached it, did not look like the solid land on which they had made a home, but like the vague shell of some substance that had been destroyed, leaving its former abiding-place untenanted.

As they passed San Francesco Vere glanced at him, and Hermione saw a faint flush of red go over her face. Directly the boat touched the rock she stepped ashore, and without waiting for her mother ran up the steps and disappeared towards the house. Gaspare looked after her, then stared at his Padrona.

"Is the Signorina ill?" he asked.

"No, Gaspare. But I think she is tired to-day and a little upset. We had better take no notice of it."

"Va bene, Signora."

He busied himself in making fast the boat, while Hermione followed Vere.

In the afternoon about five, when Hermione was sitting alone in her room writing some letters, Gaspare appeared with an angry and suspicious face.

"Signora," he said, "that Signore is here."

"What Signore? The Marchese!"

"Si, Signora."

Gaspare was watching his Padrona's face, and suddenly his own face changed, lightened, as he saw the look that had come into her eyes.

"I did not know whether you wished to see him—"

"Yes, Gaspare, I will see him. You can let him in. Wait a moment. Where is the Signorina?"

"Up in her room, Signora."

"You can tell her who is here, and ask her whether she wishes to have tea in her room or not."

"Si, Signora."

Gaspare went out almost cheerfully. He felt that now he understood what his Padrona was feeling and what she meant to do. She meant to do in her way what he wanted to do in his. He ran down the steps to the water with vivacity, and his eyes were shining as he came to the Marchesino, who was standing at the edge of the sea looking almost feverishly excited, but determined.

"The Signora will see you, Signor Marchese."

The words hit the Marchesino like a blow. He stared at Gaspare for a moment almost stupidly, and hesitated. He felt as if this servant had told him something else.

"The Signora will see you," repeated Gaspare.

"Va bene," said the Marchesino.

He followed Gaspare slowly up the steps and into the drawing-room. It was empty. Gaspare placed a chair for the Marchesino. And again the latter felt as if he had received a blow. He glanced round him and sat down, while Gaspare went away. For about five minutes he waited.

When he had arrived at the island he had been greatly excited. He had felt full of an energy that was feverish. Now, in this silence, in this pause during which patience was forced upon him, his excitement grew, became fierce, dominant. He knew from Gaspare's way of speaking, from his action, from his whole manner, that his fate had been secretly determined in that house, and that it was being rejoiced over. At first he sat looking at the floor. Then he got up, went to the window, came back, stood in the middle of the room and glanced about it. How pretty it was, with a prettiness that he was quite unaccustomed to. In his father's villa at Capodimonte there was little real comfort. And he knew nothing of the cosiness of English houses. As he looked at this room he felt, or thought he felt, Vere in it. He even made an effort scarcely natural to him, and tried to imagine a home with Vere as its mistress.

Then he began to listen. Perhaps Emilio was in the house. Perhaps Emilio was talking now to the Signora, was telling her what to do.

But he heard no sound of voices speaking.

No doubt Emilio had seen the Signora that morning in the hotel. No doubt there had been a consultation. And probably at this consultation his—the Marchesino's—fate had been decided.

By Emilio?

At that moment the Marchesino actively, even furiously, hated his former friend.

There was a little noise at the door; the Marchesino turned swiftly, and saw Hermione coming in. He looked eagerly behind her. But the door shut. She was alone. She did not give her hand to him. He bowed, trying to look calm.

"Good-afternoon, Signora."

Hermione sat down. He followed her example.

"I don't know why you wish to see me, after yesterday, Marchese," she said, quietly, looking at him with steady eyes.

"Signora, pardon me, but I should have thought that you would know."

"What is it?"

"Signora, I am here to ask the great honor of your daughter the Signorina's hand in marriage. My father, to whom—"

But Hermione interrupted him.

"You will never marry my daughter, Marchese," she said.

A sudden red burned in her cheeks, and she leaned forward slightly, but very quickly, almost as if an impulse had come to her to push the Marchesino away from her.

"But, Signora, I assure you that my family—"

"It is quite useless to talk about it."

"But why, Signora?"

"My child is not for a man like you," Hermione said, emphasizing the first word.

A dogged expression came into the Marchesino's face, a fighting look that was ugly and brutal, but that showed a certain force.

"I do not understand, Signora. I am like other men. What is the matter with me?"

He turned a little in his chair so that he faced her more fully.

"What is the matter with me, Signora?" he repeated, slightly raising his voice.

"I don't think you would be able to understand if I tried to tell you."

"Why not? You think me stupid, then?"

An angry fire shone in his eyes.

"Oh no, you are not stupid."

"Then I shall understand."

Hermione hesitated. There was within her a hot impulse towards speech, towards the telling to this self-satisfied young Pagan her exact opinion of him. Yet was it worth while? He was going out of their lives. They would see no more of him.

"I don't think it is necessary for me to tell you," she said.

"Perhaps there is nothing to tell because there is nothing the matter with me."

His tone stung her.

"I beg your pardon, Marchese. I think there is a good deal to tell."

"All I say is, Signora, that I am like other men."

He thrust forward his strong under jaw, showing his big, white teeth.

"There I don't agree with you. I am thankful to say I know many men who would not behave as you behaved last night."

"But I have come to ask for the Signorina's hand!" he exclaimed.

"And you think—you dare to think that excuses your conduct!"

She spoke with a sudden and intense heat.

"Understand this, please, Marchese. If I gave my consent to your request, and sent for my daughter—"

"Si! Si!" he said, eagerly, leaning forward in his chair.

"Do you suppose she would come near you?"

"Certainly."

"You think she would come near a man she will not even speak of?"

"What!"

"She won't speak of you. She has told me nothing about last night. That is why I know so much."

"She has not—the Signorina has—not—?"

He stopped. A smile went over his face. It was sufficiently obvious that he understood Vere's silence as merely a form of deceit, a coquettish girl's cold secret from her mother.

"Signora, give me permission to speak to your daughter, and you will see whether it is you—or I—who understands her best."

"Very well, Marchese."

Hermione rang the bell. It was answered by Gaspare.

"Gaspare," said Hermione, "please go to the Signorina, tell her the Signor Marchese is here, and wishes very much to see her before he goes."

Gaspare's face grew dark, and he hesitated by the door.

"Go, Gaspare, please."

He looked into his Padrona's face, and went out as if reassured. Hermione and the Marchese sat in silence waiting for him to return. In a moment the door was reopened.

"Signora, I have told the Signorina."

"What did she say?"

Gaspare looked at the Marchese as he answered.

"Signora, the Signorina said to me, 'Please tell Madre that I cannot come to see the Signor Marchese.'"

"You can go, Gaspare."

He looked at the angry flush on the Marchesino's cheeks, and went out.

"Good-bye, Marchese."

Hermione got up. The Marchesino followed her example. But he did not go. He stood still for a moment in silence. Then he lifted his head up with a jerk.

"Signora," he said, in a hard, uneven voice that betrayed the intensity of his excitement, "I see how it is. I understand perfectly what is happening here. You think me bad. Well, I am like other men, and I am not ashamed of it—not a bit. I am natural. I live according to my nature, and I do not come from your north, but from Naples—from Naples." He threw out his arm, pointing at a window that looked towards the city. "If it is bad to have the blood hot in one's veins and the fire hot in one's head and in one's heart—very well! I am bad. And I do not care. I do not care a bit! But you think me a stupid boy. And I am not that. And I will show you." He drew his fingers together, and bent towards her, slightly lowering his voice. "From the first, from the very first moment, I have seen, I have understood all that is happening here. From the first I have understood all that was against me—"

"Marchese—!"

"Signora, pardon me! You have spoken, the Signorina has spoken, and now it is for me to speak. It is my right. I come here with an honorable proposal, and therefore I say I have a right—"

He put his fingers inside his shirt collar and pulled it fiercely out from his throat.

"E il vecchio!" he exclaimed, with sudden passion. "E il maledetto vecchio!"

Hermione's face changed. There had been in it a firm look, a calmness of strength. But now, at his last words, the strength seemed to shrink. It dwindled, it faded out of her, leaving her not collapsed, but cowering, like a woman who crouches down in a corner to avoid a blow.

"It is he! It is he! He will not allow it, and he is master here."

"Marchese—"

"I say he is master—he is master—he has always been master here!"

He came a step towards Hermione, moving as a man sometimes moves instinctively when he is determined to make something absolutely clear to one who does not wish to understand.

"And you know it, and every one knows it—every one. When I was in the sea, when I saw the Signorina for the first time, I did not know who she was, where she lived; I did not know anything about her. I went to tell my friend about her—my friend, you understand, whom I trusted, to whom I told everything!—I went to him. I described the Signora, the Signorina, the boat to him. He knew who the ladies were; he knew directly. I saw it in his face, in his manner. But what did he say? That he did not know, that he knew nothing. I was not to come to the island. No one was to come to the island but he. So he meant. But I—I was sharper than he, I who am so stupid! I took him to fish by night. I brought him to the island. I made him introduce me to you, to the Signorina. That night I made him. You remember? Well, then—ever since that night all is changed between us. Ever since that night he is my enemy. Ever since that night he suspects me, he watches me, he hides from me, he hates me. Oh, he tries to conceal it. He is a hypocrite. But I, stupid as I am, I see it all. I see what he is, what he wants, I see all—all that is in his mind and heart. For this noble old man, so respected, with the white hairs and the great brain, what is he, what does he do? He goes at night to the Galleria. He consults with Maria Fortunata, she who is known to all Naples, she who is the aunt of that girl—that girl of the town and of the bad life, whom you have taken to be your servant here. You have taken her because he—he has told you to take her. He has put her here—"

"Marchese!"

"I say he has put her here that the Signorina—"

"Marchese, I forbid you to say that! It is not true."

"It is true! It is true! Perhaps you are blind, perhaps you see nothing. I do not know. But I know that I am not blind. I love, and I see. I see, I have always seen that he—Emilio—loves the Signorina, that he loves her madly, that he wishes, that he means to keep her for himself. Did he not hide with her in the cave, in the Grotto of Virgil, that night when I came to serenade her on the sea? Yes, he took her, and he hid her, because he loves her. He loves her, he an old man! And he thinks—and he means—"

"Marchese—"

"He loves her; I say he loves her!"

"Marchese, I must ask you to go!"

"I say—"

"Marchese, I insist upon your going."

She opened the door. She was very pale, but she looked calm. The crouching woman had vanished. She was mistress of herself.

"Gaspare!" she called, in a loud, sharp voice that betrayed the inner excitement her appearance did not show.

"Signora," vociferated the Marchesino, "I say and I repeat—"

"Gaspare! Come here!"

"Signora!" cried a voice from below.

Gaspare came running.

"The Signore Marchese is going, Gaspare. Go down with him to the boat, please."

The Marchesino grew scarlet. The hot blood rushed over his face, up to his forehead, to his hair. Even his hands became red in that moment.

"Good-bye, Marchese."

She went out, and left him standing with Gaspare.

"Signore Marchese, shall I take you to the boat?"

Gaspare's voice was quite respectful. The Marchesino made no answer, but stepped out into the passage and looked up to the staircase that led to the top floor of the house. He listened. He heard nothing.

"Is the French Signore here?" he said to Gaspare. "Do you hear me? Is he in this house?"

"No, Signore!"

The Marchesino again looked towards the staircase and hesitated. Then he turned and saw Gaspare standing in a watchful attitude, almost like one about to spring.

"Stay here!" he said, loudly, making a violent threatening gesture with his arm.

Gaspare stood where he was with a smile upon his face.

A moment later he heard the splash of oars in the sea, and knew that the Marchesino's boat was leaving the island.

He drew his lips together like one about to whistle.

The sound of the oars died away.

Then he began to whistle softly "La Ciocciara."

CHAPTER XXXII

The ghostly day sank into a ghostly night that laid pale hands upon the island, holding it closely, softly, in a hypnotic grasp, bidding it surely rest, it and those who dwelled there with all the dreaming hours. A mist hung over the sea, and the heat did not go with day, but stayed to greet the darkness and the strange, enormous silence that lay upon the waters. In the Casa del Mare the atmosphere was almost suffocating, although every window was wide open. The servants went about their duties leaden-footed, drooping, their Latin vivacity quenched as by a spell. Vere was mute. It seemed, since the episode of the Carmine, as if her normal spirit had been withdrawn, as if a dumb, evasive personality replaced it. The impression made upon Hermione was that the real Vere had sunk far down in her child, out of sight and hearing, out of reach, beyond pursuit, to a depth where none could follow, where the soul enjoyed the safety of utter isolation.

Hermione did not wish to pursue this anchorite. She did not wish to draw near to Vere that evening. To do so would have been impossible to her, even had Vere been willing to come to her. Since the brutal outburst of the Marchesino, she, too, had felt the desire, the necessity, of a desert place, where she could sit alone and realize the bareness of her world.

In that outburst of passion the Marchesino had gathered together and hurled at her beliefs that had surely been her own, but that she had striven to avoid, that she had beaten back as spectres and unreal, that she had even denied, tricking, or trying to trick, her terrible sense of truth. His brutality had made the delicacy in her crouch and sicken. It had been almost intolerable to her, to see her friend, Emile, thus driven out into the open, like one naked, to be laughed at, condemned, held up, that the wild folly, the almost insane absurdity of his secret self might be seen and understood even by the blind, the determined in stupidity.

She had always had a great reverence for her friend, which had been mingled with her love for him, giving it its character. Was this reverence to be torn utterly away? Had it already been cast to the winds?

Poor Emile!

In the first moments after the departure of the Marchesino she pitied Emile intensely with all her heart of woman. If this thing were true, how he must have suffered, how he must still be suffering—not only in his heart, but in his mind! His sense of pride, his self-respect, his passion for complete independence, his meticulous consciousness of the fitness of things, of what could be and what was impossible—all must by lying in the dust. She could almost have wept for him then.

But another feeling succeeded this sense of pity, a sensation of outrage that grew within her and became almost ungovernable. She had her independence too, her pride, her self-respect. And now she saw them in dust that Emile had surely heaped about them. A storm of almost hard anger shook her. She tasted an acrid bitterness that seemed to impregnate her, to turn the mainspring of her life to gall. She heard the violent voice of the young Neapolitan saying: "He is master, he is master, he has always been master here!" And she tried to look back over her life, and to see how things had been. And, shaken still by this storm of anger, she felt as if it were true, as if she had allowed Artois to take her life in his hands and to shape it according to his will, as if he had been governing her although she had not known it. He had been the dominant personality in their mutual friendship. His had been the calling voice, hers the obedient voice that answered. Only once had she risen to a strong act, an act that brought great change with it, and that he had been hostile to. That was when she had married Maurice.

And she had left Maurice for Artois. From Africa had come the calling, dominant voice. And even in her Garden of Paradise she had heard it. And even from her Garden of Paradise she had obeyed it. For the first time she saw that act of renunciation as the average man or woman would probably see it; as an extraordinary, quixotic act, to be wondered at blankly, or, perhaps, to be almost angrily condemned. She stood away from her own impulsive, enthusiastic nature, and stared at it critically—as even her friends had often stared—and realized that it was unusual, perhaps extravagant, perhaps sometimes preposterous. This readiness to sacrifice—was it not rather slavish than regally loyal? This forgetfulness of personal joy, this burnt-offering of personality—was it not contemptible? Could such actions bring into being the respect of others, the respect of any man? Had Emile respected her for rushing to Africa? Or had he, perhaps, then and through all these years, simply wondered how she could have done such a thing?

And Maurice—Maurice? Oh, what had he thought? How had he looked upon that action?

Often and often in lonely hours she had longed to go down into the grave, or to go up into the blue, to drag the body, the soul, the heart she loved back to her. She had been rent by a desire that had made her limbs shudder, or that had flushed her whole body with red, and set her temples beating. The longing of heart and flesh had been so vehement that it had seemed to her as if they must compel, or cease to be. Now, again, she desired to compel Maurice to come to her from his far, distant place, but in order that she might make him understand what he had perhaps died misunderstanding; why she had left him to go to Artois, exactly how she had felt, how desperately sad to abandon the Garden of Paradise, how torn by fear lest the perfect days were forever at an end, how intensely desirous to take him with her. Perhaps he had felt cruelly jealous! Perhaps that was why he had not offered to go with her at once. Yes, she believed that now. She saw her action, she saw her preceding decision as others had seen it, as no doubt Maurice had seen it, as perhaps even Artois had seen it. Why had she instinctively felt that because her nature was as it was, and because she was bravely following it, every one must understand her? Oh, to be completely understood! If she could call Maurice back for one moment, and just make him see her as she had been then; loyal to her friend, and through and through passionately loyal to him! If she could! If she could!

She had left Maurice, the one being who had utterly belonged to her, to go to Artois. She had lost the few remaining days in which she could have been supremely happy. She had come back to have a few short hours devoid of calm, chilled sometimes by the strangeness that had intruded itself between her and Maurice, to have one kiss in which surely at last misunderstanding was lost and perfect love was found. And then—that "something" in the water! And then—the gulf.

In that gulf she had not been quite alone. The friend whom she had carried away from Africa and death had been with her. He had been closely in her life ever since. And now—

She heard the Marchesino's voice: "I see what he is, what he wants, I see it all—all that is in his mind and heart. I see, I have always seen, that he loves the Signorina, that he loves her madly."

Vere!

Hermione sickened. Emile and Vere in that relation!

The storm of anger was not spent yet. Would it ever be spent? Something within her, the something, perhaps, that felt rejected, strove to reject in its turn, did surely reject. Pride burned in her like a fire that cruelly illumines night, shining upon the destruction it is compassing.

The terrible sense of outrage that gripped her soul and body—her body because Vere was bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh—seemed to be forcibly changing her nature, as cruel hands, prompted by murder in a heart, change form, change beauty in the effort to destroy.

That evening Hermione felt herself being literally defaced by this sensation of outrage within her, a sensation which she was powerless to expel.

She found herself praying to God that Artois might not come to the island that night. And yet, while she prayed, she felt that he was coming.

She dined with Vere, in almost complete silence—trying to love this dear child as she had always loved her, even in certain evil moments of an irresistible jealousy. But she felt immensely far from Vere, distant from her as one who does not love from one who loves; yet hideously near, too, like one caught in the tangle of an enforced intimacy rooted in a past which the present denies and rejects. Directly dinner was over they parted, driven by the mutual desire to be alone.

And then Hermione waited for that against which she had prayed.

Artois would come to the island that night. Useless to pray! He was coming. She felt that he was on the sea, environed by this strange mist that hung to-night over the waters. She felt that he was coming to Vere. She had gone to Africa to save him—in order that he might fall in love with her then unborn child.

Monstrosities, the monstrosities that are in life, deny them, beat them back, close our eyes to them as we will, rose up around her in the hot stillness. She felt haunted, terrified. She was forcibly changed, and now all the world was changing about her.

She must have relief. She could not sit there among spectres waiting for the sound of oars that would tell her Vere's lover had come to the island. How could she detach herself for a moment from this horror?

She thought of Ruffo.

As the thought came to her she got up and went out of the house.

Only when she was out-of-doors did she fully realize the strangeness of the night. The heat of it was flaccid. The island seemed to swim in a fatigued and breathless atmosphere. The mist that hung about it was like the mist in a vapor-bath.

Below the vague sea lay a thing exhausted, motionless, perhaps fainting in the dark. And in this heat and stillness there was no presage, no thrill, however subtle, of a coming change, of storm. Rather there was the deadness of eternity, as if this swoon would last forever, neither developing into life, nor deepening into death.

Hermione had left the house feverishly, yearning to escape from her company of spectres, yearning to escape from the sensation of ruthless hands defacing her. As she passed the door-sill it was only with difficulty that she suppressed a cry of "Ruffo!" a cry for help. But when the night took her she no longer had any wish to disturb it by a sound. She was penetrated at once by an atmosphere of fatality. Her pace changed. She moved on slowly, almost furtively. She felt inclined to creep.

Would Ruffo be at the island to-night? Would Artois really come? It seemed unlikely, almost impossible. But if Ruffo were there, if Artois came, it would be fatality. That she was there was fatality.

She walked always slowly, always furtively, to the crest of the cliff.

She stood there. She listened.

Silence.

She felt as if she were quite alone on the island. She could scarcely believe that Vere, that Gaspare, that the servants were there—among them Peppina with her cross.

They said Peppina had the evil eye. Had she perhaps cast a spell to-night?

Hermione did not smile at such an imagination as she dismissed it.

She waited and listened, but not actively, for she did not feel as if Ruffo could ever stand with her in the embrace of such a night, he, a boy, with bright hopes and eager longings, he the happy singer of the song of Mergellina.

And yet, when in a moment she found him standing by her side, she accepted his presence as a thing inevitable.

It had been meant, perhaps for centuries, that they two should stand together that night, speak together as now they were about to speak.

"Signora, buona sera."

"Buona sera, Ruffo."

"The Signorina is not here to-night?"

"I think she is in the house. I think she is tired to-night."

"The Signorina is tired after the Festa, Signora."

"You knew we were at the Festa, Ruffo?"

"Ma si, Signora."

"Did we tell you we were going? I had forgotten."

"It was not that, Signora. But I saw the Signorina at the Festa. Did not Don Gaspare tell you?"

"Gaspare said nothing. Did he see you?"

She spoke languidly. Quickness had died out of her under the influence of the night. But already she felt a slight yet decided sense of relief, almost of peace. She drew that from Ruffo. And, standing very close to him, she watched his eager face, hoping to see presently in it the expression that she loved.

"Did he see you, Ruffo?"

"Ma si, Signora. I was with my poor mamma."

"Your mother! I wish I had met her!"

"Si, Signora. I was with my mamma in the Piazza of Masaniello. We had been eating snails, Signora, and afterwards watermelon, and we had each had a glass of white wine. And I was feeling very happy, because my poor mamma had heard good news."

"What was that?"

"To-morrow my Patrigno is to be let out of prison."

"So soon! But I thought he had not been tried."

"No, Signora. But he is to be let out now. Perhaps he will be put back again. But now he is let out because"—he hesitated—"because—well, Signora, he has such friends, he has friends who are powerful for him. And so he is let out just now."

"I understand."

"Well, Signora, and after the white wine we were feeling happy, and we were going to see everything: the Madonna, and Masaniello, and the fireworks, and the fire-balloon. Did you see the fire-balloon, Signora?"

"Yes, Ruffo. It was very pretty."

His simple talk soothed her. He was so young, so happy, so free from the hideous complexities of life; no child of tragedy, but the son surely of a love that had been gay and utterly contented.

"Si, Signora! Per dio, Signora, it was wonderful! It was just before the fire-balloon went up, Signora, that I saw the Signorina with the Neapolitan Signorino. And close behind them was Don Gaspare. I said to my mamma, 'Mamma, ecco the beautiful Signorina of the island!' My mamma was excited, Signora. She held on to my arm, and she said: 'Ruffino,' she said, 'show her to me. Where is she?' my mamma said, Signora. 'And is the Signora Madre with her?' Just then, Signora, the people moved, and all of a sudden there we were, my mamma and I, right in front of Don Gaspare."

Ruffo stopped, and Hermione saw a change, a gravity, come into his bright face.

"Well, Ruffo?" she said, wondering what was coming.

"I said to my mamma, Signora, 'Mamma, this is Don Gaspare of the island.' Signora, my mamma looked at Don Gaspare for a minute. Her face was quite funny. She looked white, Signora, my mamma looked white, almost like the man at the circus who comes in with the dog to make us laugh. And Don Gaspare, too, he looked"—Ruffo paused, then used a word beloved of Sicilians who wish to be impressive—"he looked mysterious, Signora. Don Gaspare looked mysterious."

"Mysterious? Gaspare?"

"Si, Signora, he did. And he looked almost white, too, but not like my mamma. And then my mamma said, 'Gaspare!' just like that, Signora, and put out her hand—so. And Don Gaspare's face got red and hot. And then for a minute they spoke together, Signora, and I could not hear what they said. For Don Gaspare stood with his back so that I should not hear. And then the balloon went sideways and the people ran, and I did not see Don Gaspare any more. And after that, Signora, my mamma was crying all the time. And she would not tell me anything. I only heard her say: 'To think of its being Gaspare! To think of its being Gaspare on the island!' And when we got home she said to me, 'Ruffo,' she said, 'has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?' What is it, Signora?"

"Nothing, Ruffo. Go on."

"But—"

"Go on, Ruffo."

"'Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?' my mamma said."

"And you—what did you say?"

"I said, 'No,' Signora. And that is true. Don Gaspare has never said I was like somebody."

The boy had evidently finished what he had to say. He stood quietly by Hermione, waiting for her to speak in her turn. For a moment she said nothing. Then she put her hand on Ruffo's arm.

"Whom do you think your mother meant when she said 'somebody,' Ruffo?"

"Signora, I do not know."

"But surely—didn't you ask whom she meant?"

"No, Signora. I told my mamma Don Gaspare had never said that. She was crying. And so I did not say anything more."

Hermione still held his arm for a moment. Then her hand dropped down.

Ruffo was looking at her steadily with his bright and searching eyes.

"Signora, do you know what she meant?"

"I! How can I tell, Ruffo? I have never seen your mother. How can I know what she meant?"

"No, Signora."

Again there was a silence. Then Hermione said:

"I should like to see your mother, Ruffo."

"Si, Signora."

"I must see her."

Hermione said the last words in a low and withdrawn voice, like one speaking to herself. As she spoke she was gazing at the boy beside her, and in her eyes there was a mystery almost like that of the night.

"Ruffo," she added, in a moment, "I want you to promise me something."

"Si, Signora."

"Don't speak to any one about the little talk we have had to-night. Don't say anything, even to Gaspare."

"No, Signora."

For a short time they remained together talking of other things. Hermione spoke only enough to encourage Ruffo. And always she was watching him. But to-night she did not see the look she longed for, the look that made Maurice stand before her. Only she discerned, or believed she discerned, a definite physical resemblance in the boy to the dead man, a certain resemblance of outline, a likeness surely in the poise of the head upon the strong, brave-looking neck, and in a trait that suggested ardor about the full yet delicate lips. Why had she never noticed these things before? Had she been quite blind? Or was she now imaginative? Was she deceiving herself?

"Good-night, Ruffo," she said, at last.

He took off his cap and stood bareheaded.

"Good-night, Signora."

He put the cap on his dark hair with a free and graceful gesture.

Was not that, too, Maurice?

"A rivederci, Signora."

He was gone.

Hermione stood alone in the fatal night. She had forgotten Vere. She had forgotten Artois. The words of Ruffo had led her on another step in the journey it was ordained that she should make. She felt the under-things. It seemed to her that she heard in the night the dull murmuring of the undercurrents that carry through wayward, or terrible, channels the wind-driven bark of life. What could it mean, this encounter just described to her: this pain, this emotion of a woman, her strange question to her son? And Gaspare's agitation, his pallor, his "mysterious" face, the colloquy that Ruffo was not allowed to hear!

What did it mean? That woman's question—that question!

"What is it? What am I near?" Ruffo's mother knew Gaspare, must have known him intimately in the past. When? Surely long ago in Sicily; for Ruffo was sixteen, and Hermione felt sure—knew, in fact—that till they came to the island Gaspare had never seen Ruffo.

That woman's question!

Hermione went slowly to the bench and sat down by the edge of the cliff.

What could it possibly mean?

Could it mean that this woman, Ruffo's mother, had once known Maurice, known him well enough to see in her son the resemblance to him?

But then—

Hermione, as sometimes happened, having reached truth instinctively and with a sure swiftness, turned to retreat from it. She had lost confidence in herself. She feared her own impulses. Now, abruptly, she told herself that this idea was wholly extravagant. Ruffo probably resembled some one else whom his mother and Gaspare knew. That was far more likely. That must be the truth.

But again she seemed to hear in the night the dull murmurings of those undercurrents. And many, many times she recurred mentally to that weeping woman's question to her son—that question about Gaspare.

Gaspare—he had been strange, disturbed lately. Hermione had noticed it; so had the servants. There had been in the Casa del Mare an oppressive atmosphere created by the mentality of some of its inhabitants.

Even she, on that day when she had returned from Capri, had felt a sensation of returning to meet some grievous tale.

She remembered Artois now, recalling his letter which she had found that day.

Gaspare and Artois—did they both suspect, or both know, something which they had been concealing from her?

Suddenly she began to feel frightened. Yet she did not form in her mind any definite conception of what such a mutual secret might be. She simply began to feel frightened, almost like a child.

She said to herself that this brooding night, with its dumbness, its heat, its vaporous mystery, was affecting her spirit. And she got up from the bench, and began to walk very slowly towards the house.

When she did this she suddenly felt sure that while she had been on the crest of the cliff Artois had arrived at the island, that he was now with Vere in the house. She knew that it was so.

And again there rushed upon her that sensation of outrage, of being defaced, and of approaching a dwelling in which things monstrous had taken up their abode.

She came to the bridge and paused by the rail. She felt a sort of horror of the Casa del Mare in which Artois was surely sitting—alone or with Vere? With Vere. For otherwise he would have come up to the cliff.

She leaned over the rail. She looked into the Pool. One boat was there just below her, the boat to which Ruffo belonged. Was there another? She glanced to the right. Yes; there lay by the rock a pleasure-boat from Naples.

Artois had come in that.

She looked again at the other boat, searching the shadowy blackness for the form of Ruffo. She longed that he might be awake. She longed that he might sing, in his happy voice, of the happy summer nights, of the sweet white moons that light the Southern summer nights, of the bright eyes of Rosa, of the sea of Mergellina. But from the boat there rose no voice, and the mist hung heavily over the silent Pool.

Then Hermione lifted her eyes and looked across the Pool, seeking the little light of San Francesco. Only the darkness and the mist confronted her. She saw no light—and she trembled like one to whom the omens are hostile.

She trembled and hid her face for a moment. Then she turned and went up into the house.

CHAPTER XXXIII

When Hermione reached the door of the Casa del Mare she did not go in immediately, but waited on the step. The door was open. There was a dim lamp burning in the little hall, which was scarcely more than a passage. She looked up and saw a light shining from the window of her sitting-room. She listened; there was no sound of voices.

They were not in there.

She was trying to crush down her sense of outrage, to feel calm before she entered the house.

Perhaps they had gone into the garden. The night was terribly hot. They would prefer to be out-of-doors. Vere loved the garden. Or they might be on the terrace.

She stepped into the hall and went to the servants' staircase. Now she herd voices, a laugh.

"Giulia!" she called.

The voices stopped talking, but it was Gaspare who came in answer to her call. She looked down to him.

"Don't come up, Gaspare. Where is the Signorina?"

"The Signorina is on the terrace, Signora—with Don Emilio."

He looked up at her very seriously in the gloom. She thought of the meeting at the Festa, and longed to wring from Gaspare his secret.

"Don Emilio is here?"

"Si, Signora."

"How long ago did he come?"

"About half an hour, I think, Signora."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Don Emilio told me not to bother you, Signora—that he would just sit and wait."

"I see. And the Signorina?"

"I did not tell her, either. She was in the garden alone, but I have heard her talking on the terrace with the Signore. Are you ill, Signora?"

"No. All right, Gaspare!"

She moved away. His large, staring eyes followed her till she disappeared in the passage. The passage was not long, but it seemed to Hermione as if a multitude of impressions, of thoughts, of fears, of determinations rushed through her heart and brain while she walked down it and into the room that opened to the terrace. This room was dark.

As she entered it she expected to hear the voices from outside. But she heard nothing.

They were not on the terrace, then!

She again stood still. Her heart was beating violently, and she felt violent all over, thrilling with violence like one on the edge of some outburst.

She looked towards the French window. Through its high space she saw the wan night outside, a sort of thin paleness resting against the blackness in which she was hidden. And as her eyes became accustomed to their environment she perceived that the pallor without was impinged upon by two shadowy darknesses. Very faint they were, scarcely relieved against the night, very still and dumb—two shadowy darknesses, Emile and Vere sitting together in silence.

When Hermione understood this she remained where she was, trying to subdue even her breathing. Why were they not talking? What did this mutual silence, this mutual immobility mean? She was only a few feet from them. Yet she could not hear a human sound, even the slightest. There was something unnatural, but also tremendously impressive to her in their silence. She felt as if it signified something unusual, something of high vitality. She felt as if it had succeeded some speech that was exceptional, and that had laid its spell, of joy or sorrow, upon both their spirits.

And she felt much more afraid, and also much more alone, than she would have felt had she found them talking.

Presently, as the silence continued, she moved softly back into the passage. She went down it a little way, then returned, walking briskly and loudly. In this action her secret violence was at play. When she came to the room she grasped the door-handle with a force that hurt her hand. She went in, shut the door sharply behind her, and without any pause came out upon the terrace.

"Emile!"

"Yes," he said, getting up from his garden-chair quickly.

"Gaspare told me you were here."

"I have been here about half an hour."

She had not given him her hand. She did not give it.

"I didn't hear you talking to Vere, so I wondered—I almost thought—"

"That I had gone without seeing you? Oh no. It isn't very late. You don't want to get rid of me at once?"

"Of course not."

His manner—or so it seemed to her—was strangely uneasy and formal, and she thought his face looked drawn, almost tortured. But the light was very dim. She could not be sure of that.

Vere had said nothing, had not moved from her seat.

There was a third chair. As Hermione took it and drew it slightly forward, she looked towards Vere, and thought that she was sitting in a very strange position. In the darkness it seemed to the mother as if her child's body were almost crouching in its chair, as if the head were drooping, as if—

"Vere! Is anything the matter with you?"

Suddenly, as if struck sharply, Vere sprang up and passed into the darkness of the house, leaving a sound that was like a mingled exclamation and a sob behind her.

"Emile!"

"Emile!"

"Hermione?"

"What is the matter with Vere? What have you been doing to Vere?"

"I!"

"Yes, you! No one else is here."

Hermione's violent, almost furious agitation was audible in her voice.

"I should never wish to hurt Vere—you know that."

His voice sounded as if he were deeply moved.

"I must—Vere! Vere!"

She moved towards the house. But Artois stepped forward swiftly, laid a hand on her arm, and stopped her.

"No, leave Vere alone to-night."

"Why?"

"She wishes to be alone to-night."

"But I find her here with you."

There was a harsh bitterness of suspicion, of doubt, in her tone that he ought surely to have resented. But he did not resent it.

"I was sitting on the terrace," he said, gently. "Vere came in from the garden. Naturally she stayed to entertain me till you were here."

"And directly I come she rushes away into the house!"

"Perhaps there was—something may have occurred to upset her."

"What was it?"

Her voice was imperious.

"You must tell me what it was!" she said, as he was silent.

"Hermione, my friend, let us sit down. Let us at any rate be with each other as we always have been—till now."

He was almost pleading with her, but she did not feel her hardness melting. Nevertheless she sat down.

"Now tell me what it was."

"I don't think I can do that, Hermione."

"I am her mother. I have a right to know. I have a right to know everything about my child's life."

In those words, and in the way they were spoken, Hermione's bitter jealousy about the two secrets kept from her, but shared by Artois, rushed out into the light.

"I am sure there is nothing in Vere's life that might not be told to the whole world without shame; and yet there may be many things that an innocent girl would not care to tell to any one."

"But if things are told they should be told to the mother. The mother comes first."

He said nothing.

"The mother comes first!" she repeated, almost fiercely. "And you ought to know it. You do know it!"

"You do come first with Vere."

"If I did, Vere would confide in me rather than in any one else."

As Hermione said this, all the long-contained bitterness caused by Vere's exclusion of her from the knowledge that had been freely given to Artois brimmed up suddenly in her heart, overflowed boundaries, seemed to inundate her whole being.

"I do not come first," she said.

Her voice trembled, almost broke.

"You know that I do not come first. You have just told me a lie."

"Hermione!"

His voice was startled.

"You know it perfectly well. You have known it for a long time."

Hot tears were in her eyes, were about to fall. With a crude gesture, almost like that of a man, she put up her hands to brush them away.

"You have known it, you have known it, but you try to keep me in the dark."

Suddenly she was horribly conscious of the darkness of the night in which they were together, of the darkness of the world.

"You love to keep me in the dark, in prison. It is cruel, it is wicked of you."

"But Hermione—"

"Take care, Emile, take care—or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark."

Her passionate words applied only to the later events in which Vere was concerned. But his mind rushed back to Sicily, and suddenly there came to his memory some words he had once read, he did not know when, or where:

"The spirit that resteth upon a lie is a spirit in prison."

As he remembered them he felt guilty, guilty before Hermione. He saw her as a spirit confined for years in a prison to which his action had condemned her. Yes, she was in the dark. She was in an airless place. She was deprived of the true liberty, that great freedom which is the accurate knowledge of the essential truths of our own individual lives. From his mind in that moment the cause of Hermione's outburst, Vere and her childish secrets, were driven out by a greater thing that came upon it like a strong and mighty wind—the memory of that lie, in which he had enclosed his friend's life for years, that lie on which her spirit had rested, on which it was resting still. And his sense of truth did not permit him to try to refute her accusation. Indeed, he was filled with a desire that nearly conquered him—there and then, brutally, clearly, nakedly, to pour forth to his friend all the truth, to say to her:

"You have a strong, a fiery spirit, a spirit that hates the dark, that hates imprisonment, a spirit that can surely endure, like the eagle, to gaze steadfastly into the terrible glory of the sun. Then come out of the darkness, come out of your prison. I put you there—let me bring you forth. This is the truth—listen! hear it!—it is this—it is this—and—this!"

This desire nearly conquered him. Perhaps it would have conquered him but for an occurrence that, simple though it was, changed the atmosphere in which their souls were immersed, brought in upon them another world with the feeling of other lives than their own.

The boat to which Ruffo belonged, going out of the Pool to the fishing, passed at this moment slowly upon the sea beneath the terrace, and from the misty darkness his happy voice came up to them in the song of Mergellina which he loved:

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate

Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:

Mi destan le dolcissime serate

Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

Dark was the night, moonless, shrouded in the mist. But his boy's heart defied it, laughed at the sorrowful truths of life, set the sweet white moon in the sky, covered the sea with her silver. Artois turned towards the song and stood still. But Hermione, as if physically compelled towards it, moved away down the terrace, following in the direction in which the boat was going.

As she passed Artois saw tears running down her cheeks. And he said to himself:

"No, I cannot tell her; I can never tell her. If she is to be told, let Ruffo tell her. Let Ruffo make her understand. Let Ruffo lift her up from the lie on which I have made her rest, and lead her out of prison."

As this thought came to him a deep tenderness towards Hermione flooded his heart. He stood where he was. Far off he still heard Ruffo's voice drifting away in the mist out to the great sea. And he saw the vague form of Hermione leaning down over the terrace wall, towards the sea, the song, and Ruffo.

How intensely strange, how mysterious, how subtle was the influence housed within the body of that singing boy, that fisher-boy, which, like an issuing fluid, or escaping vapor, or perfume, had stirred and attracted the childish heart of Vere, had summoned and now held fast the deep heart of Hermione.

Just then Artois felt as if in the night he was walking with the Eternities, as if that song, now fading away across the sea, came even from them. We do not die. For in that song to which Hermione bent down—the dead man lived when that boy's voice sang it. In that boat, now vanishing upon the sea, the dead man held an oar. In that warm young heart of Ruffo the dead man moved, and spoke—spoke to his child, Vere, whom he had never seen, spoke to his wife, Hermione, whom he had deceived, yet whom he had loved.

Then let him—let the dead man himself—speak out of that temple which he had created in a moment of lawless passion, out of that son whom he had made to live by the action which had brought upon him death.

Ruffo—all was in the hands of Ruffo, to whom Hermione, weeping, bent for consolation.

The song died away. Yet Hermione did not move, but still leaned over the sea. She scarcely knew where she was. The soul of her, the suffering soul, was voyaging through the mist with Ruffo, was voyaging through the mist and through the night with—her Sicilian and all the perfect past. It seemed to her at that moment that she had lost Vere in the dark, that she had lost Emile in the dark, that even Gaspare was drifting from her in a mist of secrecy which he did not intend that she should penetrate.

There was only Ruffo left.

He had no secrets. He threw no darkness round him and those who loved him. In his happy, innocent song was his happy, innocent soul.

She listened, she leaned down, almost she stretched out her arms towards the sea. And in that moment she knew in her mind and she felt in her heart that Ruffo was very near to her, that he meant very much to her, even that she loved him.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Artois left the island that night without speaking to Hermione. He waited a long time. But she did not move to come to him. And he did not dare to go to her. He did not dare! In all their long friendship never before had his spirit bent before, or retreated as if in fear from Hermione's. To-night he was conscious that in her fierce anger, and afterwards in her tears, she had emancipated herself from him. He was conscious of her force as he had never been conscious of it before. Something within him almost abdicated to her intensity. And at last he turned and went softly away from the terrace. He descended to the sea. He left the island.

Were they no longer friends?

As the boat gave itself to the mist he wondered. It had come to this, then—that he did not know whether Hermione and he were any longer friends. Almost imperceptibly, with movement so minute that it had seemed like immobility, they had been drifting apart through these days and nights of the summer. And now abruptly the gulf appeared between them.

He felt just then that they could never more be friends, that their old happy camaraderie could never be reestablished.

That they could ever be enemies was unthinkable. Even in Hermione's bitterness and anger Artois felt her deep affection. In her cry, "Take care, Emile, or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark!" he heard only the hatred that is the other side of love.

But could they ever be comrades again? And if they could not, what could they be?

As the boat slipped on, under the Saint's light, which was burning although the mist had hidden it from Hermione's searching eyes, and out to the open sea, Artois heard again her fierce exclamation. It blended with Vere's sob. He looked up and saw the faint lights of the Casa del Mare fading from him in the night. And an immense sadness, mingled with an immense, but chaotic, longing invaded him. He felt horribly lonely, and he felt a strange, new desire for the nearness to him of life. He yearned to feel life close to him, pulsing with a rhythm to which the rhythm of his being answered. He yearned for that strange and exquisite satisfaction, compounded of mystery and wonder, and thrilling with something akin to pain, that is called forth in the human being who feels another human being centring all its highest faculties, its strongest powers, its deepest hopes in him. He desired intensely, as he had never desired before, true communion with another, that mingling of bodies, hearts, and spirits, that is the greatest proof of God to man.

The lights of the Casa del Mare were lost to his eyes in the night. He looked for them still. He strained his eyes to see them. But the powerful night would not yield up its prey.

And now, in the darkness and with Hermione's last words ringing in his ears, he felt almost overwhelmed by the solitariness of his life in the world of lives.

That day, before he came to the island, he had met himself face to face like a man meeting his double. He had stripped himself bare. He had searched himself for the truth. Remembering all the Marchesino had said, he had demanded of his heart the truth, uncertain whether it would save or slay him. It had not slain him. When the colloquy was over he was still upright.

But he had realized as never before the delicate poise of human nature, set, without wings, on a peak with gulfs about it. Had he not looked in time, and with clear, steadfast eyes, might he not have fallen?

His affection for Vere was perfectly pure, was the love of a man without desire for a gracious and charming child. It still was that. He knew it for that by the wave of disgust that went over him when his imagination, prompted by the Marchesino's brutality, set pictures before him of himself in other relations with Vere. The real man in him recoiled so swiftly, so uncontrollably, that he was reassured as to his own condition. And yet he found much to condemn, something to be contemptuous of, something almost to weep over—that desire to establish a monopoly—that almost sickly regret for his vanished youth, that bitterness against the community to which all young things instinctively belong, whatever their differences of intellect, temperament, and feeling.

Could he have fallen?

Even now he did not absolutely know whether such a decadence might have been possible to him or not. But that now it would not be possible he felt that he did know.

Age could never complete youth, and Vere must be complete. He had desired to make her gift for song complete. He could never desire to mutilate her life. Had he not said to himself one day, as his boat glided past the sloping gardens of Posilipo, "Vere must be happy."

Yet that evening he had made her unhappy.

He had come to the island from his self-examination strong in the determination to be really himself, no longer half self-deceived and so deceiving. He had gone out upon the terrace, and waited there. But when Vere had come to join him, he had not been able to be natural. In his desire to rehabilitate himself thoroughly and swiftly in his own opinion he must have been almost harsh to the child. She had approached him a little doubtfully. She had needed specially just then to be met with even more than the usual friendship. Artois had seen in her face, in her expressive eyes, a plea not for forgiveness—there was no need for that, but for compassion, an appeal to him to ignore and yet to sympathise, that was exquisitely young and winning. But, because of his self-examination, and because he was feeling acutely, he had been abrupt, cold, changed in his manner. They had sat down together in the dark, and after some uneasy conversation, Vere, perhaps eager to make things easier between herself and "Monsieur Emile," had brought up the subject of her poems with a sort of anxious simplicity, and a touch of timidity that yet was confidential. And Artois, still recoiling secretly from that which might possibly have become a folly but could never have been anything more, had told Vere plainly and almost sternly that she must go to her literary path unaided, unadvised by him.

"I was glad to advise you at the beginning, Vere," he had said, finally; "but now I must leave you to yourself to work out your own salvation. You have talent. Trust it. Trust yourself. Do no lean on any one, least of all on me."

"No, Monsieur Emile," she had answered.

Those were the last words exchanged between them before Hermione came and questioned Vere. And only when Vere slipped into the house, leaving that sound of pain behind her, did Artois realize how cruel he must have seemed in his desire quickly to set things right.

He realized that; but, subtle though he was, he did not understand the inmost and root-cause of Vere's loss of self-control.

Vere was feeling bitterly ashamed, had been bending under this sense of undeserved shame, ever since the Marchesino's stratagem on the preceding night. Although she was gay and fearless, she was exquisitely sensitive. Peppina's confession had roused her maidenhood to a theoretical knowledge of certain things in life, of certain cruel phases of man's selfishness and lust which, till then, she had never envisaged. The Marchesino's madness had carried her one step further. She had not actually looked into the abyss. But she had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had returned to the hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained, intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her mother and Artois a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which had made her half apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony, which had even set a flush on her face when she looked at San Francesco. The abrupt change in Monsieur Emile's demeanor towards her made her feel as if she were despised by him because she had been the victim of the Marchesino's trick. Or perhaps Monsieur Emile completely misunderstood her; perhaps he thought—perhaps he dared to think, that she had helped the Marchesino in his manoeuvre.

Vere felt almost crucified, but was too proud to speak of the pain and bitterness within her. Only when her mother came out upon the terrace did she suddenly feel that she could bear no more.

That night, directly she was in her room, she locked her door. She was afraid that her mother might follow her, to ask what was the matter.

But Hermione did not come. She, too, wished to be alone that night. She, too, felt that she could not be looked at by searching eyes that night.

She did not know when Artois left the terrace. Long after Ruffo's song had died away she still leaned over the sea, following his boat with her desirous heart. Artois, too, was on the sea. She did not know it. She was, almost desperately, seeking a refuge in the past. The present failed her. That was her feeling. Then she would cling to the past. And in that song, prompted now by her always eager imagination, she seemed to hear it. For she was almost fiercely, feverishly, beginning to find resemblances in Ruffo to Maurice. At first she had noticed none, although she had been strangely attracted by the boy. Then she had seen that look, fleeting but vivid, that seemed for a moment to bring Maurice before her. Then, on the cliff, she had discerned a likeness of line, a definite similarity of features.

And now—was not that voice like Maurice's? Had it not his wonderful thrill of youth in it, that sound of the love of life which wakes all the pulses of the body and stirs all the depths of the heart?

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate——"

The voice upon the sea was singing always the song of Mergellina. But to Hermione it began to seem that the song was changing to another song, and that the voice that was dying away across the shrouded water was sinking into the shadows of a ravine upon a mountainside.

"Ciao, Ciao, Ciao,

Morettina bella, ciao——"

Maurice was going to the fishing under the sweet white moon of Sicily. And she—she was no longer leaning down from the terrace of the Casa del Mare, but from the terrace of the House of the Priest.

"Prima di partire

Un bacio ti voglio da!"

That kiss, which he had given her before he had gone away from her forever! She seemed to feel it on her lips again, and she shut her eyes, giving herself up to a passion of the imagination.

When she opened them again she felt exhausted and terribly alone. Maurice had gone down into the ravine. He was never coming back. Ruffo was taken by the mists and by the night. She lifted herself up from the balustrade and looked round, remembering suddenly that she had left Artois upon the terrace. He had disappeared silently, without a word of good-bye.

And now, seeing the deserted terrace, she recollected her fierce attack upon Artois, she remembered how she had stood in the black room watching the two darknesses outside, listening to their silence. And she remembered her conversation with Ruffo.

Actualities rushed back upon her memory. She felt as if she heard them coming like an army to the assault. Her brain was crowded with jostling thoughts, her heart with jostling feelings and fears. She was like one trying to find a safe path through a black troop of threatening secrets. What had happened that night between Vere and Emile? Why had Vere fled? Why had she wept? And the previous night with the Marchesino—Vere had not spoken of it to her mother. Hermione had found it impossible to ask her child for any details. There was a secret too. And there were the two secrets, which now she knew, but which Vere and Artois thought were unknown to her still. And then—that mystery of which Ruffo had innocently spoken that night.

As Hermione, moving in imagination through the black and threatening troop, came to that last secret, she was again assailed by a curious, and horrible, sensation of apprehension. She again felt very little and very helpless, like a child.

She moved away from the balustrade and turned towards the house. Above, in her sitting-room, the light still shone. The other windows on this side of the Casa del Mare were dark. She felt that she must go to that light quickly, and she hastened in, went cautiously—though now almost panic-stricken—through the black room with the French windows, and came into the dimly lighted passage that led to the front door.

Gaspare was there locking up. She came to him.

"Good-night, Gaspare," she said, stopping.

"Good-night, Signora," he answered, slightly turning his head, but not looking into her face.

Hermione turned to go up-stairs. She went up two or three steps. She heard a bolt shot into its place below her, and she stopped again. To-night she felt for the first time almost afraid of Gaspare. She trusted him as she had always trusted him—completely. Yet that trust was mingled with this new and dreadful sensation of fear bred of her conviction that he held some secret from her in his breast. Indeed, it was her trust in Gaspare which made her fear so keen. As she stood on the staircase she knew that. If Gaspare kept things, kept anything from her that at all concerned her life, it must be because he was faithfully trying to save her from some pain or misery.

But perhaps she was led astray by her depression of to-night. Perhaps this mystery was her own creation, and he would be quite willing to explain, to clear it away with a word.

"Gaspare," she said, "have you finished locking up?"

"Not quite, Signora. I have the front of the house to do."

"Of course. Well, when you have finished come up to my room for a minute, will you?"

"Va bene, Signora."

Was there reluctance in his voice? She thought there was. She went up-stairs and waited in her sitting-room. It seemed to her that Gaspare was a very long time locking up. She leaned out of the window that overlooked the terrace to hear if he was shutting the French windows. When she did so she saw him faintly below, standing by the balustrade. She watched him, wondering what he was doing, till at last she could not be patient any longer.

"Gaspare!" she called out.

He started violently.

"I am coming, Signora."

"I am waiting for you."

"A moment, Signora!"

Yes, his voice was reluctant; but he went at once towards the house and disappeared. Directly afterwards she heard the windows being shut and barred, then a step coming rather slowly up the staircase.

"Che vuole, Signora?"

How many times she had heard that phrase from Gaspare's lips? How many times in reply she had expressed some simple desire! To-night she found a difficulty in answering that blunt question. There was so much that she wished, wanted—wide and terrible want filled her heart.

"Che vuole?" he repeated.

As she heard it a second time, suddenly Hermione knew that for the moment she was entirely dominated by Ruffo and that, which concerned, which was connected with him. The fisher-boy had assumed an abrupt and vast importance in her life.

"Gaspare," she said, "you know me pretty well by this time, don't you?"

"Know you, Signora! Of course I know you!" He gazed at her, then added, "Who should know you, Signora, if I do not?"

"That is just what I mean, Gaspare. I wonder—I wonder—" She broke off. "Do you understand, Gaspare, how important you are to me, how necessary you are to me?"

An expressive look that was full of gentleness dawned in his big eyes.

"Si, Signora, I understand."

"And I think you ought to understand my character by this time." She looked at him earnestly. "But I sometimes wonder—I mean lately—I sometimes wonder whether you do quite understand me."

"Why, Signora?"

"Do you know what I like best from the people who are near me, who live with me?"

"Si, Signora."

"What?"

"Affection, Signora. You like to be cared for, Signora."

She felt tears rising again in her eyes.

"Yes, I love affection. But—there's something else, too. I love to be trusted. I'm not curious. I hate to pry into people's affairs. But I love to feel that I am trusted, that those I trust and care for would never keep me in the dark—"

She thought again of Emile and of the night and her outburst.

"The dark, Signora?"

"Don't you understand what I mean? When you are in the dark you can't see anything. You can't see the things you ought to see."

"You are not in the dark, Signora."

He spoke rather stupidly, and looked towards the lamp, as if he misunderstood her explanation. But she knew his quickness of mind too well to be deceived.

"Gaspare," she said, "I don't know whether you are going to be frank with me, but I am going to be frank with you. Sit down for a minute, and—please shut the door first."

He looked at her, looked down, hesitated, then went slowly to the door, and shut it softly. Hermione was sitting on the sofa when he turned. He came back and stood beside her.

"Si, Signora?"

"I'd rather you sat too, Gaspare."

He took a seat on a hard chair. His face had changed. Generally it was what is called "an open face." Now it looked the opposite to that. When she glanced at him, almost furtively, Hermione was once more assailed by fear. She began to speak quickly, with determination, to combat her fear.

"Gaspare, I may be wrong, but for some time I have felt now and then as if you and I were not quite as we used to be together, as if—well, now and then it seems to me as if there was a wall, and I was on one side of the wall and you were on the other. I don't like that feeling, after having you with me so long. I don't like it, and I want to get rid of it."

She paused.

"Si, Signora," he said, in a low voice.

He was now looking at the floor. His arms were resting on his knees, and his hands hung down touching each other.

"It seems to me that—I never noticed the thing between us until—until Ruffo came to the island."

"Ruffo?"

"Yes, Gaspare, Ruffo."

She spoke with increasing energy and determination, still combating her still formless fear. And because of this interior combat her manner and voice were not quite natural, though she strove to keep them so, knowing well how swiftly a Sicilian will catch the infection of a strange mood, will be puzzled by it, be made obstinate, even dogged by it.

"I am sure that all this—I mean that this has something to do with Ruffo."

Gaspare said nothing.

"I know you like Ruffo, Gaspare. I believe you like him very much. Don't you?"

"Signora, Ruffo has never done me any harm."

"Ruffo is very fond of you."

She saw Gaspare redden.

"He respects and admires you more than other people. I have noticed that."

Gaspare cleared his throat but did not look up or make any remark.

"Both the Signorina and I like Ruffo, too. We feel—at least I feel—I feel as if he had become one of the family."

Gaspare looked up quickly and his eyes were surely fierce.

"One of the family!" he exclaimed.

Hermione wondered if he were jealous.

"I don't mean that I put him with you, Gaspare. No—but he seems to me quite a friend. Tell me—do you know anything against Ruffo?"

"Non, Signora."

It came very slowly from his lips.

"Absolutely nothing?"

"Signora, I don't know anything bad of Ruffo."

"I felt sure not. Don't you like his coming to the island?"

Gaspare's face was still flushed.

"Signora, it is nothing to do with me."

A sort of dull anger seemed to be creeping into his voice, an accent of defiance that he was trying to control. Hermione noticed it, and it brought her to a resolve that, till now, she had avoided. Her secret fear had prompted her to delay, to a gradual method of arriving at the truth. Now she sat forward, clasping her hands together hard, and speaking quickly:

"Gaspare, I feel sure that you noticed long ago something very strange in Ruffo. Perhaps you noticed it almost at once. I believe you did. It is this. Ruffo has an extraordinary look in his face sometimes, a look of—of your dead Padrone. I didn't see it for some time, but I think you saw it directly. Did you? Did you, Gaspare?"

There was no answer. Gaspare only cleared his throat again more violently. Hermione waited for a minute. Then, understanding that he was not going to answer, she went on:

"You have seen it—we have both noticed it. Now I want to tell you something—something that happened to-night."

Gaspare started, looked up quickly, darted at his Padrona a searching glance of inquiry.

"What is it?" she said.

"Niente!"

He kept his eyes on her, staring with a tremendous directness that was essentially southern. And she returned his gaze.

"I was with Ruffo this evening. We talked, and he told me that he met you at the Festa last night. He told me, too, that he was with his mother."

She waited to give him a chance of speaking, of forestalling any question. But he only stared at her with dilated eyes.

"He told me that you knew his mother, and that his mother knew you."

"Why not?"

"Of course, there is no reason. What surprised me rather"—she was speaking more slowly now, and more unevenly—"was this—"

"Si?"

Gaspare's voice was loud. He lifted up his hands and laid them heavily on his knees.

"Si?" he repeated.

"After you had spoken with her, she cried, Ruffo's mother cried, Gaspare. And she said, 'To think of its being Gaspare on the island!'"

"Is that all?"

"No."

A look that was surely a look of fear came into his face, rendering it new to Hermione. Never before had she seen such an expression—or had she once—long ago—one night in Sicily?

"That isn't all. Ruffo took his mother home, and when they got home she said to him this, 'Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?'"

Gaspare said nothing.

"Did you hear, Gaspare?"

"Si, Signora."

"Gaspare, it seems to me"—Hermione was speaking now very slowly, like one shaping a thought in her mind while she spoke—"it seems to me strange that you and Ruffo's mother should have known each other so well long before Ruffo was born, and that she should cry because she met you at the Festa, and that—afterwards—she should ask Ruffo that."

"Strange?"

The fear that had been formless was increasing now in Hermione, and surely it was beginning at last to take a form, but as yet only a form that was vague and shadowy.

"Yes. I think it very strange. Did you"—an intense curiosity was alive in her now—"did you know Ruffo's mother in Sicily?"

"Signora, it does not matter where I knew her."

"Why should she say that?"

"What?"

"Has Gaspare ever said you were like somebody?"

"I have never said Ruffo was like anybody!" Gaspare exclaimed, with sudden and intense violence. "May the Madonna let me die—may I die"—he held up his arms—"may I die to-morrow if I have ever said Ruffo was like anybody!"

He got up from his chair. His face was red in patches, like the face of a man stricken with fever.

"Gaspare, I know that, but what could this woman have meant?"

"Madonna! How should I know? Signora, how can I tell what a woman like that means? Such women have no sense, they talk, they gossip—ah, ah, ah, ah!"—he imitated the voice of a woman of the people—"they are always on the door-step, their tongues are always going. Dio mio! Who is to say what they mean, or what nonsense goes through their heads?"

Hermione got up and laid her hand heavily on his arm.

"I believe you know of whom Ruffo's mother spoke, Gaspare. Tell me this—did Ruffo's mother ever know your Padrone?"

She looked straight into his eyes. It seemed to her as if, for the first time, there came from them to her a look that had something in it of dislike. This look struck her to a terrible melancholy, yet she met it firmly, almost fiercely, with a glance that fought it, that strove to beat it back. And with a steady voice she repeated the question he had not answered.

"Did Ruffo's mother ever know your Padrone?"

Gaspare moved his lips, passing his tongue over them. His eyes fell. He moved his arm, trying to shift it from his Padrona's hand. Her fingers closed on it more tenaciously.

"Gaspare, I order you to tell me."

"Signora," he said, "such things are not in my service. I am here to work, not to answer questions."

He spoke quietly now, heavily, and moved his feet on the carpet.

"You disobey me?"

"Signora, I shall always obey all your orders as a servant."

"And as a friend, Gaspare, as a friend! You are my friend, aren't you?"

Her voice had suddenly changed, and in answer to it his face changed. He looked into her face, and his eyes were full of a lustrous softness that was like a gentle and warm caress.

"Signora, you know what I am for you. Then leave me alone, Signora." He spoke solemnly. "You ought to trust me, Signora, you ought to trust me."

"I do trust you. But you—do you trust me?"

"Si, Signora."

"In everything?"

"Signora, I trust you; I have always trusted you."

"And my courage—do you trust that?"

He did not answer.

"I don't think you do, Gaspare."

Suddenly she felt that he was right not to trust it. Again she felt beset by fear, and as if she had nothing within her that was strong enough to stand up in further combat against the assaults of the world and of destiny. The desire to know all, to probe this mystery, abruptly left her, was replaced by an almost frantic wish to be always ignorant, if only that ignorance saved her from any fresh sorrow or terror.

"Never mind," she said. "You needn't answer. I don't want—What does it all matter? It's—it's all so long ago."

Having got hold of that phrase, she clung to it as if for comfort.

"It's all so long ago," she repeated. "Years and years ago. We've forgotten it. We've forgotten Sicily, Gaspare. Why should we think of it or trouble about it any more? Good-night, Gaspare."

She smiled at him, but her face was drawn and looked old.

"Buona notte, Signora."

He did not smile, but gazed at her with earnest gentleness, and still with that lustrous look in his eyes, full of tenderness and protection.

"Buon riposo, Signora."

He went away, surely relieved to go. At the door he said again:

"Buon riposo."

The door was shut.

"Buon riposo!"

Hermione repeated the words to herself.

"Riposo!"

The very thought of repose was like the most bitter irony. She walked up and down the room. To-night there was no stability in her. She was shaken, lacerated mentally, by sharply changing moods that rushed through her, one chasing another. Scarcely had Gaspare gone before she longed to call him back, to force him to speak, to explain everything to her. The fear that cringed was suddenly replaced by the fear that rushes forward blindly, intent only on getting rid of uncertainty even at the cost of death. Soldiers know that fear. It has given men to bayonet points.

Now it increased rapidly within Hermione. She was devoured by a terror that was acutely nervous, that gnawed her body as well as her soul.

Gaspare had known Ruffo's mother in Sicily. And Maurice—he had known Ruffo's mother. He must have known her. But when? How had he got to know her?

Hermione stood still.

"It must have been when I was in Africa!"

A hundred details of her husband's conduct, from the moment of his return from the fair till the last kiss he had given her before he went away down the side of Monte Amato, flashed through her mind. And each one seemed to burn her mind as a spark, touching flesh, burns the flesh.

"It was when I was in Africa!"

She went to the window and leaned out into the night over the misty sea. Her lips moved. She was repeating to herself again and again:

"To-morrow I'll go to Mergellina! To-morrow I'll go to Mergellina!"

CHAPTER XXXV

Hermione did not sleep at all that night. When the dawn came she got up and looked out over the sea. The mist had vanished with the darkness. The vaporous heat was replaced by a delicate freshness that embraced the South as dew embraces a rose. On the as yet pale waters, full of varying shades of gray, slate color, ethereal mauve, very faint pink and white, were dotted many fishing-boats. Hermione looked at them with her tired eyes. Ruffo's boat was no doubt among them. There was one only a few hundred yards beyond the rocks from which Vere sometimes bathed. Perhaps that was his.

Ruffo's boat! Ruffo!

She put her elbows on the sill of the window and rested her face in her hands.

Her eyes felt very dry, like sand she thought, and her mind felt dry too, as if insomnia was withering it up. She opened her lips to breathe in the salt freshness of the morning.

Upon Anacapri a woolly white cloud lay lightly. The distant coast, where dreams Sorrento, was becoming clearer every moment.

Often and often in the summer-time had Hermione been invaded by the radiant cheerfulness of the Bay of Naples. She knew no sea that had its special gift of magical gayety and stirring hopefulness, its laughing Pagan appeal to all the light things of the soul. It woke even the weary heart to holiday when, in the summer, it glittered and danced in the sun, whispering or calling with a tender or bold vivacity along its lovely coast.

Out of this morning beauty, refined and exquisitely gentle, would rise presently that livelier Pagan spirit. It was not hers. She was no Pagan. But she had loved it, and she had, or thought she had, been able to understand it.

All that was long ago.

Now, as she leaned out, her soul felt old and haggard, and the contact with the youth and freshness of the morning emphasized its inability to be influenced any more by youthful wonders, by the graciousness and inspiration that are the gifts of dawn.

Was that Ruffo's boat?

Her mind was dwelling on Ruffo, but mechanically, heavily, like a thing with feet of lead, unable to lift itself once it had dropped down upon a surface.

All the night her brain had been busy. Now it did not slumber, but it brooded, like the mist that had so lately left the sea. It brooded upon the thought of Ruffo.

The light grew. Over the mountains the sky spread scarlet banners. The sea took, with a quiet readiness that was happily submissive, its burnished gift of gold. The gray was lost in gold.

And Hermione watched, and drank in the delicate air, but caught nothing of the delicate spirit of the dawn.

Presently the boat that lay not far beyond the rocks moved. A little black figure stood up in it, swayed to and fro, plying tiny oars. The boat diminished. It was leaving the fishing-ground. It was going towards Mergellina.

"To-day I am going to Mergellina."

Hermione said that to herself as she watched the boat till it disappeared in the shining gold that was making a rapture of the sea. She said it, but the words seemed to have little meaning, the fact which they conveyed to be unimportant to her.

And she leaned out of the window, with a weary and inexpressive face, while the gold spread ever more widely over the sea, and the Pagan spirit surely stirred from its brief repose to greet the brilliant day.

Presently she became aware of a boat approaching the island from the direction of Mergellina. She saw it first when it was a long distance off, and watched it idly as it drew near. It looked black against the gold, till it was off the Villa Pantano. But then, or soon after, she saw that it was white. It was making straight for the island, propelled by vigorous arms.

Now she thought it looked like one of the island boats. Could Vere have got up and gone out so early with Gaspare?

She drew back, lifted her face from her hands, and stood straight up against the curtain of the window. In a moment she heard the sound of oars in the water, and saw that the boat was from the island, and that Gaspare was in it alone. He looked up, saw her, and raised his cap, but with a rather reluctant gesture that scarcely indicated satisfaction or a happy readiness to greet her. She hesitated, then called out to him.

"Good-morning, Gaspare."

"Good-morning, Signora."

"How early you are up!"

"And you, too, Signora."

"Couldn't you sleep?"

"Signora, I never want much sleep."

"Where have you been?"

"I have been for a row, Signora."

He lifted his cap again and began to row in. The boat disappeared into the Saint's Pool.

"He has been to Mergellina."

The mind of Hermione was awake again. The sight of Gaspare had lifted those feet of lead. Once more she was in flight.

Arabs can often read the thoughts of those whom they know. In many Sicilians there is some Arab blood, and sometimes Hermione had felt that Gaspare knew well intentions of hers which she had never hinted to him. Now she was sure that in the night he had divined her determination to go to Mergellina, to see the mother of Ruffo, to ask her for the truth which Gaspare had refused to tell. He had divined this, and he had gone to Mergellina before her. Why?

She was fully roused now. She felt like one in a conflict. Was there, then, to be a battle between herself and Gaspare, a battle over this hidden truth?

Now she felt that it was vital to her to know this truth. Yet when her mind, or her tormented heart, was surely on the verge of its statement, was—or seemed to be—about to say to her, "Perhaps it is—that!" or "It is—that!" something within her, housed deep down in her, refused to listen, refused to hear, revolted from—what it did not acknowledge the existence of.

Paradox alone could hint the condition of her mind just then. She was in the thrall of fear, but, had she been questioned, would not have allowed that she was afraid.

Afterwards she never rightly knew what was the truth of her during this period of her life.

There was to be a conflict between her and Gaspare.

She came from the window, took a bath, and dressed. When she had finished she looked in the glass. Her face was calm, but set and grim. She had not known she could look like that. She hated her face, her expression, and she came away from the glass feeling almost afraid of herself.

At breakfast she and Vere always met. The table was laid out-of-doors in the little garden or on the terrace if the weather was fine, in the dining-room if it was bad. This morning Hermione saw the glimmer of the white cloth near the fig-tree. She wondered if Vere was there, and longed to plead a headache and to have her coffee in her bedroom. Nevertheless, she went down resolved to govern herself.

In the garden she found Giulia smiling and putting down the silver coffee-pot in quite a bower of roses. Vere was not visible.

Hermione exchanged a good-morning with Giulia and sat down. The servant's smiling face brought her a mingled feeling of relief and wonder. The pungent smell of coffee, conquering the soft scent of the many roses, pinned her mind abruptly down to the simple realities and animal pleasures and necessities of life. She made a strong effort to be quite normal, to think of the moment, to live for it. The morning was fresh and lively; the warmth of the sun, the tonic vivacity of the air from the sea, caressed and quickened her blood.

The minute garden was secluded. A world that seemed at peace, a world of rocks and waters far from the roar of traffic, the uneasy hum of men, lay around her.

Surely the moment was sweet, was peaceful. She would live in it.

Vere came slowly from the house, and at once Hermione's newly made and not yet carried out resolution crumbled into dust. She forgot the sun, the sea, the peaceful situation and all material things. She was confronted by the painful drama of the island life! Vere with her secrets, Emile with his, Gaspare fighting to keep her, his Padrona, still in mystery. And she was confronted by her own passions, those hosts of armed men that have their dwelling in every powerful nature.

Vere came up listlessly.

"Good-morning, Madre," she said.

She kissed her mother's cheek with cold lips.

"What lovely roses!"

She smelled them and sat down in her place facing the sea-wall.

"Yes, aren't they?"

"And such a heavenly morning after the mist! What are we going to do to-day?"

Hermione gave her her coffee, and the little dry tap of a spoon on an egg-shell was heard in the stillness of the garden.

"Well, I—I am going across to take the tram."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"Naples again? I'm tired of Naples."

There was in her voice a sound that suggested rather hatred than lassitude.

"I don't know that I shall go as far as Naples. I am going to Mergellina."

"Oh!"

Vere did not ask her what she was going to do there. She showed no special interest, no curiosity.

"What will you do, Vere?"

"I don't know."

She glanced round. Hermione saw that her usually bright eyes were dull and lack-lustre.

"I don't know what I shall do."

She sighed and began to eat her egg slowly, as if she had no appetite.

"Did you sleep well, Vere?"

"Not very well, Madre."

"Are you tired of the island?"

Vere looked up as if startled.

"Oh no! at least"—she paused—"No, I don't believe I could ever be really that. I love the island."

"What is it, then?"

"Sometimes—some days one doesn't know exactly what to do."

"Well, but you always seem occupied." Hermione spoke with slow meaning, not unkindly, but with a significance she hardly meant to put into her voice, yet could not keep out of it. "You always manage to find something to do."

Suddenly Vere's eyes filled with tears. She bent down her head and went on eating. Again she heard Monsieur Emile's harsh words. They seemed to have changed her world. She felt despised. At that moment she hated the Marchesino with a fiery hatred.

Hermione was not able to put her arm round her child quickly, to ask her what was the matter, to kiss her tears away, or to bid them flow quietly, openly, while Vere rested against her, secure that the sorrow was understood, was shared. She could only pretend not to see, while she thought of the two shadows in the garden last night.

What could have happened between Emile and Vere? What had been said, done, to cause that cry of pain, those tears? Was it possible that Emile had let Vere see plainly his—his—? But here Hermione stopped. Not even in her own mind, for herself alone, could she summon up certain spectres.

She went on eating her breakfast, and pretending not to notice that Vere was troubled. Presently Vere spoke again.

"Would you like me to come with you to Mergellina, Madre?" she said.

Her voice was rather uneven, almost trembling.

"Oh no, Vere!"

Hermione spoke hastily, abruptly, strongly conscious of the impossibility of taking Vere with her. Directly she had said the words she realized that they must have fallen on Vere like a blow. She realized this still more when she looked quickly up and saw that Vere's face was scarlet.

"I don't mean that I shouldn't like to have you with me, Vere," she added, hurriedly. "But—"

"It's all right, Madre. Well, I've finished. I think I shall go out a little in my boat."

She went away, half humming, half singing the tune of the Mergellina song.

Hermione put down her cup. She had not finished her coffee, but she knew she could not finish it. Life seemed at that moment utterly intolerable to her. She felt desperate, as a nature does that is forced back upon itself by circumstances, that is forced to be, or to appear to be, traitor to itself. And in her desperation action presented itself to her as imperatively necessary—necessary as air is to one suffocating.

She got up. She would start at once for Mergellina. As she went up-stairs she remembered that she did not know where Ruffo's mother lived, what she was like, even what her name was. The boy had always spoken of her as "Mia Mamma." They dwelt at Mergellina. That was all she knew.

She did not choose to ask Gaspare anything. She would go alone, and find out somehow for herself where Ruffo lived. She would ask the fishermen. Or perhaps she would come across Ruffo. Probably he had gone home by this time from the fishing.

Quickly, energetically she got ready.

Just before she left her room she saw Vere pass slowly by upon the sea, rowing a little way out alone, as she often did in the calm summer weather. Vere had a book, and almost directly she laid the oars in their places side by side, went into the stern, sat down under the awning, and began—apparently—to read. Hermione watched her for two or three minutes. She looked very lonely; and moved by an impulse to try to erase the impression made on her by the abrupt exclamation at the breakfast-table, the mother leaned out and hailed the child.

"Good-bye, Vere! I am just starting!" she cried out, trying to make her voice sound cheerful and ordinary.

Vere looked up for a second.

"Good-bye!"

She bent her head and returned to her book.

Hermione felt chilled.

She went down and met Giulia in the passage.

"Giulia, is Gaspare anywhere about? I want to cross to the mainland. I am going to take the tram."

"Signora, are you going to Naples? Maria says—"

"I can't do any commissions, because I shall probably not go beyond Mergellina. Find Gaspare, will you?"

Giulia went away and Hermione descended to the Saint's Pool. She waited there two or three minutes. Then Gaspare appeared above.

"You want the boat, Signora?"

"Yes, Gaspare."

He leaped down the steps and stood beside her.

"Where do you want to go?"

She hesitated. Then she looked him straight in the face and said:

"To Mergellina."

He met her eyes without flinching. His face was quite calm.

"Shall I row you there, Signora?"

"I meant to go to the village, and walk up and take the tram."

"As you like, Signora. But I can easily row you there."

"Aren't you tired after being out so early this morning?"

"No, Signora."

"Did you go far?"

"Not so very far, Signora."

Hermione hesitated. She knew Gaspare had been to Mergellina. She knew he had been to see Ruffo's mother. If that were so her journey would probably be in vain. In their conflict Gaspare had struck the first blow. Could anything be gained by her going?

Gaspare saw, and perhaps read accurately, her hesitation.

"It will get very hot to-day, Signora," he said, carelessly.

His words decided Hermione. If obstacles were to be put in her way she would overleap them. At all costs she would emerge from the darkness in which she was walking. A heat of anger rushed over her. She felt as if Gaspare, and perhaps Artois, were treating her like a child.

"I must go to Mergellina, Gaspare," she said. "And I shall go by tram. Please row me to the village."

"Va bene, Signora," he answered.

He went to pull in the boat.

CHAPTER XXXVI

When Hermione got out of the boat in the little harbor of the village on the mainland Gaspare said again:

"I could easily row you to Mergellina, Signore. I am not a bit tired."

She looked at him as he stood with his hand on the prow of the boat. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, showing his strong arms. There was something brave, something "safe"—so she called it to herself—in his whole appearance which had always appealed to her nature. How she longed at that moment to be quite at ease with him! Why would he not trust her completely? Perhaps in her glance just then she showed her thought, her desire. Gaspare's eyes fell before her.

"I think I'll take the tram," she said, "unless—"

She was still looking at him, longing for him to speak. But he said nothing. At that moment a fisherman ran down the steps from the village, and came over the sand to greet them.

"Good-bye, Gaspare," she said. "Don't wait, of course. Giovanni can row me back."

The fisherman smiled, but Gaspare said:

"I can come for you, Signora. You will not be very long, will you? You will be back for colazione?"

"Oh yes, I suppose so."

"I will come for you, Signora."

Again she looked at him, and felt his deep loyalty to her, his strong and almost doglike affection. And, feeling them, she was seized once more by fear. The thing Gaspare hid from her must be something terrible.

"Thank you, Gaspare."

"A rivederci, Signora."

Was there not a sound of pleading in his voice, a longing to retain her? She would not heed it. But she gave him a very gentle look as she turned to walk up the hill.

At the top, by the Trattoria del Giardinetto, she had to wait for several minutes before the tram came. She remembered her solitary dinner there on the evening when she had gone to the Scoglio di Frisio to look at the visitor's book. She had felt lonely then in the soft light of the fading day. She felt far more lonely now in the brilliant sunshine of morning. And for an instant she saw herself travelling steadily along a straight road, from which she could not diverge. She passed milestone after milestone. And now, not far off, she saw in the distance a great darkness in which the road ended. And the darkness was the ultimate loneliness which can encompass on earth the human spirit.

The tram-bell sounded. She lifted her head mechanically. A moment later she was rushing down towards Naples. Before the tram reached the harbor of Mergellina, on the hill opposite the Donn' Anna, Hermione got out. Something in her desired delay; there was plenty of time. She would walk a little way among the lively people who were streaming to the Stabilimenti to have their morning dip.

In the tram she had scarcely thought at all. She had given herself to the air, to speed, to vision. Now, at once, with physical action came an anxiety, a restlessness, that seemed to her very physical too. Her body felt ill, she thought; though she knew there was nothing the matter with her. All through her life her health had been robust. Never yet had she completely "broken down." She told herself that her body was perfectly well.

But she was afraid. That was the truth. And to feel fear was specially hateful to her, because she abhorred cowardice, and was inclined to despise all timidity as springing from weakness of character.

She dreaded reaching Mergellina. She dreaded seeing this woman, Ruffo's mother. And Ruffo? Did she dread seeing him?

She fought against her fear. Whatever might befall her she would remain herself, essentially separate from all other beings and from events, secure of the tremendous solitude that is the property of every human being on earth.

"Pain, misery, horror, come from within, not from without." She said that to herself steadily. "I am free so long as I choose, so long as I have the courage to choose, to be free."

And saying that, and never once allowing her mind to state frankly any fear, she came down to the harbor of Mergellina.

The harbor and its environs looked immensely gay in the brilliant sunshine. Life was at play here, even at its busiest. The very workers sang as if their work were play. Boats went in and out on the water. Children paddled in the shallow sea, pushing hand-nets along the sand. From the rocks boys were bathing. Their shouts travelled to the road where the fishermen were talking with intensity, as they leaned against the wall hot with the splendid sun.

Hermione looked for Ruffo's face among all these sun-browned faces, for his bright eyes among all the sparkling eyes of these children of the sea.

But she could not see him. She walked along the wall slowly.

"Ruffo—Ruffo—Ruffo!"

She was summoning him with her mind.

Perhaps he was among those bathing boys. She looked across the harbor to the rocks, and saw the brown body of one shoot through the shining air and disappear with a splash into the sea.

Perhaps that boy was he—how far away from her loneliness, her sadness, and her dread!

She began to despair of finding him.

"Barca! Barca!"

She had reached the steps now near the Savoy Hotel. A happy-looking boatman, with hazel eyes and a sensitive mouth, hailed her from the water. It was Fabiano Lari, to whom Artois had once spoken, waiting for custom in his boat the Stella del Mare.

Hermione was attracted to the man, as Artois had been, and she resolved to find out from him, if possible, where Ruffo's mother lived. She went down the steps. The man immediately brought his boat right in.

"No," she said, "I don't want the boat."

Fabiano looked a little disappointed.

"I am looking for some one who lives here, a Sicilian boy called Ruffo."

"Ruffo Scarla, Signora? The Sicilian?"

"That must be he. Do you know him?"

"Si, Signora, I know Ruffo very well. He was here this morning. But I don't know where he is now." He looked round. "He may have gone home, Signora."

"Do you know where he lives?"

"Si, Signora. It is near where I live. It's near the Grotto."

"Could you possibly leave your boat and take me there?"

"Si, Signora! A moment, Signora."

Quickly he signed to a boy who was standing close by watching them. The boy ran down to the boat. Fabiano spoke to him in dialect. He got into the boat, while Fabiano jumped ashore.

"Signora, I am ready. We go this way."

They walked along together.

Fabiano was as frank and simple as a child, and began at once to talk. Hermione was glad of that, still more glad that he talked of himself, his family, the life and affairs of a boatman. She listened sympathetically, occasionally putting in a word, till suddenly Fabiano said:

"Antonio Bernari will be out to-day. I suppose you know that, Signora?"

"Antonio Bernari! Who is he? I never heard of him."

Fabiano looked surprised.

"But he is Ruffo's Patrigno. He is the husband of Maddalena."

Hermione stood still on the pavement. She did not know why for a moment. Her mind seemed to need a motionless body in which to work. It was surely groping after something, eagerly, feverishly, yet blindly.

Fabiano paused beside her.

"Signora," he said, staring at her in surprise, "are you tired? Are you not well?"

"I'm quite well. But wait a minute. Yes, I do want to rest for a minute."

She dared not move lest she should interfere with that mental search. Fabiano's words had sent her mind sharply to Sicily.

Maddalena!

She was sure she had known, or heard of, some girl in Sicily called Maddalena, some girl or some woman. She thought of the servants in the Casa del Prete, Lucrezia. Had she any sister, any relation called Maddalena? Or had Gaspare—?

Suddenly Hermione seemed to be on the little terrace above the ravine with Maurice and Artois. She seemed to feel the heat of noon in summer. Gaspare was there, too. She saw his sullen face. She saw him looking ugly. She heard him say:

"Salvatore and Maddalena, Signora."

Why had he said that? In answer to what question?

And then, in a flash, she remembered everything. It was she who had spoken first. She had asked him who lived in the House of the Sirens.

"Salvatore and Maddalena."

And afterwards—Maurice had said something. Her mind went in search, seized its prey.

"They're quite friends of ours. We saw them at the fair only yesterday."

Maurice had said that. She could hear his voice saying it.

"I'm rested now."

She was speaking to Fabiano. They were walking on again among the chattering people. They had come to the wooden station where the tram-lines converge.

"Is it this way?"

"Si, Signora, quite near the Grotto. Take care, Signora."

"It's all right. Thank you."

They had crossed now and were walking up the street that leads directly to the tunnel, whose mouth confronted them in the distance. Hermione felt as if they were going to enter it, were going to walk down it to the great darkness which seemed to wait for her, to beckon her. But presently Fabiano turned to the right, and they came into a street leading up the hill, and stopped almost immediately before a tall house.

"Antonio and Maddalena live here, Signora."

"And Ruffo," she said, as if correcting him.

"Ruffo! Si, Signora, of course."

Hermione looked at the house. It was evidently let out in rooms to people who were comparatively poor; not very poor, not in any destitution, but who made a modest livelihood, and could pay their fourteen or fifteen lire a month for lodging. She divined by its aspect that every room was occupied. For the building teemed with life, and echoed with the sound of calling, or screaming, voices. The inhabitants were surely all of them in a flurry of furious activity. Children were playing before and upon the door-step, which was flanked by an open shop, whose interior revealed with a blatant sincerity a rummage of mysterious edibles—fruit, vegetables, strings of strange objects that looked poisonous, fungi, and other delights. Above, from several windows, women leaned out, talking violently to one another. Two were holding babies, who testified their new-born sense of life by screaming shrilly. Across other window-spaces heads passed to and fro, denoting the continuous movement of those within. People in the street called to people in the house, and the latter shouted in answer, with that absolute lack of self-consciousness and disregard of the opinions of others which is the hall-mark of the true Neapolitan. From the corner came the rumble and the bell notes of the trams going to and coming from the tunnel that leads to Fuorigrotta. And from every direction rose the vehement street calls of ambulant venders of the necessaries of Neapolitan life.

"Ruffo lives here!" said Hermione.

She could hardly believe it. So unsuitable seemed such a dwelling to that bright-eyed child of the sea, whom she had always seen surrounded by the wide airs and the waters.

"Si, Signora. They are on the third floor. Shall I take you up?"

Hermione hesitated. Should she go up alone?

"Please show me the way," she said, deciding.

Fabiano preceded her up a dirty stone staircase, dark and full of noises, till they came to the third floor.

"It is here, Signora!"

He knocked loudly on a door. It was opened very quickly, as if by some one who was on the watch, expectant of an arrival.

"Chi e?" cried a female voice.

And, almost simultaneously, a woman appeared with eyes that stared in inquiry.

By these eyes, their shape, and the long, level brows above them, Hermione knew that this woman must be Ruffo's mother.

"Good-morning, Donna Maddalena," said Fabiano, heartily.

"Good-morning," said the woman, directing her eyes with a strange and pertinacious scrutiny to Hermione, who stood behind him. "I thought perhaps it was—"

She stopped. Behind, in the doorway, appeared the head of a young woman, covered with blue-black hair, then the questioning face of an old woman with a skin like yellow parchment.

"Don Antonio?"

She nodded, keeping her long, Arab eyes on Hermione.

"No. Are you expecting him so early?"

"He may come at any time. Chi lo sa?"

She shrugged her broad, graceless shoulders.

"It isn't he! It isn't Antonio!" bleated a pale and disappointed voice, with a peculiarly irritating timbre.

It was the voice of the old woman, who now darted over Maddalena Bernari's shoulder a hostile glance at Hermione.

"Madonna Santissima!" baaed the woman with the blue-black hair. "Perhaps he will not be let out to-day!"

The old woman began to cry feebly, yet angrily.

"Courage, Madre Teresa!" said Fabiano. "Antonio will be here to-day for a certainty. Every one knows it. His friends"—he raised a big brown hand significantly—"his friends have managed well for him."

"Si! si! It is true!" said the black-haired woman, nodding her large head, and gesticulating towards Madre Teresa. "He will be here to-day. Antonio will be here."

They all stared at Hermione, suddenly forgetting their personal and private affairs.

"Donna Maddalena," said Fabiano, "here is a signora who knows Ruffo. I met her at the Mergellina, and she asked me to show her the way here."

"Ruffo is out," said Maddalena, always keeping her eyes on Hermione.

"May I come in and speak to you?" asked Hermione.

Maddalena looked doubtful, yet curious.

"My son is in the sea, Signora. He is bathing at the Marina."

Hermione thought of the brown body she had seen falling through the shining air, of the gay splash as it entered the water.

"I know your son so well that I should like to know his mother," she said.

Fabiano by this time had moved aside, and the two women were confronting each other in the doorway. Behind Maddalena the two other women stared and listened with all their might, giving their whole attention to this unexpected scene.

"Are you the Signora of the island?" asked Maddalena.

"Yes, I am."

"Let the Signora in, Donna Maddalena," said Fabiano. "She is tired and wants to rest."

Without saying anything Maddalena moved her broad body from the doorway, leaving enough space for Hermione to enter.

"Thank you," said Hermione to Fabiano, giving him a couple of lire.

"Grazie, Signora. I will wait down-stairs to take you back."

He went off before she had time to tell him that was not necessary.

Hermione walked into Ruffo's home.

There were two rooms, one opening into the other. The latter was a kitchen, the former the sleeping-room. Hermione looked quietly round it, and her eyes fell at once upon a large green parrot, which was sitting at the end of the board on which, supported by trestles of iron, the huge bed of Maddalena and her husband was laid. At present this bed was rolled up, and in consequence towered to a considerable height. The parrot looked at Hermione coldly, with round, observant eyes whose pupils kept contracting and expanding with a monotonous regularity. She felt as if it had a soul that was frigidly ironic. Its pertinacious glance chilled and repelled her, and she fancied it was reflected in the faces of the women round her.

"Can I speak to you alone for a few minutes?" she asked Maddalena.

Maddalena turned to the two women and spoke to them loudly in dialect. They replied. The old woman spoke at great length. She seemed always angry and always upon the verge of tears. Over her shoulders she wore a black shawl, and as she talked she kept fidgeting with it, pulling it first to one side, then to the other, or dragging at it with her thin and crooked yellow fingers. The parrot watched her steadily. Her hideous voice played upon Hermione's nerves till they felt raw. At length, looking back, as she walked, with bloodshot eyes, she went into the kitchen, followed by the young woman. They began talking together in sibilant whispers, like people conspiring.

After a moment of apparent hesitation Maddalena gave her visitor a chair.

"Thank you," Hermione said, taking it.

She looked round the room again. It was clean and well kept, but humbly furnished. Ruffo's bed was rolled up in a corner. On the walls were some shields of postcards and photographs, such as the poor Italians love, deftly enough arranged and fastened together by some mysterious not apparent means. Many of the postcards were American. Near two small flags, American and Italian, fastened crosswise above the head of the big bed, was a portrait of Maria Addolorata, under which burned a tiny light. A palm, blessed, and fashioned like a dagger with a cross for the hilt, was nailed above it, with a coral charm to protect the household against the evil eye. And a little to the right of it was a small object which Hermione saw and wondered at without understanding why it should be there, or what was its use—a Fattura della morte (death-charm), in the form of a green lemon pierced with many nails. This hung by a bit of string to a nail projecting from the wall.

From the death-charm Hermione turned her eyes to Maddalena.

She saw a woman who was surely not very much younger than herself, with a broad and spreading figure, wide hips, plump though small-boned arms, heavy shoulders. The face—that, perhaps—yes, that, certainly—must have been once pretty. Very pretty? Hermione looked searchingly at it until she saw Maddalena's eyes drop before hers suddenly, as if embarrassed. She must say something. But now that she was here she felt a difficulty in opening a conversation, an intense reluctance to speak to this woman into whose house she had almost forced her way. With the son she was strangely intimate. From the mother she felt separated by a gulf.

And that fear of hers?

She looked again round the room. Had that fear increased or diminished? Her eyes fell on Maria Addolorata, then on the Fattura della morte. She did not know why, but she was moved to speak about it.

"You have nice rooms here," she said.

"Si, Signora."

Maddalena had rather a harsh voice. She spoke politely, but inexpressively.

"What a curious thing that is on the wall!"

"Signora?"

"It's a lemon, isn't it? With nails stuck through it?"

Maddalena's broad face grew a dusky red.

"That is nothing, Signora!" she said, hastily.

She looked greatly disturbed, suddenly went over to the bed, unhooked the string from the nail, and put the death-charm into her pocket. As she came back she looked at Hermione with defiance in her eyes.

The gulf between them had widened.

From the kitchen came the persistent sound of whispering voices. The green parrot turned sideways on the board beyond the pile of rolled-up mattresses, and looked, with one round eye, steadfastly at Hermione.

An almost intolerable sensation of desertion swept over her. She felt as if every one hated her.

"Would you mind shutting that door?" she said to Maddalena, pointing towards the kitchen.

The sound of whispers ceased. The women within were listening.

"Signora, we always keep it open."

"But I have something to say to you that I wish to say in private."

"Si!"

The exclamation was suspicious. The voice sounded harsher than before. In the kitchen the silence seemed to increase, to thrill with anxious curiosity.

"Please shut that door."

It was like an order. Maddalena obeyed it, despite a cataract of words from the old woman that voiced indignant protest.

"And do sit down, won't you? I don't like to sit while you are standing."

"Signora, I—"

"Please do sit down."

Hermione's voice began to show her acute nervous agitation. Maddalena stared, then took another chair from its place against the wall, and sat down at some distance from Hermione. She folded her plump hands in her lap. Seated, she looked bigger, more graceless, than before. But Hermione saw that she was not really middle-aged. Hard life and trouble doubtless had combined to destroy her youth and beauty early, to coarsen the outlines, to plant the many wrinkles that spread from the corners of her eyes and lips to her temples and her heavy, dusky cheeks. She was now a typical woman of the people. Hermione tried to see her as a girl, long ago—years and years ago.

"I know your son Ruffo very well," she said.

Maddalena's face softened.

"Si, Signora. He has told me of you."

Suddenly she seemed to recollect something.

"I have never—Signora, thank you for the money," she said.

The harshness was withdrawn from her voice as she spoke now, and in her abrupt gentleness she looked much younger than before. Hermione divined in that moment her vanished beauty. It seemed suddenly to be unveiled by her tenderness.

"I heard you were in trouble."

"Si, Signora—great trouble."

Her eyes filled with tears and her mouth worked. As if moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she thrust one hand into her dress, drew out the death-charm, and contemplated it, at the same time muttering some words that Hermione did not understand. Her face became full of hatred. Holding up the charm, and lifting her head, she exclaimed:

"Those who bring trouble shall have trouble!"

While she spoke she looked straight before her, and her voice became harsh again, seemed to proclaim to the world unalterable destiny.

"Yes," said Hermione, in a low voice.

Maddalena hid the death-charm once more with a movement that was surreptitious.

"Yes," Hermione said again, gazing into Maddalena's still beautiful eyes. "And you have trouble!"

Maddalena looked afraid, like an ignorant person whose tragic superstition is proved true by an assailing fact.

"Signora!"

"You have trouble in your house. Have you ever brought trouble to any one? Have you?"

Maddalena stared at her with dilated eyes, but made no answer.

"Tell me something." Hermione leaned forward. "You know my servant, Gaspare?"

Maddalena was silent.

"You know Gaspare. Did you know him in Sicily?"

"Sicily?" Her face and her voice had become stupid. "Sicily?" she repeated.

The parrot shifted on the board, lifted its left claw, and craned its head forward in the direction of the two women. The tram-bell sounded its reiterated appeal.

"Yes, in Sicily. You are a Sicilian?"

"Who says so?"

"Your son is a Sicilian. At the port they call him 'Il Siciliano.'"

"Do they?"

Her intellect seemed to be collapsing. She looked almost bovine.

Hermione's excitement began to be complicated by a feeling of hot anger.

"But don't you know it? You must know it!"

The parrot shuffled slowly along the board, coming nearer to them, and bowing its head obsequiously. Hermione could not help watching its movements with a strained attention. Its presence distracted her. She had a longing to take it up and wring its neck. Yet she loved birds.

"You must know it!" she repeated, no longer looking at Maddalena.

"Si!"

All ignorance and all stupidity were surely enshrined in that word thus said.

"Where did you know Gaspare?"

"Who says I know Gaspare?"

The way in which she pronounced his name revealed to Hermione a former intimacy between them.

"Ruffo says so."

The parrot was quite at the edge of the board now, listening apparently with cold intensity to every word that was being said. And Hermione felt that behind the kitchen door the two women were straining their ears to catch the conversation. Was the whole world listening? Was the whole world coldly, cruelly intent upon her painful effort to come out of darkness into—perhaps a greater darkness?

"Ruffo says so. Ruffo told me so."

"Boys say anything."

"Do you mean it is not true?"

Maddalena's face was now almost devoid of expression. She had set her knees wide apart and planted her hands on them.

"Do you mean that?" repeated Hermione.

"Boys—"

"I know it is true. You knew Gaspare in Sicily. You come from Marechiaro."

At the mention of the last word light broke into Maddalena's face.

"You are from Marechiaro. Have you ever seen me before? Do you remember me?"

Maddalena shook her head.

"And I—I don't remember you. But you are from Marechiaro. You must be."

Maddalena shook her head again.

"You are not?"

Hermione looked into the long Arab eyes, searching for a lie. She met a gaze that was steady but dull, almost like that of a sulky child, and for a moment she felt as if this woman was only a great child, heavy, ignorant, but solemnly determined, a child that had learned its lesson and was bent on repeating it word for word.

"Did Gaspare come here early this morning to see you?" she asked, with sudden vehemence.

Maddalena was obviously startled. Her face flushed.

"Why should he come?" she said, almost angrily.

"That is what I want you to tell me."

Maddalena was silent. She shifted uneasily in her chair, which creaked under her weight, and twisted her full lips sideways. Her whole body looked half-sleepily apprehensive. The parrot watched her with supreme attention. Suddenly Hermione felt that she could no longer bear this struggle, that she could no longer continue in darkness, that she must have full light. The contemplation of this stolid ignorance—that yet knew how much?—confronting her like a featureless wall almost maddened her.

"Who are you?" she said. "What have you had to do with my lie?"

Maddalena looked at her and looked away, bending her head sideways till her plump neck was like a thing deformed.

"What have you had to do with my life? What have you to do with it now? I want to know!" She stood up. "I must know. You must tell me! Do you hear?" She bent down. She was standing almost over Maddalena. "You must tell me!"

There was again a silence through which presently the tram-bell sounded. Maddalena's face had become heavily expressionless, almost like a face of stone. And Hermione, looking down at this face, felt a moment of impotent despair that was succeeded by a fierce, energetic impulse.

"Then," she said—"then—I'll tell you!"

Maddalena looked up.

"Yes, I'll tell you."

Hermione paused. She had begun to tremble. She put one hand down to the back of the chair, grasping it tightly as if to steady herself.

"I'll tell you."

What? What was she going to tell?

That first evening in Sicily—just before they went in to bed—Maurice had looked down over the terrace wall to the sea. He had seen a light—far down by the sea.

It was the light in the House of the Sirens.

"You once lived in Sicily. You once lived in the Casa delle Sirene, beyond the old wall, beyond the inlet. You were there when we were in Sicily, when Gaspare was with us as our servant."

Maddalena's lips parted. Her mouth began to gape. It was obvious that she was afraid.

"You—you knew Gaspare. You knew—you knew my husband, the Signore of the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato. You knew him. Do you remember?"

Maddalena only stared up at her with a sort of heavy apprehension, sitting widely in her chair, with her feet apart and her hands always resting on her knees.

"It was in the summer-time—" She was again in Sicily. She was tracing out a story. It was almost as if she saw words and read them from a book. "There were no forestieri in Sicily. They had all gone. Only we were there—" An expression so faint that it was like a fleeting shadow passed over Maddalena's face, the fleeting shadow of something that denied. "Ah, yes! Till I went away, you mean! I went to Africa. Did you know it then? But before I went—before—" She was thinking, she was burrowing deep down into the past, stirring the heap of memories that lay like drifted leaves. "They used to go—at least they went once—down to the sea. One night they went to the fishing. And they slept out all night. They slept in the caves. Ah, you know that? You remember that night!"

The trembling that shook her body was reflected in her voice, which became tremulous. She heard the tram-bell ringing. She saw the green parrot listening on its board. And yet she was in Sicily, and saw the line of the coast between Messina and Cattaro, the Isle of the Sirens, the lakelike sea of the inlet between it and the shore.

"I see that you remember it. You saw them there. They—they didn't tell me!"

As she said the last words she felt that she was entering the great darkness. Maurice and Gaspare—she had trusted them with all her nature. And they—had they failed her? Was that possible?

"They didn't tell me," she repeated, piteously, speaking now only for herself and to her own soul. "They didn't tell me!"

Maddalena shook her head like one in sympathy or agreement. But Hermione did not see the movement. She no longer saw Maddalena. She saw only herself, and those two, whom she had trusted so completely, and—who had not told her.

What had they not told her?

And then she was in Africa, beside the bed of Artois, ministering to him in the torrid heat, driving away the flies from his white face.

What had been done in the Garden of Paradise while she had been in exile?

She turned suddenly sick. Her body felt ashamed, defiled. A shutter seemed to be sharply drawn across her eyes, blotting out life. Her head was full of sealike noises.

Presently, from among these noises, one detached itself, pushed itself, as it were, forward to attract forcibly her attention—the sound of a boy's voice.

"Signora! Signora!"

"Signora!"

A hand touched her, gripped her.

"Signora!"

The shutter was sharply drawn back from her eyes, and she saw Ruffo. He stood before her, gazing at her. His hair, wet from the sea, was plastered down upon his brown forehead—as his hair had been when, in the night, they drew him from the sea.

She saw Ruffo in that moment as if for the first time.

And she knew. Ruffo had told her.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Hermione was outside in the street, hearing the cries of ambulant sellers, the calls of women and children, the tinkling bells and the rumble of the trams, and the voice of Fabiano Lari speaking—was it to her?

"Signora, did you see him?"

"Yes."

"He is glad to be out of prison. He is gay, but he looks wicked."

She did not understand what he meant. She walked on and came into the road that leads to the tunnel. She turned mechanically towards the tunnel, drawn by the darkness.

"But, Signora, this is not the way! This is the way to Fuorigrotta!"

"Oh!"

She went towards the sea. She was thinking of the green parrot expanding and contracting the pupils of its round, ironic eyes.

"Was Maddalena pleased to see him? Was Donna Teresa pleased?"

Hermione stood still.

"What are you talking about?"

"Signora! About Antonio Bernari, who has just come home from prison! Didn't you see him? But you were there—in the house!"

"Oh—yes, I saw him. A rivederci!"

"Ma—"

"A rivederci!"

She felt in her purse, found a coin, and gave it to him. Then she walked on. She did not see him any more. She did not know what became of him.

Of course she had seen the return of Antonio Bernari. She remembered now. As Ruffo stood before her with the wet hair on his forehead there had come a shrill cry from the old woman in the kitchen: a cry that was hideous and yet almost beautiful, so full it was of joy. Then from the kitchen the two women had rushed in, gesticulating, ejaculating, their faces convulsed with excitement. They had seized Maddalena, Ruffo. One of them—the old woman, she thought—had even clutched at Hermione's arm. The room had been full of cries.

"Ecco! Antonio!"

"Antonio is coming!"

"I have seen Antonio!"

"He is pale! He is white like death!"

"Mamma mia! But he is thin!"

"Ecco! Ecco! He comes! Here he is! Here is Antonio!"

And then the door had been opened, and on the sill a big, broad-shouldered man had appeared, followed by several other evil-looking though smiling men. And all the women had hurried to them. There had been shrill cries, a babel of voices, a noise of kisses.

And Ruffo! Where had he been? What had he done?

Hermione only knew that she had head a rough voice saying:

"Sangue del Diavolo! Let me alone! Give me a glass of wine! Basta! Basta!"

And then she went out in the street, thinking of the green parrot and hearing the cries of the sellers, the tram-bells, and Fabiano's questioning voice.

Now she continued her walk towards the harbor of Mergellina alone. The thought of the green parrot obsessed her mind.

She saw it before her on its board, with the rolled-up bed towering behind it. Now it was motionless—only the pupils of its eyes moved. Now it lifted its claw, bowed its head, shuffled along the board to hear their conversation better.

She saw it with extreme distinctness, and now she also saw on the wall of the room near it the "Fattura della Morte"—the green lemon with the nails stuck through it, like nails driven into a cross.

Vaguely the word "crucifixion" went through her mind. Many people, many women, had surely been crucified since the greatest tragedy the world had ever known. What had they felt, they who were only human, they who could not see the face of the Father, who could—some of them, perhaps—only hope that there was a Father? What had they felt? Perhaps scarcely anything. Perhaps merely a sensation of numbness, as if their whole bodies, and their minds, too, were under the influence of a great injection of cocaine. Her thoughts again returned to the parrot. She wondered where it had been bought, whether it had come with Antonio from America.

Presently she reached the tramway station and stood still. She had to go back to the "Trattoria del Giardinetto." She must take the tram here, one of those on which was written in big letters, "Capo di Posilipo." No, not that! That did not go far enough. The other one—what was written upon it? Something—"Sette Settembre." She looked for the words "Sette Settembre."

Tram after tram came up, paused, passed on. But she did not see those words on any of them. She began to think of the sea, of the brown body of the bathing boy which she had seen shoot through the air and disappear into the shining water before she had gone to that house where the green parrot was. She would go down to the sea, to the harbor.

She threaded her way across the broad space, going in and out among the trams and the waiting people. Then she went down a road not far from the Grand Hotel and came to the Marina.

There were boys bathing still from the breakwater of the rocks. And still they were shouting. She stood by the wall and watched them, resting her hands on the stone.

How hot the stone was! Gaspare had been right. It was going to be a glorious day, one of the tremendous days of summer.

The nails driven through the green lemon like nails driven through a cross—Peppina—the cross cut on Peppina's cheek.

That broad-shouldered man who had come in at the door had cut that cross on Peppina's cheek.

Was it true that Peppina had the evil eye? Had it been a fatal day for the Casa del Mare when she had been allowed to cross its threshold? Vere had said something—what was it?—about Peppina and her cross. Oh yes! That Peppina's cross seemed like a sign, a warning come into the house on the island, that it seemed to say, "There is a cross to be borne by some one here, by one of us!"

And the fishermen's sign of the cross under the light of San Francesco?

Surely there had been many warnings in her life. They had been given to her, but she had not heeded them.

She saw a brown body shoot through the air from the rocks and disappear into the shining sea. Was it Ruffo? With an effort she remembered that she had left Ruffo in the tall house, in the room where the green parrot was.

She walked on slowly till she came to the place where Artois had seen Ruffo with his mother. A number of tables were set out, but there were few people sitting at them. She felt tired. She crossed the road, went to a table, and sat down. A waiter came up and asked her what she would have.

"Acqua fresca," she said.

He looked surprised.

"Oh—then wine, vermouth—anything!"

He looked more surprised.

"Will you have vermouth, Signora?"

"Yes, yes—vermouth."

He brought her vermouth and iced water. She mixed them together and drank. But she was not conscious of tasting anything. For a considerable time she sat there. People passed her. The trams rushed by. On several of them were printed the words she had looked for in vain at the station. But she did not notice them.

During this time she did not feel unhappy. Seldom had she felt calmer, more at rest, more able to be still. She had no desire to do anything. It seemed to her that she would be quite satisfied to sit where she was in the sun forever.

While she sat there she was always thinking, but vaguely, slowly, lethargically. And her thoughts reiterated themselves, were like recurring fragments of dreams, and were curiously linked together. The green parrot she always connected with the death-charm, because the latter had once been green. Whenever the one presented itself to her mind it was immediately followed by the other. The shawl at which the old woman's yellow fingers had perpetually pulled led her mind to the thought of the tunnel, because she imagined that the latter must eventually end in blackness, and the shawl was black. She knew, of course, really that the tunnel was lit from end to end by electricity. But her mind arbitrarily put aside this knowledge. It did not belong to her strange mood, the mood of one drawing near to the verge either of some abominable collapse or of some terrible activity. Occasionally, she thought of Ruffo; but always as one of the brown boys bathing from the rocks beyond the harbor, shouting, laughing, triumphant in his glorious youth. And when the link was, as it were, just beginning to form itself from the thought-shape of youth to another thought-shape, her mind stopped short in that progress, recoiled, like a creature recoiling from a precipice it has not seen but has divined in the dark. She sipped the vermouth and the iced water, and stared at the drops chasing each other down the clouded glass. And for a time she was not conscious where she was, and heard none of the noises round about her.

It was the song of Mergellina, sung at some distance off in dialect, by a tenor voice to the accompaniment of a piano-organ. Hermione ceased from gazing at the drops on the glass, looked up, listened.

The song came nearer. The tenor voice was hard, strident, sang lustily but inexpressively in the glaring sunshine. And the dialect made the song seem different, almost new. Its charm seemed to have evaporated. Yet she remembered vaguely that it had charmed her. She sought for the charm, striving feebly to recapture it.

The piano-organ hurt her, the hard voice hurt her. It sounded cruel and greedy. But the song—once it had appealed to her. Once she had leaned down to hear it, she had leaned down over the misty sea, her soul had followed it out over the sea.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate

Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la Marina:

Mi destan le dolcissime serate

Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

Those were the real words. And what voice had sung them?

And then, suddenly, her brain worked once more with its natural swiftness and vivacity, her imagination and her heart awaked. She was again alive. She saw the people. She heard the sounds about her. She felt the scorching heat of the sun. But in it she was conscious also of the opposite of day, of the opposite of heat. At that moment she had a double consciousness. For she felt the salt coolness of the night around the lonely island. And she heard not only the street singer, but Ruffo in his boat.

Ruffo—in his boat.

Suddenly she could not see anything. Her sight was drowned by tears. She got up at once. She felt for her purse, found it, opened it, felt for money, found some coins, laid them down on the table, and began to walk. She was driven by fear, the fear of falling down in the sun in the sight of all men, and crying, sobbing, with her face against the ground. She heard a shout. Some one gave her a violent push, thrusting her forward. She stumbled, recovered herself. A passer-by had saved her from a tram. She did not know it. She did not look at him or thank him. He went away, swearing at the English. Where was she going?

She must go home. She must go to the island. She must go to Vere, to Gaspare, to Emile—to her life.

Her body and soul revolted from the thought, her outraged body and her outraged soul, which were just beginning to feel their courage, as flesh and nerves begin to feel pain after an operation when the effect of the anaesthetic gradually fades away.

She was walking up the hill and still crying.

She met a boy of the people, swarthy, with impudent black eyes, tangled hair, and a big, pouting mouth, above which a premature mustache showed like a smudge. He looked into her face and began to laugh. She saw his white teeth, and her tears rushed back to their sources. At once her eyes were dry. And, almost at once, she thought, her heart became hard as stone, and she felt self-control like iron within her.

That boy of the people should be the last human being to laugh at her.

She saw a tram stop. It went to the "Trattoria del Giardinetto." She got in, and sat down next to two thin English ladies, who held guide-books in their hands, and whose pointed features looked piteously inquiring.

"Excuse me, but do you know this neighborhood?"

She was being addressed.

"Yes."

"That is fortunate—we do not. Perhaps you will kindly tell us something about it. Is it far to Bagnoli?"

"Not very far."

"And when you get there?"

"I beg your pardon!"

"When you get there, is there much to see?"

"Not so very much."

"Can one lunch there?"

"No doubt."

"Yes. But I mean, what sort of lunch? Can one get anything clean and wholesome, such as you get in England?"

"It would be Italian food."

"Oh, dear. Fanny, this lady says we can only get Italian food at Bagnoli!"

"Tcha! Tcha!"

"But perhaps—excuse me, but do you think we could get a good cup of tea there? We might manage with that—tea and some boiled eggs. Don't you think so, Fanny? Could we get a cup of—"

The tram stopped. Hermione had pulled the cord that made the bell sound. She paid and got down. The tram carried away the English ladies, their pointed features red with surprise and indignation.

Hermione again began to walk, but almost directly she saw a wandering carriage and hailed the driver.

"Carrozza!"

She got in.

"Put me down at the 'Trattoria del Giardinetto.'"

"Si, Signora—but how much are you going to give me? I can't take you for less than—"

"Anything—five lire—drive on at once."

The man drove on, grinning.

Presently Hermione was walking through the short tunnel that leads to the path descending between vineyards to the sea. She must take a boat to the island. She must go back to the island. Where else could she go? If Vere had not been there she might—but Vere was there. It was inevitable. She must return to the island.

She stood still in the path, between the high banks.

Her body was demanding not to be forced by the will to go to the island.

"I must go back to the island."

She walked on very slowly till she could see the shining water over the sloping, vine-covered land. The sight of the water reminded her that Gaspare would be waiting for her on the sand below the village. When she remembered that she stopped again. Then she turned round, and began to walk back towards the highroad.

Gaspare was waiting. If she went down to the sand she would have to meet his great intent eyes, those watching eyes full of questions. He would read her. He would see in a moment that—she knew. And he would see more than that! He would see that she was hating him. The hatred was only dawning, struggling up in her tangled heart. But it existed—it was there. And he would see that it was there.

She walked back till she reached the tunnel under the highroad. But she did not pass through it. She could not face the highroad with its traffic. Perhaps the English ladies would be coming back. Perhaps—She turned again and presently sat down on a bank, and looked at the dry and wrinkled ground. Nobody went by. The lizards ran about near her feet. She sat there over an hour, scarcely moving, with the sun beating upon her head.

Then she got up and walked fast, and with a firm step, towards the village and the sea.

The village is only a tiny hamlet, ending in a small trattoria with a rough terrace above the sea, overlooking a strip of sand where a few boats lie. As Hermione came to the steps that lead down to the terrace she stood still and looked over the wall on her left. The boat from the island was at anchor there, floating motionless on the still water. Gaspare was not in it, but was lying stretched on his back on the sand, with his white linen hat over his face.

He lay like one dead.

She stood and watched him, as she might have watched a corpse of some one she had cared for but who was gone from her forever.

Perhaps he was not asleep, for almost directly he became aware of her observation, sat up, and uncovered his face, turning towards her and looking up. Already, and from this distance, she would see a fierce inquiry in his eyes.

She made a determined effort and waved her hand.

Gaspare sprang to his feet, took out his watch, looked at it, then went and fetched the boat.

His action—the taking out of the watch—reminded Hermione of the time. She looked at her watch. It was half-past two. On the island they lunched at half-past twelve. Gaspare must have been waiting for hours. What did it matter?

She made another determined effort and went down the remaining steps to the beach.

Gaspare should not know that she knew. She was resolved upon that, concentrated upon that. Continually she saw in front of her the pouting mouth, the white teeth of the boy who had laughed at her in the street. There should be no more crying, no more visible despair. No one should see any difference in her. All the time that she had been sitting still in the sun upon the bank she had been fiercely schooling herself in an act new to her—the act of deception. She had not faced the truth that to-day she knew. She had not faced the ruin that its knowledge had made of all that had been sacred and lovely in her life. She had fastened her whole force fanatically upon that one idea, that one decision and the effort that was the corollary of it.

"There shall be no difference in me. No one is to know that anything has happened."

At that moment she was a fanatic. And she looked like one as she came down upon the sand.

"I'm afraid I'm rather late—Gaspare."

It was difficult to her to say his name. But she said it firmly.

"Signora, it is nearly three o'clock."

"Half-past two. No, I can get in all right."

He had put out his arm to help her into the boat. But she could not touch him. She knew that. She felt that she would rather die at the moment than touch or be touched by him.

"You might take away your arm."

He dropped his arm at once.

Had she already betrayed herself?

She got into the boat and he pushed off.

Usually he sat, when he was rowing, so that he might keep his face towards her. But to-day he stood up to row, turning his back to her. And this change of conduct made her say to herself again:

"Have I betrayed myself already?"

Fiercely she resolved to be and to do the impossible. It was the only chance. For Gaspare was difficult to deceive.

"Gaspare!" she said.

"Si, Signora," he replied, without turning his head.

"Can't you row sitting down?"

"If you like, Signora."

"We can talk better then."

"Va bene, Signora."

He turned round and sat down.

The boat was at this moment just off the "Palace of the Spirits." Hermione saw its shattered walls cruelly lit up by the blazing sun, its gaping window-spaces like eye-sockets, sightless, staring, horribly suggestive of ruin and despair.

She was like that. Gaspare was looking at her. Gaspare must know that she was like that.

But she was a fanatic just then, and she smiled at him with a resolution that had in it something almost brutal, something the opposite of what she was, of the sum of her.

"I forgot the time. It is so lovely to-day. It was so gay at Mergellina."

"Si?"

"I sat for a long time watching the boats, and the boys bathing, and listening to the music. They sang 'A Mergellina.'"

"Si?"

She smiled again.

"And I went to visit Ruffo's mother."

Gaspare made no response. He looked down now as he plied his oars.

"She seems a nice woman. I—I dare say she was quite pretty once."

The voice that was speaking now was the voice of a fanatic.

"I am sure she must have been pretty."

"Chi lo sa?"

"If one looks carefully one can see the traces. But, of course, now—"

She stopped abruptly. It was impossible to her to go on. She was passionately trying to imagine what that spreading, graceless woman, with her fat hands resting on her knees set wide apart, was like once—was like nearly seventeen years ago. Was she ever pretty, beautiful? Never could she have been intelligent—never, never. Then she must have been beautiful. For otherwise—Hermione's drawn face was flooded with scarlet.

"If—if it's easier to you to row standing up, Gaspare," she almost stammered, "never mind about sitting down."

"I think it is easier, Signora."

He got up, and once more turned his back upon her.

They did not speak again until they reached the island.

Hermione watched his strong body swinging to and fro with every stroke, and wondered if he felt the terrible change in her feeling for him—a change that a few hours ago she would have thought utterly impossible.

She wondered if Gaspare knew that she was hating him.

He was alive and, therefore, to be hated. For surely we cannot hate the dust!

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Gaspare did not offer to help Hermione out of the boat when they reached the island. He glanced at her face, met her eyes, looked away again immediately, and stood holding the boat while she got out. Even when she stumbled slightly he made no movement; but he turned and gazed after her as she went up the steps towards the house, and as he gazed his face worked, his lips muttered words, and his eyes, become almost ferocious in their tragic gloom, were clouded with moisture. Angrily he fastened the boat, angrily he laid by the oars. In everything he did there was violence. He put up his hands to his eyes to rub the moisture that clouded them away. But it came again. And he swore under his breath. He looked once more towards the Casa del Mare. The figure of his Padrona had disappeared, but he remembered just how it had gone up the steps—leaning forward, moving very slowly. It had made him think of an early morning long ago, when he and his Padrona had followed a coffin down the narrow street of Marechiaro, and over the mountain-path to the Campo Santo above the Ionian Sea. He shook his head, murmuring to himself. He was not swearing now. He shook his head again and again. Then he went away, and sat down under the shadow of the cliff, and let his hands drop down between his knees.

The look he had seen in his Padrona's eyes had made him feel terrible. His violent, faithful heart was tormented. He did not analyze—he only knew, he only felt. And he suffered horribly. How had his Padrona been able to look at him like that?

The moisture came thickly to his eyes now, and he no longer attempted to rub it away. He no longer thought of it.

Never had he imagined that his Padrona could look at him like that. Strong man though he was, he felt as a child might who is suddenly abandoned by its mother. He began to think now. He thought over all he had done to be faithful to his dead Padrone and to be faithful to the Padrona. During many, many years he had done all he could to be faithful to these two, the dead and the living. And at the end of this long service he received as a reward this glance of hatred.

Tears rolled down his sunburnt cheeks.

The injustice of it was like a barbed and poisoned arrow in his heart. He was not able to understand what his Padrona was feeling, how, by what emotional pilgrimage, she had reached that look of hatred which she had cast upon him. If she had not returned, if she had done some deed of violence in the house of Maddalena, he could perhaps have comprehended it. But that she should come back, that she should smile, make him sit facing her, talk about Maddalena as she had talked, and then—then look at him like that!

His amour-propre, his long fidelity, his deep affection—all were outraged.

Vere came down the steps and found him there.

"Gaspare!"

He got up instantly when he heard her voice, rubbed his eyes, and yawned.

"I was asleep, Signorina."

She looked at him intently, and he saw tears in her eyes.

"Gaspare, what is the matter with Madre?"

"Signorina?"

"Oh, what is the matter?" She came a step nearer to him. "Gaspare, I'm frightened! I'm frightened!"

She laid her hand on his arm.

"Why, Signorina? Have you seen the Padrona?"

"No. But—but—I've heard—What is it? What has happened? Where has Madre been all this time? Has she been in Naples?"

"Signorina, I don't think so."

"Where has she been?"

"I believe the Signora has been to Mergellina."

Vere began to tremble.

"What can have happened there? What can have happened?"

She trembled in every limb. Her face had become white.

"Signorina, Signorina! Are you ill?"

"No—I don't know what to do—what I ought to do. I'm afraid to speak to the servants—they are making the siesta. Gaspare, come with me, and tell me what we ought to do. But—never say to any one—never say—if you hear!"

"Signorina!"

He had caught her terror. His huge eyes looked awestruck.

"Come with me, Gaspare!"

Making an obvious and great effort, she controlled her body, turned and went before him to the house. She walked softly, and he imitated her. They almost crept up-stairs till they reached the landing outside Hermione's bedroom door. There they stood for two or three minutes, listening.

"Come away, Gaspare!"

Vere had whispered with lips that scarcely moved.

When they were in Hermione's sitting-room she caught hold of both his hands. She was a mere child now, a child craving for help.

"Oh, Gaspare, what are we to do? Oh—I'm—I'm frightened! I can't bear it!"

The door of the room was open.

"Shut it!" she said. "Shut it, then we sha'n't—"

He shut it.

"What can it be? What can it be?"

She looked at him, followed his eyes. He had stared towards the writing-table, then at the floor near it. On the table lay a quantity of fragments of broken glass, and a silver photograph-frame bent, almost broken. On the floor was scattered a litter of card-board.

"She came in here! Madre was in here—"

She bent down to the carpet, picked up some of the bits of card-board, turned them over, looked at them. Then she began to tremble again.

"It's father's photograph!"

She was now utterly terrified.

"Oh, Gaspare! Oh, Gaspare!"

She began to sob.

"Hush, Signorina! Hush!"

He spoke almost sternly, bent down, collected the fragments of card-board from the floor, and put them into his pocket.

"Father's photograph! She was in here—she came in here to do that! And she loves that photograph. She loves it!"

"Hush, Signorina! Don't, Signorina—don't!"

"We must do something! We must—"

He made her sit down. He stood by her.

"What shall we do, Gaspare? What shall we do?"

She looked up at him, demanding counsel. She put out her hands again and touched his arm. His Padroncina—she at least still loved, still trusted him.

"Signorina," he said, "we can't do anything."

His voice was fatalistic.

"But—what is it? Is—is—"

A frightful question was trembling on her lips. She looked again at the fragments of card-board in her hand, at the broken frame on the table.

"Can Madre be—"

She stopped. Her terror was increasing. She remembered many small mysteries in the recent conduct of her mother, many moments when she had been surprised, or made vaguely uneasy, by words or acts of her mother. Monsieur Emile, too, he had wondered, and more than once. She knew that. And Gaspare—she was sure that he, also, had seen that change which now, abruptly, had thus terribly culminated. Once in the boat she had asked him what was the matter with her mother, and he had, almost angrily, denied that anything was the matter. But she had seen in his eyes that he was acting a part—that he wished to detach her observation from her mother.

Her trembling ceased. Her little fingers closed more tightly on his arm. Her eyes became imperious.

"Gaspare, you are to tell me. I can bear it. You know something about Madre."

"Signorina—"

"Do you think I'm a coward? I was frightened—I am frightened, but I'm not really a coward, Gaspare. I can bear it. What is it you know?"

"Signorina, we can't do anything."

"Is it—Does Monsieur Emile know what it is?"

He did not answer.

Suddenly she got up, went to the door, opened it, and listened. The horror came into her face again.

"I can't bear it," she said. "I—I shall have to go into the room."

"No, Signorina. You are not to go in."

"If the door isn't locked I must—"

"It is locked."

"You don't know. You can't know."

"I know it is locked, Signorina."

Vere put her hands to her eyes.

"It's too dreadful! I didn't know any one—I have never heard—"

Gaspare went to her and shut the door resolutely.

"You are not to listen, Signorina. You are not to listen."

He spoke no longer like a servant, but like a master.

Vere's hands had dropped.

"I am going to send for Monsieur Emile," she said.

"Va bene, Signorina."

She went quickly to the writing-table, sat down, hesitated. Her eyes were riveted upon the photograph-frame.

"How could she? How could she?" she said, in a choked voice.

Gaspare took the frame away reverently, and put it against his breast, inside his shirt.

"I can't go to Don Emilio, Signorina. I cannot leave you."

"No, Gaspare. Don't leave me! Don't leave me!"

She was the terrified child again.

"Perhaps we can find a fisherman, Signorina."

"Yes, but don't—Wait for me, Gaspare!"

"I am not going, Signorina."

With feverish haste she took a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote:

"DEAR MONSIEUR EMILE,

—Please come to the island at once.
Something terrible has happened. I don't know what it is. But

Madre is—No, I can't put it. Oh, do come—please—please come!

VERE

"Come the quickest way."

When the paper was shut in an envelope and addressed she got up. Gaspare held out his hand.

"I will go and look for a fisherman, Signorina."

"But I must come with you. I must keep with you."

She held on to his arm.

"I'm not a coward. But I can't—I can't—"

"Si, Signorina! Si, Signorina!"

He took her hand and held it. They went to the door. When he put out his other hand to open it Vere shivered.

"If we can't do anything, let us go down quickly, Gaspare!"

"Si, Signorina. We will go quickly."

He opened the door and they went out.

In the Pool of the Saint there was no boat. They went to the crest of the island and looked out over the sea. Not far off, between the island and Nisida, there was a boat. Gaspare put his hands to his mouth and hailed her with all his might. The two men in her heard, and came towards the shore.

A few minutes later, with money in their pockets, and set but cheerful faces, they were rowing with all their strength in the direction of Naples.

That afternoon Artois, wishing to distract his thoughts and quite unable to work, went up the hill to the Monastery of San Martino. He returned to the hotel towards sunset feeling weary and depressed, companionless, too, in this gay summer world. Although he had never been deeply attached to the Marchesino he had liked him, been amused by him, grown accustomed to him. He missed the "Toledo incarnate." And as he walked along the Marina he felt for a moment almost inclined to go away from Naples. But the people of the island! Could he leave them just now? Could he leave Hermione so near to the hands of Fate, those hands which were surely stretched out towards her, which might grasp her at any moment, even to-night, and alter her life forever? No, he knew he could not.

"There is a note for Monsieur!"

He took it from the hall porter.

"No, I'll walk up-stairs."

He had seen the lift was not below, and did not wish to wait for its descent. Vere's writing was on the envelope he held; but Vere's writing distorted, frantic, tragic. He knew before he opened the envelope that it must contain some dreadful statement or some wild appeal; and he hurried to his room, almost feeling the pain and fear of the writer burn through the paper to his hand.

"DEAR MONSIEUR EMILE,

—Please come to the island at once.
Something terrible has happened. I don't know what it is. But

Madre is—No, I can't put it. Oh, do come—please—please come!

VERE

"Come the quickest way."

"Something terrible has happened." He knew at once what it was. The walls of the cell in which he had enclosed his friend had crumbled away. The spirit which for so long had rested upon a lie had been torn from its repose, had been scourged to its feet to face the fierce light of truth. How would it face the truth?

"But Madre is—No, I can't put it."

That phrase struck a chill almost of horror to his soul. He stared at it for a moment trying to imagine—things. Then he tore the note up.

The quickest way to the island!

"I shall not be in to dinner to-night."

He was speaking to the waiter at the door of the Egyptian Room. A minute later he was in the Via Chiatamone at the back of the hotel waiting for the tram. He must go by Posilipo to the Trattoria del Giardinetto, walk down to the village below, and take a boat from there to the island. That was the quickest way. The tram-bell sounded. Was he glad? As he watched the tram gliding towards him he was conscious of an almost terrible reluctance—a reluctance surely of fear—to go that night to the island.

But he must go.

The sun was setting when he got down before the Trattoria del Giardinetto. Three soldiers were sitting at a table outside on the dusty road, clinking their glasses of marsala together, and singing, "Piange Rosina! La Mamma ci domanda." Their brown faces looked vivid with the careless happiness of youth. As Artois went down from the road into the tunnel their lusty voices died away.

Because his instinct was to walk slowly, to linger on the way, he walked very fast. The slanting light fell gently, delicately, over the opulent vineyards, where peasants were working in huge straw hats, over the still shining but now reposeful sea. In the sky there was a mystery of color, very pure, very fragile, like the mystery of color in a curving shell of the sea. The pomp and magnificence of sunset were in abeyance to-night, were laid aside. And the sun, like some spirit modestly radiant, slipped from this world of vineyards and of waters almost surreptitiously, yet shedding exquisite influences in his going.

And in the vineyards, as upon the dusty highroad, the people of the South were singing.

The sound of their warm voices, rising in the golden air towards the tender beauty of the virginal evening sky, moved Artois to a sudden longing for a universal brotherhood of happiness, for happy men on a happy earth, men knowing the truth and safe in their knowledge. And he longed, too, just then to give happiness. A strongly generous emotion stirred him, and went from him, like one of the slanting rays of light from the sun, towards the island, towards his friend, Hermione. His reluctance, his sense of fear, were lessened, nearly died away. His quickness of movement was no longer a fight against, but a fulfilment of desire.

Once she had helped him. Once she had even, perhaps, saved him from death. She had put aside her own happiness. She had shown the divine self-sacrifice of woman.

And now, after long years, life brought to him an hour which would prove him, prove him and show how far he was worthy of the friendship which had been shed, generously as the sunshine over these vineyards of the South, upon him and his life.

He came down to the sea and met the fisherman, Giovanni, upon the sand.

"Row me quickly to the island, Giovanni!" he said.

"Si, Signore."

He ran to get the boat.

The light began to fall over the sea. They cleared the tiny harbor and set out on their voyage.

"The Signora has been here to-day, Signore," said Giovanni.

"Si! When did she come?"

"This morning, with Gaspare, to take the tram to Mergellina."

"She went to Mergellina?"

"Si, Signore. And she was gone a very long time. Gaspare came back for her at half-past eleven, and she did not come till nearly three. Gaspare was in a state, I can tell you. I have known him—for years I have known him—and never have I seen him as he was to-day."

"And the Signora? When she came, did she look tired?"

"Signore, the Signora's face was like the face of one who has been looked on by the evil eye."

"Row quickly, Giovanni!"

"Si, Signore."

The men talked no more.

When they came in sight of the island the last rays of the sun were striking upon the windows of the Casa del Mare.

The boat, urged by Giovanni's powerful arms, drew rapidly near to the land, and Artois, leaning forward with an instinct to help the rower, fixed his eyes upon these windows which, like swift jewels, focussed and gave back the light. While he watched them the sun sank. Its radiance was withdrawn. He saw no longer jewels, casements of magic, but only the windows of the familiar house; and then, presently, only the window of one room, Hermione's. His eyes were fixed on that as the boat drew nearer and nearer—were almost hypnotized by that. Where was Hermione? What was she doing? How was she? How could she be, now that—she knew? A terrible but immensely tender, immensely pitiful curiosity took possession of him, held him fast, body and soul. She knew, and she was in that house!

The boat was close in now, but had not yet turned into the Pool of San Francesco. Artois kept his eyes upon the window for still a moment longer. He felt now, he knew, that Hermione was in the room beyond that window. As he gazed up from the sea he saw that the window was open. He saw behind the frame of it a white curtain stirring in the breeze. And then he saw something that chilled his blood, that seemed to drive it in an icy stream back to his heart, leaving his body for a moment numb.

He saw a figure come, with a wild, falling movement to the window—a white, distorted face utterly strange to him looked out—a hand lifted in a frantic gesture.

The gesture was followed by a crash.

The green Venetian blind had fallen, hiding the window, hiding the stranger's face.

"Who was that at the window, Signore?" asked Giovanni, staring at Artois with round and startled eyes.

And Artois answered: "It is difficult to see, Giovanni, now that the sun has gone down. It is getting dark so quickly."

"Si, Signore, it is getting dark."

CHAPTER XXXIX

There was no one at the foot of the cliff. Artois got out of the boat and stood for a moment, hesitating whether to keep Giovanni or to dismiss him.

"I can stay, Signore," said the man. "You will want some one to row you back."

"No, Giovanni. I can get Gaspare to put me ashore. You had better be off."

"Va bene, Signore," he replied, looking disappointed.

The Signora of the Casa del Mare was always very hospitable to such fishermen as she knew. Giovanni wanted to seek out Gaspare, to have a cigarette. But he obediently jumped into the boat and rowed off into the darkness, while Artois went up the steps towards the house.

A cold feeling of dread encompassed him. He still saw, imaginatively, that stranger at the window, that falling movement, that frantic gesture, the descending blind that brought to Hermione's bedroom a great obscurity. And he remembered Hermione's face in the garden, half seen by him once in shadows, with surely a strange and terrible smile upon it—a smile that had made him wonder if he had ever really known her.

He came out on the plateau before the front door. The door was shut, but as he went to open it it was opened from within, and Gaspare stood before him in the twilight, with the dark passage for background.

Gaspare looked at Artois in silence.

"Gaspare," Artois said, "I came home from San Martino. I found a note from the Signorina, begging me to come here at once."

"Lo so, Signore."

"I have come. What has—what is it? Where is the Signorina?"

Gaspare stood in the middle of the narrow doorway.

"The Signorina is in the garden."

"Waiting for me?"

"Si, Signore."

"Very well."

He moved to enter the house; but Gaspare stood still where he was.

"Signore," he said.

Artois stopped at the door-sill.

"What is it?"

"What are you going to do here?"

At last Gaspare was frankly the watch-dog guarding the sacred house. His Padrona had cast upon him a look of hatred. Yet he was guarding the sacred house and her within it. Deep in the blood of him was the sense that, even hating him, she belonged to him and he to her.

And his Padroncina had trusted him, had clung to him that day.

"What are you going to do here?"

"If there is trouble here, I want to help."

"How can you help, Signore?"

"First tell me,—there is great trouble?"

"Si, Signore."

"And you know what it is? You know what caused it?"

"No one has told me."

"But you know what it is."

"Si, Signore."

"Does—the Signorina doesn't know?"

"No, Signore."

He paused, then added:

"The Signorina is not to know what it is."

"You do not think I shall tell her?"

"Signore, how can I tell what you will do here? How can I tell what you are here?"

For a moment Artois felt deeply wounded—wounded to the quick. He had not supposed it was possible for any one to hurt him so much with a few quiet words. Anger rose in him, an anger such as the furious attack of the Marchesino had never brought to the birth.

"You can say that!" he exclaimed. "You can say that, after Sicily!"

Gaspare's face changed, softened for an instant, then grew stern again.

"That was long ago, Signore. It was all different in Sicily!"

His eyes filled with tears, yet his face remained stern. But Artois was seized again, as when he walked in the golden air between the vineyards and heard the peasants singing, by an intense desire to bring happiness to the unhappy, especially and above all to one unhappy woman. To-night his intellect was subordinate to his heart, his pride of intellect was lost in feeling, in an emotion that the simplest might have understood and shared: the longing to be of use, to comfort, to pour balm into the terrible wound of one who had been his friend—such a friend as only a certain type of woman can be to a certain type of man.

"Gaspare," he said, "you and I—we helped the Signora once, we helped her in Sicily."

Gaspare looked away from him, and did not answer.

"Perhaps we can help her now. Perhaps only we can help her. Let me into the house, Gaspare. I shall do nothing here to make your Padrona sad."

Gaspare looked at him again, looked into his eyes, then moved aside, giving room for him to enter. As soon as he was in the passage Gaspare shut the door.

"I am sorry, Signore; the lamp is not lighted."

Artois felt at once an unusual atmosphere in the house, an atmosphere not of confusion but of mystery, of secret curiosity, of brooding apprehension. At the foot of the servants' staircase he heard a remote sound of whispering, which emphasized the otherwise complete silence of this familiar dwelling, suddenly become unfamiliar to him—unfamiliar and almost dreadful.

"I had better go into the garden."

"Si, Signore."

Gaspare looked down the servants' staircase and hissed sharply:

"Sh! S-s-sh!"

"The Signora—?" asked Artois, as Gaspare came to him softly.

"The Signora is always in her room. She is shut up in her room."

"I saw the Signora just now, at the window," Artois said, in an undervoice.

"You saw the Signora?"

Gaspare looked at him with sudden eagerness mingled with a flaming anxiety.

"From the boat. She came to the window and let down the blind."

Gaspare did not ask anything. They went to the terrace above the sea.

"I will tell the Signorina you have come, Signore."

"Sha'n't I go down?"

"I had better go and tell her."

He spoke with conviction. Artois did not dispute his judgment. He went away, always softly. Artois stood still on the terrace. The twilight was spreading itself over the sea, like a veil dropping over a face. The house was dark behind him. In that darkness Hermione was hidden, the Hermione who was a stranger to him, the Hermione into whose heart and soul he was no longer allowed to look. Upon Monte Amato at evening she had, very simply, showed him the truth of her great sorrow.

Now—he saw the face at the window, the falling blind. Between then and now—what a gulf fixed!

Vere came from the garden followed by Gaspare. Her eyes were wide with terror. The eyelids were red. She had been weeping. She almost ran to Artois, as a child runs to refuge. Never before had he felt so acutely the childishness that still lingered in this little Vere of the island—lingered unaffected, untouched by recent events. Thank God for that! In that moment the Marchesino was forgiven; and Artois—did he not perhaps also in that moment forgive himself?

"Oh Monsieur Emile—I thought you wouldn't come!"

There was the open reproach of a child in her voice. She seized his hand.

"Has Gaspare told you?" She turned her head towards Gaspare. "Something terrible has happened to Madre. Monsieur Emile, do you know what it is?"

She was looking at him with an intense scrutiny.

"Gaspare is hiding something from me—"

Gaspare stood there and said nothing.

"—something that perhaps you know."

Gaspare looked at Artois, and Artois felt now that the watch-dog trusted him. He returned the Sicilian's glance, and Gaspare moved away, went to the rail of the terrace, and looked down over the sea.

"Do you know? Do you know anything—anything dreadful about Madre that you have never told me?"

"Vere, don't be frightened."

"Ah, but you haven't been here! You weren't here when—"

"What is it?"

Her terror infected him.

"Madre came back. She had been to Mergellina all alone. She was away such a long time. When she came back I was in my room. I didn't know. I didn't hear the boat. But my door was open, and presently I heard some one come up-stairs and go into the boudoir. It was Madre. I know her step. I know it was Madre!"

She reiterated her assertion, as if she anticipated that he was going to dispute it.

"She stayed in the boudoir only a very little while—only a few minutes. Oh, Monsieur Emile, but—"

"Vere. What do you mean? Did—what happened there—in the boudoir?"

He was reading from her face.

"She went—Madre went in there to—"

She stopped and swallowed.

"Madre took father's photograph—the one on the writing-table—and tore it to pieces. And the frame—that was all bent and nearly broken. Father's photograph, that she loves so much!"

Artois said nothing. At that moment it was as if he entered suddenly into Hermione's heart, and knew every feeling there.

"Monsieur Emile—is she—is Madre—ill?"

She began to tremble once more, as she had trembled when she came to fetch Gaspare from the nook of the cliff beside the Saint's Pool.

"Not as you mean, Vere."

"You are sure? You are certain?"

"Not in that way."

"But then I heard Madre come out and go to her bedroom. I didn't hear whether she locked the door. I only heard it shut. But Gaspare says he knows it is locked. Two or three minutes after the door was shut I heard—I heard—"

"Don't be afraid. Tell me—if I ought to know."

Those words voiced a deep and delicate reluctance which was beginning to invade him. Yet he wished to help Vere, to release this child from the thrall of a terror which could only be conquered if it were expressed.

"Tell me," he added, slowly.

"I heard Madre—Monsieur Emile, it was hardly crying!"

"Don't. You needn't tell me any more."

"Gaspare heard it too. It went on for a long, long time. We—Gaspare made the servants keep downstairs ever since. And I—I have been waiting for you to come, because Madre cares for you."

Artois put his hand down quickly upon Vere's right hand.

"I am glad that you sent for me, Vere. I am glad you think that. Come and sit down on the bench."

He drew her down beside him. He felt that he was with a child whom he must comfort. Gaspare stood always looking down over the rail of the terrace to the sea.

"Vere!"

"Yes, Monsieur Emile."

"You mother is not ill as you thought—feared. But—to-day—she has had, she must have had, a great shock."

"But at Mergellina?"

"Only that could account for what you have just told me."

"But I don't understand. She only went to Mergellina."

"Did you see her before she went there?"

"Yes."

"Was she as usual?"

"I don't think she was. I think Madre has been changing nearly all this summer. That is why I am so afraid. You know she has been changing."

He was silent. The difficulty of the situation was great. He did not know how to resolve it.

"You have seen the change, Monsieur Emile!"

He did not deny it. He did not know what to do or say. For of that change, although perhaps now he partly understood it, he could never speak to Vere or to any one.

"It has made me so unhappy," Vere said, with a break in her voice.

And he had said to himself: "Vere must be happy!" At that moment he and his intellect seemed to him less than a handful of dust.

"But this change of to-day is different," he said, slowly. "Your mother has had a dreadful shock."

"At Mergellina?"

"It must have been there."

"But what could it be? We scarcely ever go there. We don't know any one there—oh, except Ruffo."

Her eyes, keen and bright with youth, even though they had been crying, were fixed upon his face while she was speaking, and she saw a sudden conscious look in his eyes, a movement of his lips—he drew them sharply together, as if seized by a spasm.

"Ruffo!" she repeated. "Has it something to do with Ruffo?"

There was a profound perplexity in her face, but the fear in it was less.

"Something to do with Ruffo?" she repeated.

Suddenly she moved, she got up. And all the fear had come back to her face, with something added to it, something intensely personal.

"Do you mean—is Ruffo dead?" she whispered.

A voice rose up from the sea singing a sad little song. Vere turned towards the sea. All her body relaxed. The voice passed on. The sad little song passed under the cliff, to the Saint's Pool and the lee of the island.

"Ah, Monsieur Emile," she said, "why don't you tell me?"

She swayed. He put his arm quickly behind her.

"No, no! It's all right. That was Ruffo!"

And she smiled.

At that moment Artois longed to tell her the truth. To do so would surely be to do something that was beautiful. But he dared not—he had no right.

A bell rang in the house, loudly, persistently, tearing its silence. Gaspare turned angrily from the rail, with an expression of apprehension on his face.

Giulia was summoning the household to dinner.

"Perhaps—perhaps Madre will come down," Vere whispered.

Gaspare passed them and went into the house quickly. They knew he had gone to see if his Padrona was coming. Moved by a mutual instinct, they stayed where they were till he should come to them again.

For a long time they waited. He did not return.

"We had better go in, Vere. You must eat."

"I can't—unless she comes."

"You must try to eat."

He spoke to her as to a child.

"And perhaps—Gaspare may be with her, may be speaking with her. Let us go in."

They passed into the house, and went to the dining-room. The table was laid. The lamp was lit. Giulia stood by the sideboard looking anxious and subdued. She did not even smile when she saw Artois, who was her favorite.

"Where is Gaspare, Giulia?" said Artois.

"Up-stairs, Signore. He came in and ran up-stairs, and he has not come down. Ah!"—she raised her hands—"the evil eye has looked upon this house! When that girl Peppina—"

"Be quiet!" Artois said, sharply.

Giulia's round, black eyes filled with tears, and her mouth opened in surprise.

He put his hand kindly on her arm.

"Never mind, Giulia mia! But it is foolish to talk like that. There is no reason why evil should come upon the Casa del Mare. Here is Gaspare!"

At that moment he entered, looking tragic.

"Go away, Giulia!" he said to her, roughly.

"Ma—"

"Go away!"

He put her out of the room without ceremony, and shut the door.

"Signore!" he said to Artois, "I have been up to the Padrona's room. I have knocked on the door. I have spoken—"

"What did you say?"

"I did not say that you were here, Signore."

"Did you ask the Signora to come down?"

"I asked if she was coming down to dinner. I said the Signorina was waiting for her."

"Yes?"

"The Signora did not answer. There was no noise, and in the room there is no light!"

"Let me go!" Vere said, breathlessly.

She was moving towards the door when Artois stopped her authoritatively.

"No, Vere—wait!"

"But some one must—I'm afraid—"

"Wait, Vere!"

He turned once more to Gaspare.

"Did you try the door, Gaspare?"

"Signore, I did. After I had spoken several times and waited a long time, I tried the door softly. It is locked."

"You see!"

It was Vere speaking, still breathlessly.

"Let me go, Monsieur Emile. We can't let Madre stay like that, all alone in the dark. She must have food. We can't stay down here and leave her."

Artois hesitated. He thought of the stranger at the window, and he felt afraid. But he concealed his fear.

"Perhaps you had better go, Vere," he said, at length. "But if she does not answer, don't try the door. Don't knock. Just speak. You will find the best words."

"Yes. I'll try—I'll try."

Gaspare opened the door. Giulia was sobbing outside. Her pride and dignity were lacerated by Gaspare's action.

"Giulia, never mind! Don't cry! Gaspare didn't mean—"

Before she had finished speaking the servant passionately seized her hand and kissed it. Vere released her hand very gently and went slowly up the stairs.

The instinct of Artois was to follow her. He longed to follow her, but he denied himself, and sat down by the dinner-table, on which the zuppa di pesce was smoking under the lamp. Giulia, trying to stifle her sobs, went away down the kitchen stairs, and Gaspare stood near the door. He touched his face with his hands, opened and shut his lips, then thrust his hands into his pockets, and stared first at Artois then at the floor. His cheeks and his forehead looked hot, as if he had just finished some difficult physical act. Artois did not glance at him. In that moment both men, in their different ways, felt dreadfully, almost unbearably, self-conscious.

Presently Vere's step was heard again on the stairs, descending softly and slowly. She came in and went at once to Artois.

"Madre doesn't answer."

Artois got up.

"What ought we to do?"

Vere was whispering.

"Did you hear anything?"

"No."

Gaspare moved, took his hands violently out of his pockets, then thrust them in again.

Artois stood in silence. His face, generally so strong, so authoritative, showed his irresolution, and Vere, looking to him like a frightened child for guidance, felt her terror increase.

"Shall I go up again. I didn't knock. You told me not to. Shall I go and knock? Or shall Gaspare go again?"

She did not suggest that Artois should go himself. He noticed that, even in this moment of the confusion of his will.

"I think we had better leave her for a time," he said, at last.

As he spoke he made an effort, and recovered himself.

"We had better do nothing more. What can we do?"

He was looking at Gaspare.

Gaspare went out into the passage and called down the stairs.

"Giulia! Come up! The Signorina is going to dinner."

His defiant voice sounded startling in the silent house.

"We are to eat!"

"Yes, Vere. I shall stay. Presently our mother may come down. She feels that she must be alone. We have no right to try to force ourselves upon her."

"Do you think it is that? Are you telling me the truth? Are you?"

"If she does not come down presently I will go up. Don't be afraid. I will not leave you till she comes down."

Giulia returned, wiping her eyes. When he saw her Gaspare disappeared. They knew he had gone to wait outside his Padrona's door.

The dinner passed almost in silence. Artois ate, and made Vere eat. Vere sat in her mother's place, with her back to the door. Artois was facing her. Often his eyes travelled to the door. Often, too, Vere turned her head. And in the silence both were listening for a step that did not come: Vere with a feverish eagerness, Artois with a mingling of longing and of dread. For he knew he dreaded to see Hermione that night. He knew that it would be terrible to him to meet her eyes, to speak to her, to touch her hand. And yet he longed for her to come. For he was companioned by a great and growing fear, which he must hide. And that act of secrecy, undertaken for Vere's sake, seemed to increase the thing he hid, till the shadow it had been began to take form, to grow in stature, to become dominating, imperious.

Giulia put some fruit on the table. The meal was over, and there had been no sound outside upon the stairs.

"Monsieur Emile, what are you going to do?"

"Go to the drawing-room, Vere. I will go out and see whether there is any light in your mother's window."

She obeyed him silently and went away. Then he took his hat and went out upon the terrace.

Gaspare had said that Hermione's room was dark. Perhaps he had been mistaken. The key might have been so placed in the lock that he had been deceived. As Artois walked to a point from which he could see one of the windows of Hermione's bedroom, he knew that he longed to see a light there. If the window was dark the form of his fear would be more distinct. He reached the point and looked up. There was no light.

He stood there for some time gazing at that darkness. He thought of the bent photograph frame, of the photograph that had been so loved torn into fragments, of the sound that was—hardly crying, and of the face he had seen for an instant as he drew near to the island. He ought to come to some decision, to take some action. Vere was depending upon him. But he felt as if he could do nothing. In answer to Vere's appeal he had hastened to the island. And now he was paralyzed, he was utterly useless.

He felt as if he dared not do anything. Hermione in her grief, had suddenly passed from him into a darkness that was sacred. What right had he to try to share it?

And yet—if that great shape of fear were not the body of a lie, but of the truth?

Never had he felt so impotent, so utterly unworthy of his manhood.

He moved away, turned, came back and stood once more beneath the window. Ought he to go up to Hermione's door, to knock, to speak, to insist on admittance? And if there was no reply?—what ought he to do then? Break down the door?

He went into the house. Vere was sitting in the drawing-room looking at the door. She sprang up.

"Is there a light in Madre's room?"

"No."

He saw, as he answered, that she caught his fear, that hers now had the same shape as his.

"Monsieur Emile, you—you don't think—?"

Her voice faltered, her bright eyes became changed, dim, seemed to sink into her head.

"You must go to her room. Go to Madre, Monsieur Emile, Go! Speak to her! Make her answer! Make her! make her!"

She put her hands on him. She pushed him frantically.

He took her hands and held them tightly.

"I am going, Vere. Don't be frightened!"

"But you are frightened! You are frightened!"

"I will speak to your mother. I will beg her to answer."

"And if she doesn't answer?"

"I will get into the room."

He let go her hands and went towards the door. Just as he reached it there came from below in the house a loud, shrill cry. It was followed by an instant of silence, then by another cry, louder, nearer than before. And this time they could hear the words:

"La fattura della morte! La fattura della morte!"

Running, stumbling feet sounded outside, and Peppina appeared at the door, her disfigured face convulsed with terror, her hand out-stretched.

"Look!" she cried shrilly. "Look, Signorina! Look, Signore! La fattura della morte! La fattura della morte! It has been brought to the house to-night! It has been put in my room to-night!"

In her hand lay a green lemon pierced by many nails.

CHAPTER XL

"Monsieur Emile, what is it?" exclaimed Vere.

The frightened servants were gone, half coaxed and half scolded into silence by Artois. He had taken the lemon from Peppina, and it lay now in his hand.

"It is what the people of Naples call a death-charm."

"A death-charm?"

In her eyes superstition dawned.

"Why do they call it that?"

"Because it is supposed to bring death to any one—any enemy—near whom it is placed."

"Who can have put it in the house to-night?" Vere said. Her voice was low and trembling. "Who can have wished to bring death here to-night?"

"I don't know, Vere."

"And such a thing—could it bring death?"

"Vere! You can ask me!"

He spoke with an attempt at smiling irony, but his eyes held something of the awe, the cloudy apprehension that had gathered in hers.

"Where is your mind?" he added.

She answered: "Are you going to Madre's room, Monsieur Emile?"

He put the death-charm down quickly, as if it had burned his hand.

"I am going now. Gaspare!"

At this moment Gaspare came into the room with a face that was almost livid.

"Who is it that has brought a fattura della morte here?" he exclaimed.

His usually courageous eyes were full of superstitious fear.

"Signore, do you—"

He stopped. He had seen the death-charm lying on the little table covered with silver trifles. He approached it, made a sign of the cross, bent down his head and examined it closely, but did not touch it.

Artois and Vere watched him closely. He lifted up his head at last.

"I know who brought the fattura della morte here," he said, solemnly. "I know."

"Who?" said Vere.

"It was Ruffo."

"Ruffo!"

Vere reddened. "Ruffo! He loves our house, and he loves us!"

"It is Ruffo, Signorina. It is Ruffo. He brought it, and it is he that must take it away. Do not touch it, Signorina. Do not touch it, Signore. Leave it where it is till Ruffo comes, till Ruffo takes it away."

He again made the sign of the cross, and drew back from the death-charm with a sort of mysterious caution.

"Signore," he said to Artois, "I will go down to the Saint's Pool. I will find Ruffo. I will bring him here. I will make him come here."

He was going out when Artois put a hand on his shoulder.

"And the Padrona?"

"Signore, she is always there, in her room, in the dark."

"And you have heard nothing?"

"Signore, I have heard the Padrona moving."

The hand of Artois dropped down. He was invaded by a sense of relief that was almost overwhelming.

"You are certain?"

"Si, Signore. The Padrona is walking up and down the room. When Peppina screamed out I heard the Padrona move. And then I heard her walking up and down the room."

He looked again at the death-charm and went out. Vere stood for a moment. Then she, too, went suddenly away, and Artois heard her light footstep retreating from him towards the terrace.

He understood her silent and abrupt departure. His fear had been hers. His relief was hers, too, and she was moved to hide it. He was left alone with the death-charm.

He sat down by the table on which it lay among the bright toys of silver. Released from his great fear, released from his undertaking to force his way into the darkness of that room which had been silent, he seemed suddenly to regain his identity, to be put once more into possession of his normal character. He had gone out from it. He returned to it. The cloud of superstition, in which even he had been for a moment involved with Vere and with the servants, evaporated, and he was able to smile secretly at them and at himself. Yet while he smiled thus secretly, and while he looked at the lemon with its perforating nails, he realized his own smallness, helplessness, the smallness and the helplessness of every man, as he had never realized them before. And he realized also something, much, of what it would have meant to him, had the body of his fear been the body of a truth, not of a lie.

If death had really come into the Casa del Mare that night with the death-charm!

He stretched out his hand to the table, lifted the death-charm from among the silver ornaments, held it, kept it in his hand, which he laid upon his knee.

If Ruffo had carried death in his boy's hand over the sea to the island, had carried death to Hermione!

Artois tried to imagine that house without Hermione, his life without Hermione.

For a long time he sat, always holding the death-charm in his hand, always with his eyes fixed upon it, until at last in it, as in a magic mirror, among the scars of its burning, and among the nails that pierced it, as the woman who had fashioned it, and fired it, and muttered witch's words over it, longed to pierce the heart of her enemy, he saw scenes of the past, and shadowy, moving figures. He saw among the scars and among the nails Hermione and himself!

They were in Paris, at a table strewn with flowers. That was the first scene in the magic mirror of the fattura della morte, the scene in which they met for the first time. Hermione regarded him almost with timidity. And he looked at her doubtfully, because she had no beauty.

Then they were in another part of Paris, in his "Morocco slipper of a room," crammed with books, and dim with Oriental incense and tobacco smoke, his room red and yellow, tinted with the brilliant colors of the East. And he turned to her for sympathy, and he received it in full measure, pressed down and running over. He told her his thought, and he told her his feelings, his schemes, his struggles, his moments of exaltation, his depressions. Something, much indeed of him was hers, the egotistic part of a man that does really give, but that keeps back much, and that seeks much more than it gives. And what he sought she eagerly, generously gave, with both hands, never counting any cost. Always she was giving and always he was taking.

Then they were in London, in another room full of books. He stood by a fire, and she was seated with a bundle of letters in her lap. And his heart was full of something that was like anger, and of a dull and smouldering jealousy. And hers was full of a new and wonderful beauty, a piercing joy.

He sighed deeply. He stirred. He looked up for a moment and listened.

But all the house was silent. And again he bent over the death-charm.

He stood by a door. Outside was the hum of traffic, inside a narrow room. And now in the magic mirror a third figure showed itself, a figure of youth incarnate, brave, passionate, thrilling with the joy of life. He watched it, how coldly, although he felt its charm, the rays of fire that came from it, as sunbeams come from the sun! And apprehension stirred within him. And presently in the night, by ebony waters, and by strange and wandering lights, and under unquiet stars, he told Hermione something of his fear.

Africa—and the hovering flies, and the dreadful feeling that death's hands were creeping about his body and trying to lay hold of it! A very lonely creature lay there in the mirror, with the faint shadow of a palm-leaf shifting and swaying upon the ghastly whiteness of its face—himself, in the most desolate hour of his life. As he gazed he was transported to the City of the Mosques. The years rolled back. He felt again all, or nearly all, that he had felt then of helplessness, abandonment, despair. It was frightful to go out thus alone, to be extinguished in the burning heat of Africa, and laid in that arid soil, where the vipers slid through the hot crevices of the earth, and the scorpions bred in the long days of the summer. Now it was evening. He heard the call to prayer, that wailing, wonderful cry which saluted the sinking sun.

He remembered exactly how it had come into his ears through the half-opened window, the sensation of remoteness, of utter solitude, which it had conveyed to him. An Arab had passed under the window, singing in a withdrawn and drowsy voice a plaintive song of the East which had mingled with the call to prayer. And then, he, Artois being quite alone, had given way in his great pain and weakness. He remembered feeling the tears slipping over his cheeks, one following another, quickly, quickly. It had seemed as if they would never stop, as if there would always be tears to flow from those sources deep within his stricken body, his stricken soul.

He looked into the mirror. The door of the room was opened. A woman stood upon the threshold. The sick man turned upon his pillow. He gazed towards the woman. And his tears ceased. He was no longer alone. His friend had come from her garden of Paradise to draw him back to life.

In the magic mirror of the fattura della morte other scenes formed themselves, were clearly visible for a moment, then dispersed, dissolved—till scenes of the island came, till the last scene in the mirror dawned faintly before his eyes.

He saw a dark room, and a woman more desolate than he had been when he lay alone with the shadow of the palm-tree shifting on his face, and heard the call to prayer. He saw Hermione in her room in the Casa del Mare that night, after she knew.

Suddenly he put his hand to his eyes.

Those were the first tears his eyes had known since that evening in Africa years and years ago.

He laid the death-charm down once more among the silver toys. But he still looked at it as he sat back now in his chair, waiting for Gaspare's return.

He gazed at the symbol of death. And he began to think how strangely appropriate was its presence that night in the Casa del Mare, how almost more than strange had been its bringing there by Ruffo—if indeed Ruffo had brought it, as Gaspare declared. And Ruffo, all ignorantly and unconsciously, had pierced the heart of Hermione.

Artois knew nothing of what had happened that day at Mergellina, but he divined that it was Ruffo who, without words, had told Hermione the truth. It must have been Ruffo, in whom the dead man lived again. And, going beyond the innocent boy, deep into the shadows where lies so much of truth, Artois saw the murdered man stirring from his sleep, unable to rest because of the lie that had been coiled around his memory, making it what it should not be. Perhaps only the dead know the true, the sacred passion for justice. Perhaps only they are indifferent to everything save truth, they who know the greatest truth of all.

And Artois saw Maurice Delarey, the gay, the full-blooded youth, grown stern in the halls of death, unable to be at peace until she who had most loved him knew him at last as he had been in life.

As no one else would tell Hermione the truth, the dead man himself, speaking through his son, the fruit of his sin, had told her the truth that day. He, too, had been perhaps a spirit in prison, through all these years since his death.

Artois saw him in freedom.

And at that moment Artois felt that in the world there was only one thing that was perfectly beautiful, and that thing was absolute truth. Its knowledge must make Hermione greater.

But now she was hanging on her cross.

If he could only comfort her!

As she had come to him in Africa, he longed now to go to her. She had saved him from the death of the body. If only he could save her from another and more terrible death—the death of the spirit that believes and trusts in life!

He had been absorbed in thought and unconscious of time. Now he looked up, he was aware of things. He listened. Surely Gaspare had been away a long while. And Vere—where was she?

He had a strange desire to see Ruffo now. Something new and mystic had been born, or had for the first time made itself apparent, within him to-night. And he knew that to-night he would look at Ruffo as he had never looked at him before.

He got up and, leaving the death-charm lying on the table, went to the door. There he hesitated. Should he go to the terrace, to Vere? Or should he go up-stairs to that dark room and try to speak to his friend? Or should he go out to the cliff, to seek Gaspare and Ruffo?

Ruffo drew him. He had to go to the cliff.

He went out by the front door. At first he thought of descending at once by the steps to the Pool of San Francesco. But he changed his mind and went instead to the bridge.

He looked over into the Pool.

It was a very clear night. San Francesco's light was burning brightly. Very sincerely it was burning beneath the blessing hands of the Saint. A ray of gold that came from it lay upon the darkness of the Pool, stealing through the night a little way, as if in an effort to touch the Casa del Mare.

In the Pool there was one boat. Artois saw no one by the sea's edge, heard no voices there, and he turned towards the crest of the island, to the seat where Vere so often went at night, and where Hermione, too, had often sought out Ruffo.

Gaspare and Ruffo were near it. Almost directly he saw their forms, relieved against the dimness but not deep darkness of the night, and heard their voices talking. As he went towards them Gaspare was speaking vehemently. He threw up one arm in a strong, even, and excited gesture, and was silent. Then Artois heard Ruffo say, in a voice that, though respectful and almost deprecatory, was yet firm like a man's:

"I cannot take it away, Gaspare. When I go home my mamma will ask me if I have put it in the house."

"Dio mio!" cried Gaspare. "But you have put it in the house! Is it not there—is it not there now to bring death upon the Signora, upon the Signorina, upon us all?"

"It was made for Peppina. My mamma made it only against Peppina, because she has brought evil into our house. It will hurt only Peppina! It will kill only Peppina!"

He spoke now with a vehemence and passion almost equal to Gaspare's. Artois stood still. They did not see him. They were absorbed in their conversation.

"It will not hurt the Signora or the Signorina. The fattura della morte—it is to harm Peppina. Has she not done us injury? Has she not taken my Patrigno from my mamma? Has she not made him mad? Is it not for her that he has been in prison, and that he has left my mamma without a soldo in the house? The Signora—she has been good to me and my mamma. It is she who sent my mamma money—twenty lire! I respect the Signora as I respect my mamma. Only to-day, only this very day she came to Mergellina, she came to see my mama. And when she knew that my Patrigno was let out of prison, when I cried out at the door that he was coming, the Signora was so glad for us that she looked—she looked—Madre di Dio! She was all white, she was shaking—she was worse than my poor mamma. And when I came to her, and when I called out, 'Signora! Signora!' you should have seen! She opened her eyes! She gave me such a look! And then my Patrigno came in at the door, and the Signora—she went away. I was going to follow her, but she put out her hand—so, to make me stay—she wanted me to stay with my mamma. And she went down the stairs all trembling because my Patrigno was let out of prison. Per dio! She has a good heart. She is an angel. For the Signora I would die. For the Signora I would do anything! I—you say I would kill the Signora! Would I kill my mamma? Would I kill the Madonna? La Bruna—would I kill her? To me the Signora is as my mamma! I respect the Signora as I respect my mamma. Ecco!"

"The fattura della morte will bring evil on the house, it will bring death into the house."

Gaspare spoke again, and his voice was dogged with superstition, but it was less vehement than before.

"Already—who knows what it has brought? Who knows what evil it has done? All the house is sad to-night, all the house is terrible to-night."

"It is Peppina who has looked on the house with the evil eye," said Ruffo. "It is Peppina who has brought trouble to the house."

There was silence. Then Gaspare said:

"No, it is not Peppina."

As he spoke Artois saw him stretch out his hand, but gently, towards Ruffo.

"Who is it, then?" said Ruffo.

Moved by an irresistible impulse to interpose, Artois called out:

"Gaspare!"

He saw the two figures start.

"Gaspare!" he repeated, coming up to them.

"Signore! What is it? Has the Signora—"

"I have not heard her. I have not seen her."

"Then what is it, Signore?"

"Good-evening, Ruffo," Artois said, looking at the boy.

"Good-evening, Signore."

Ruffo took off his cap. He was going to put it back on his dark hair, when Artois held his arm.

"Wait a minute, Ruffo!"

The boy looked surprised, but met fearlessly the eyes that were gazing into his.

"Va bene, Ruffo."

Artois released his arm, and Ruffo put on his cap.

"I heard you talking of the fattura della morte," Artois said.

Ruffo reddened slightly.

"Si, Signore."

"Your mother made it?"

Ruffo did not answer. Gaspare stood by, watching and listening with deep, half-suspicious attention.

"I heard you say so."

"Si, Signore. My mamma made it."

"And told you to bring it to the island and put it in the house to-night?"

"Si, Signore."

"Are you sure it was Peppina your mother wished to do evil?"

"Si, Signore, quite sure. Peppina is a bad girl. She made my Patrigno mad. She brought trouble to our house."

"You love the Signora, don't you, Ruffo?"

His face changed and grew happier at once.

"Si, Signore. I love the Signora and the Signorina."

He would not leave out Vere. Artois's heart warmed to him for that.

"Ruffo—"

While he had been on the crest of the island an idea had come to him. At first he had put it from him. Now, suddenly, he caressed it, he resolved to act on its prompting.

"Ruffo, the Signora is in the house."

"Si, Signore."

"I don't think she is very well. I don't think she will leave the house to-night. Wouldn't you like to see her?"

"Signore, I always like to see the Signora."

"And I think she likes to see you. I know she does."

"Si, Signore. The Signora is always glad when I come."

He spoke without conceit or vanity, with utterly sincere simplicity.

"Go to the house and ask to see her now—Gaspare will take you."

As he spoke he looked at Gaspare, and Gaspare understood.

"Come on, Ruffo!"

Gaspare's voice was rough, arbitrary, but the eyes that he turned on Ruffo were full of the almost melting gentleness that Hermione had seen in them sometimes and that she had always loved.

"Come on, Ruffino!"

He walked away quickly, almost sternly, towards the house. And Ruffo followed him.

CHAPTER XLI

Artois did not go with them. Once again he was governed by an imperious feeling that held him inactive, the feeling that it was not for him to approach Hermione—that others might draw near to her, but that he dared not. The sensation distressed and almost humiliated him, it came upon him like a punishment for sin, and as a man accepts a punishment which he is conscious of deserving Artois accepted it.

So now he waited alone on the crest of the island, looking towards the Casa del Mare.

What would be the result of this strange and daring embassy?

He was not long to be in doubt.

"Signore! Signore!"

Gaspare's voice was calling him from somewhere in the darkness.

"Signore."

"I am coming."

There had been a thrill of emotion in the appeal sent out to him. He hurried towards the house. He crossed the bridge. When he was on it he heard the splash of oars below him in the Pool, but he took no heed of it. What were the fishermen to him to-night? Before the house door he met Gaspare and Ruffo.

"What is it?"

"The Signora is not in her room, Signore."

"Not—? How do you know? Is the door open?"

"Si, Signore. The Signora has gone! And the fattura della morte has gone."

"The fattura della morte has gone!" repeated Ruffo.

The repetition of the words struck a chill to the heart of Artois. Again he was beset by superstition. He caught it from these children of the South, who stared at him now with their grave and cloudy eyes.

"Perhaps one of the servants—" he began.

"No, Signore. I have asked them. And they would not dare to touch it."

"The Signorina?"

He shook his head.

"She is in the garden. She has been there all the time. She does not know"—he lowered his voice almost to a whisper—"she does not know about the Signora and the fattura della morte."

"We must not let her know—"

He stopped. Suddenly his ears seemed full of the sound of splashing oars in water. Yet he heard nothing.

"Gaspare," he said quickly, "have you looked everywhere for the Signora?"

"I have looked in the house, Signore. I have been on the terrace and to the Signorina in the garden. Then I came to tell you. I thought you should know about the Signora and the fattura della morte."

Artois felt that it was this fact of the disappearance of the death-charm which for the moment paralyzed Gaspare's activities. What stirring of ancient superstition was in the Sicilian's heart he did not know, but he knew that now his own time of action was come. No longer could he delegate to others the necessary deed. And with this knowledge his nature seemed to change. An ardor that was almost vehement with youth, and that was hard-fibred with manly strength and resolution, woke up in him.

Again his ears were full of the sound of oars in water.

"Ruffo," he said, "will you obey me?"

He laid his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"Si, Signore."

"Go into the garden. Stay with the Signorina till I come."

"Si, Signore."

"If it is a long time, if the Signorina is afraid, if she wants to do anything, you are to say that Don Emilio said she was not to be afraid, and that she was to wait."

"Si, Signore."

The boy paused, looking steadily at Artois, then, seeing that he had finished, turned away and went softly into the house.

"Gaspare, come with me."

Gaspare said nothing, but followed him down to the foot of the cliff. One of the island boats was gone. When Gaspare saw that he ran to pull in the other. He held out his arm to help Artois into the boat, then took the oars, standing up and looking before him into the night.

"Row towards the village, Gaspare."

"Si, Signore."

At that moment Gaspare understood much of what was in Artois's mind. He relied upon Artois. He trusted him—and this fact, of Gaspare's trust and reliance upon him, added now to that feeling of ardor that had risen up in Artois, gave him courage, helped to banish completely that punishing sensation which had condemned him to keep away from Hermione as one unworthy to approach her, to touch even the hem of her grief.

No need to tell Gaspare to row quickly. With all his strength he forced the boat along through the calm sea.

"Keep near the shore, Gaspare!"

"Si, Signore."

Only the first quarter of the young moon was visible in the sky. It cast but a thin and distant glint of silver upon the waters. By the near shore the dimness of this hour was unbroken by any light, unstirred by any sound except the withdrawn and surreptitious murmur of the sea. The humped shapes of the low yellow rocks showed themselves faintly like shapes of beasts asleep. In the distance, lifted above the sea, two or three flames shone faintly. They were shed by lamps or candles set in the windows of the fishermen's cottages in the village.

Had Hermione gone to the village?

She might have left the island with some definite purpose, or moved by a blind impulse to get away, and be alone. Artois could not tell. But she had taken the fattura della morte.

He wondered whether she knew its meaning, with what sinister intention it had been made. Something in the little worthless thing must have attracted her, have fascinated her, or she would not have taken it. In her distress of mind, in her desire for solitude, she would have hastened away and left it lying where it was.

Perhaps she had a purpose in leaving the island with the fattura della morte.

Her taking of it began to seem to Artois, as it had evidently seemed to Gaspare, a fact of profound significance. His imagination, working with an almost diseased rapidity and excitement, brought before him a series of scenes in which the death-charm figured as symbol. In one of these there were two women—Hermione and Maddalena.

Hermione might have set out on some wild quest to Mergellina. He remembered the face at the window, and knew that to-night everything was possible.

"Row quickly, Gaspare!"

Gaspare bent almost furiously to the oars. Then sharply he turned his head.

"What is it?"

"I can see the boat! I can see the Signora!"

The words struggled out on a long breath that made his broad chest heave. Instinctively Artois put his hands on the gunwale of the boat on either side of him, moving as if to stand up.

"Take care, Signore!"

"I'd forgotten—" He leaned forward, searching the night. "Where is the Signora?"

"There—in front! She is rowing to the village. No, she has turned."

He stopped rowing.

"The Signora has seen, or she has heard, and she is going in to shore."

"But there are only the rocks."

"The Signora is going in to the Palazzo of the Spirits."

"The Palazzo of the Spirits?" Artois repeated.

"Si, Signore."

Gaspare turned and looked again into the darkness.

"I cannot see the Signora any more."

"Follow the Signora, Gaspare. If she has gone to the Palazzo of the Spirits row in there."

"Si, Signore."

He drew the oars again strongly through the water.

Artois remembered a blinding storm that had crashed over a mountain village in Sicily long ago, a flash of lightning which had revealed to him the gaunt portal of a palace that seemed abandoned, a strip of black cloth, the words "Lutto in famiglia." They had seemed to him prophetic words.

And now—?

In the darkness he saw another darkness, the strange and broken outline of the ruined palace by the sea, once perhaps, the summer home of some wealthy Roman, now a mere shell visited in the lonely hours by the insatiate waves. Were Hermione and he to meet here? To-day he had thought of his friend as a spirit that had been long in prison. Now he came to the Palace of the Spirits to face her truth with his. The Palace of the Spirits! The name suggested the very nakedness of truth. Well, let it be so, let the truth stand there naked. Again, mingling with a certain awe, there rose up in him a strong ardor, a courage that was vehement, that longed at last to act. And it seemed to him suddenly that for many years, through all the years that divided Hermione and him from the Sicilian life, they had been held in leash, waiting for the moment of this encounter. Now the leash slackened. They were being freed. And for what?

Gaspare plunged his right oar into the sea alone. The boat swung round obediently, heading for the shore.

One of the faint lights that gleamed in the village was extinguished.

"Signore, the Signora has left the boat!"

"Si?"

"Madonna! She has let it go! She has left it to the sea!"

He backed water. A moment later the little boat in which Vere loved to go out alone grated against theirs.

"Madonna! To leave the boat like that!" exclaimed Gaspare, bending to catch the tow-rope. "The Signora is not safe to-night. The Signora's saint will not look on her to-night."

"Put me ashore, Gaspare."

"Si, Signore."

The boat passed before the façade of the palace.

Artois knew the palace well by day. This was the first time he had come to it by night. In daylight it was a small and picturesque ruin washed by the laughing sea, lonely but scarcely sad. Leaping from its dark and crumbling walls the fisher-boys often plunged into the depths below; or they lay upon the broad sills of the gaping window-spaces to dry themselves in the sun. Men came with rods and lines to fish from its deserted apartments, through which, when rough weather was at hand, the screaming sea-birds flew. The waves played frivolously enough in its recesses. And their voices were heard against the slimy and defiant stones calling to teach other merrily, as perhaps once the voices of revellers long dead called in the happy hours of a vanished villeggiatura.

But the night wrought on it, in it, and about it change. Its solitude then became desolation, the darkness of its stones a blackness that was tragic, its ruin more than a suggestion, the decisive picture of despair.

At its base was a line of half-discovered window-spaces, the lower parts of which had become long since the prey of the waves. Above it were more window-spaces, fully visible, and flanking a high doorway, once, no doubt, connected with a staircase, but now giving upon mid-air. Formerly there had been another floor, but this had fallen into decay and disappeared, with the exception of one small and narrow chamber situated immediately over the doorway. Isolated, for there was no means of approach to it, this chamber had something of the aspect of a low and sombre tower sluggishly lifting itself towards the sky. The palace was set upon rock and flanked by rocks. Round about it grass grew to the base of a high cliff at perhaps two hundred yards distance from it. And here and there grass and tufts of rank herbage pushed in its crevices, proclaiming the triumph of time to exulting winds and waters.

As Gaspare rowed in cautiously and gently to this deserted place, to which from the land no road, no footpath led, he stared at the darkness of the palace with superstitious awe, then at the small, familiar boat, which followed in their wake because he held the tow-rope.

"Signore," he said, "I am afraid!"

"You—Gaspare!"

"I am afraid for the Signora. Why should she come here all alone with the fattura della morte? I am afraid for the Signora."

The boat touched the edge of the rock to the right of the palace.

"And where has the Signora gone, Signore? I cannot see her, and I cannot hear her."

He lifted up his hand. They listened. But they heard only the sucking murmur of the sea against the rocks perforated with little holes, and in distant, abandoned chambers of the palace.

"Where has the Signora gone?" Gaspare repeated, in a whisper.

"I will find the Signora," said Artois.

He got up. Gaspare held his arm to assist him to the shore.

"Thank you."

He was on the rocks.

"Gaspare," he said, "wait here. Lie off the shore close by till I come back."

"Si, Signore."

Artois hesitated, looking at Gaspare.

"I will persuade the Signora to come back with us," he said.

"Si, Signore. You must persuade the poor Signora. The poor Signora is mad to-night. She gave me a look—" His eyes clouded with moisture. "If the poor Signora had not been mad she could not have looked at me like that—at another, perhaps, but not at me."

It seemed as if at last his long reserve was breaking down. He put up his hand to his eyes.

"I did not think that my Padrona—"

He stopped. Artois remembered the face at the window. He grasped Gaspare's hand.

"The Signora does not understand," he said. "I will make the Signora understand."

"Si, Signore, you must make the poor Signora understand."

Gaspare's hand held on to the hand of Artois, and in that clasp the immense reserve, that for so many years had divided, and united, these two men, seemed to melt like gold in a crucible of fire.

"I will make the Signora understand."

"And I will wait, Signore."

He pushed the boat off from the rocks. It floated away, with its sister boat, on the calm sea that kissed the palace walls. He gave his Padrona's fate into the hands of Artois. It was a tribute which had upon Artois a startling effect.

It was like a great resignation which conferred a great responsibility.

Always Gaspare had been very jealous, very proud of his position of authority as the confidential servant and protector of Hermione. And now, suddenly, and very simply, he seemed to acknowledge his helplessness with Hermione—to rely implicitly upon the power of Artois.

Vere, too, in her way had performed a kindred action. She had summoned "Monsieur Emile" in her great trouble. She had put herself in his hands. And he—he had striven to delegate to others the burden he was meant to bear. He had sent Vere to Hermione. He had sent Gaspare to her. He had even sent Ruffo to her. Now he must go himself. Vere, Gaspare, Ruffo—they were all looking to him. But Gaspare's eyes were most expressive, held more of demand for him than the eyes of the girl and boy. For the past was gathered in Gaspare, spoke to him in Gaspare's voice, looked at him from Gaspare's eyes, and in Gaspare's soul waited surely to know how it would be redeemed.

He turned from the sea and looked towards the cliff. Now he had the palace on his left hand. On his right, not far off, was a high bluff going almost sheer into the sea. Nevertheless, access to the village was possible by the strip of rocks beneath it. Had Hermione gone to the village by the rocks? If she had, Gaspare's keen eyes would surely have seen her. Artois looked at the blank wall of the palace. This extended a little way, then turned at right angles. Just beyond the angle, in its shadow, there was a low and narrow doorway. Artois moved along the wall, reached this doorway, stood without it, and listened.

The grass here grew right up to the stones of the ruin. He had come almost without noise. Before him he saw blackness, the blackness of a passage extending from the orifice of the doorway to an interior chamber of the palace. He heard the peculiar sound of moving water that is beset and covered in by barriers of stone, a hollow and pugnacious murmur, as of something so determined that it would be capable of striving through eternity, yet of something that was wistful and even sad.

For an instant he yielded his spirit to this sound of eternal striving. Then he said:

"Hermione!"

No one answered.

"Hermione!"

He raised his voice. He almost called the name.

Still there was no answer. Yet the silence seemed to tell him that she was near.

He did not call again. He waited a moment, then he stepped into the passage.

The room to which it led was the central room, or hall, of the palace—a vaulted chamber, high and narrow, opening to the sea at one end by the great doorway already mentioned, to the land beneath the cliff by a smaller doorway at the other. The faint light from without, penetrating through these facing doorways, showed to Artois a sort of lesser darkness, towards which he walked slowly, feeling his way along the wall. When he reached the hall he again stood still, trying to get accustomed to the strange and eerie obscurity, to pierce it with his eyes.

Now to his left, evidently within the building, and not far from where he stood, he heard almost loudly the striving of the sea. He heard the entering wave push through some narrow opening, search round the walls for egress, lift itself in a vain effort to emerge, fall back baffled, retreat, murmuring discontent, only to be succeeded by another eager wave. And this startling living noise of water filled him with a sensation of acute anxiety, almost of active fear.

"Hermione!" he said once more.

It seemed to him that the voice of the water drowned his voice, that it was growing louder, was filling the palace with an uproar that was angry.

"Hermione! Hermione!"

He strove to dominate that uproar.

Now, far off, through the seaward opening, he saw a streak of silver lying like a thread upon the darkness of the sea. And as he saw it, the voice of the waves within the palace seemed to sink suddenly away almost to silence. He did not know why, but the vision of that very distant radiance of the young and already setting moon seemed to restore to him abruptly the accuracy of his sense of hearing.

He again went forward a few steps, descending in the chamber towards the doorway by the worn remains of an almost effaced staircase. Reaching the bottom he stood still once more. On either side of him he could faintly discern openings leading into other rooms. Perhaps Hermione, hearing him call, had retreated from him through one of them. A sort of horror of the situation came upon him, as he began thoroughly to realize the hatred, hatred of brain, of nerves, of heart, that was surely quivering in Hermione in this moment, that was driving her away into the darkness from sound and touch of life. Like a wounded animal she was creeping away from it and hating it. He remembered Gaspare's words about the look she had cast upon perhaps the most truly faithful of all her friends.

But—she did not know. And he, Artois, must tell her. He must make her see the exact truth of the years. He must win her back to reason.

Reason! As the word went through his mind it chilled him, like the passing of a thing coated with ice. He had been surely a reasonable man, and his reasonableness had led him to this hour. Suddenly he saw himself, as he had seen that palace door by lightning. He saw himself for an instant lit by a glare of fire. He looked, he stared upon himself.

And he shivered, as if he had drawn close to, as if he had stood by, a thing coated with ice.

And he dared to come here, to pursue such a woman as Hermione! He dared to think that he could have any power over her, that his ice could have any power over her fire! He dared to think that! For a moment all, and far more than all, his former feelings of unworthiness, of helplessness, of cowardice, rushed back upon him. Then, abruptly, there came upon him this thought—"Vere believes I have power over Hermione." And then followed the thought—"Gaspare believes that I have power over her." And the ice seemed to crack. He saw fissures in it. He saw it melting. He saw the "thing" it had covered appearing, being gradually revealed as—man.

"Vere believes in my power. Gaspare believes in my power. They are the nearest to Hermione. They know her best. Their instincts about her must be the strongest, the truest. Why do they believe in it? Why do they—why do they know—for they must, they do know, that I have this power, that I am the one to succeed where any one else would fail? Why have they left Hermione in my hands to-night?"

The ice was gone. The lightning flash lit up a man warm with the breath of life. From the gaunt door of the abandoned palace the strip of black cloth, the tragic words above it, dropped down and disappeared.

Suddenly Artois knew why Vere believed in his power, and why Gaspare believed in it—knew how their instincts had guided them, knew to what secret knowledge—perhaps not even consciously now their knowledge—they had travelled. And he remembered the words he had written in the book at Frisio's on the night of the storm:

"La Conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en nous."

He had written those words hurriedly, irritably, merely because he had to write something, and they chanced—he knew not why—to come into his mind as he took hold of the pen. And it was on that night, surely, that his conscience—his innate knowledge—began to betray him. Or—no—it was on that night that he began to defy it, to deny it, to endeavor to cast it out.

For surely he must have known, he had known, what Vere and Gaspare innately knew. Surely his conscience had not slept while theirs had been awake.

He did not know. It seemed to him as if he had not time to decide this now. Very rapidly his mind had worked, rushing surely through corridors of knowledge to gain an inner room. He had only stood at the foot of the crumbling staircase two or three minutes before he moved again decisively, called again, decisively:

"Hermione! Hermione! I know you are here. I have come for you!"

He went to the right. On the left was the chamber which had been taken possession of by the sea. She could not have gone that way, unless—he thought of the fattura della morte, and for a moment the superstitious horror returned upon him. But he banished it. That could not be. His heart was flooded by conviction that cruelty has an end, that the most relentless fate fails at last in its pursuing, that the fattura della morte, if it brought death with it, brought a death that was not of the body, brought, perhaps, a beautiful death of something that had lived too long.

He banished fear, and he entered the chamber on the right. It was lit only by an opening looking to the sea. As he came into it he saw a tall thing—like a tall shadow—pass close to him and disappear. He saw that, and he heard the faint sound of material in movement.

There was then still another chamber on this side, and Hermione had passed into it. He followed her in silence, came to the doorway of it, looked, saw black darkness. There was no other opening either to sea or land. In it Hermione had found what she sought—absolute blackness.

But he had found her. Here she could not escape him.

He stood in the doorway. He remembered Vere's trust in him. He remembered Gaspare's trust. He remembered that Gaspare was waiting in the boat for him—for them. He remembered the words of Gaspare:

"You must make the poor Signora understand!"

That was what he had to do: to make Hermione understand. And that surely he could do. Surely he had the power to do it now.

For he himself understood.

CHAPTER XLII

"Hermione!"

Artois spoke to the void.

"Hermione, because I have followed you, because I have come here, don't you think that I am claiming any right. Don't think that I imagine, because I am your—because I am—I mean that it has not been easy to me to come. It has not been—it is not a simple thing to me to break in upon—upon—"

He had begun to speak with determination. He had said the very first words with energy, almost with a warm eagerness, as of one hurrying on to vital speech. But suddenly the energy faltered, the eagerness failed, the ring of naturalness died out of the voice. It was as if a gust of cold air had blown out a flame. He paused. Then he said, in a low voice:

"You hate me for coming."

He stopped again. He stared at the void, at the blackness.

"You hate me for being here."

As he said the last words the blackness before him surely gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon him to overwhelm him. So acute was his sensation of being attacked, of being in peril, that his body was governed by it and instinctively shrank, trying to make itself small that it might oppose as little resistance as possible to the oncoming foe.

For it seemed to him that the wave of blackness was the wave of Hermione's present hatred, that it came upon him, that it struck him, that it stunned and almost blinded him, then divided, rushing onwards he knew not where, unspent and unsatisfied.

He stood like a man startled and confused, striving to regain lost footing, to recover his normal condition.

"You hate me."

Had he spoken the words or merely thought them? He did not know. He was not conscious of speaking them, yet he seemed to hear them. He looked at the blackness. And again it surely moved. Again he surely saw it gathering itself together, and towering up as a wave towers.

His sensation was absolutely one of nightmare. And exactly as in a nightmare a man feels that he is no longer fully himself, has no longer the power to do any manly or effective thing, so Artois felt now.

It seemed to him that he was nothing, and yet that he was hated. He turned and looked behind him, moved by a fierce desire for relief. He had not the courage to persist in confronting that blackness which took a form, which came upon him, which would surely overwhelm him.

In the distance he saw a pallor, where the face of the night looked into the palace from the sea. And he heard the distant water. Still the little waves were entering the deserted chambers, only to seek an exit which they could never find. Their ceaseless determination was horrible to him, because it suggested to him the ceaseless determination of those other waves of black hatred, one following another, from some hidden centre of energy that was inexhaustible. As he listened the sound of the sea stole into his ears till his brain was full of it, till he felt as if into his brain, as into those deserted chambers, the waves were penetrating, the waves of the sea and those dark waves which gathered themselves together and flowed upon him from the void.

For a moment they possessed him. For a moment he was the prey of these two oceans.

Then he made a violent effort, released himself, and turned again to the chamber in which Hermione was hidden. He faced the blackness. He was able to do that now. But he was not able to go on speaking to the woman who remained invisible, but whose influence he was so painfully conscious of. He was not able to speak to her because she was surely speaking to him, was communicating to him not only her feeling towards him, but also its reason, its basis, in that wordless language which is only used and comprehended by human beings in moments of crisis and intense emotion. That was what he felt, seemed to know.

He stood there, facing the blackness and listening, while she seemed to be telling him her woman's reasons for her present hatred of the man who had been for so long a time her closest friend.

And these reasons were not only the reasons born of a day's events, of the discovery of the lie on which her spirit had been resting. She did not say—her heart did not say only: "I hate you because you let me believe in that which never existed except in my imagination—my husband's complete love of me, complete faithfulness to me. I hate you because you enclosed me in the prison of a lie. I hate you because during all these years you have been a witness of my devotion to an idol, a graven image whose wooden grimace I mistook for the smile of the god's happy messenger, because you have been a witness of my cult for the memory of one who betrayed my trust in him, who thought nothing of my gift to him, who put another in the sanctuary that should have been sacred to me, and who has poisoned the sources of the holy streams that flow into and feed the soul of a good woman."

If Hermione had silently told Artois reasons such as these for hating him she would have roused him to battle with her, to defend himself with some real hope of holding his own, even of eventual conquest. But other reasons, too, did they not come from her, creeping out of her brain and heart and soul into his, reasons against which he had no weapons, against which he could make no defence?

He had claimed to understand the psychology of women. He had believed he comprehended women well. Hermione best of all women. But these reasons, creeping out of her into him, set a ring of illuminating fire about his misconception. They told him that though perhaps he had known one Hermione in his friend, there were other Hermiones in her whom he had never really known. Once in the garden of the island by night he had seen, or fancied he had seen, a strange smile upon her face that betokened a secret bitterness; and for a moment he had been confused, and had faltered in his speech, and had felt as if he were sitting with a stranger who was hostile to him, or, if not actually hostile, was almost cruelly critical of him. Now that stranger silently spoke to him, silently told him many things.

She told him—that which few men ever know—something of what women specially want, specially need in life. And the catalogue of these needs seemed to him to be also the catalogue of her reasons for hating him at this moment.

"Women need—I needed," she seemed to say, "not only a large and ample friendship, noble condescending, a friendship like an announcement to citizens affixed to the wall of a market-place, and covering boldly all the principal circumstances and likely happenings of ordinary feminine life, but a friendship, an affection, very individual, very full of subtlety, not such as would suit, would fit comfortably women, but such as would suit, would fit comfortably, would fit beautifully one individual woman—me."

Ah, the "women need" was flung away, like a stone thrown into the sea! It was the "I needed" that was held fast, that was shown to Artois now. And the "I" stood to Hermione for herself. But might it not have stood to the world for many a woman?

"I needed some one to whom I could be kind, for whom I could think, plan, hope, weave a fabric of ambitious dreams, look forward along the path that leads to glory. I needed some one for whom I could be unselfish, to whom I could often offer those small burnt sacrifices whose smoke women love to see ascending towards God, burnt sacrifices of small personal desire, small personal plans and intentions. I needed some one to need my encouragement, my admiration—frequently expressed—my perpetual sympathy hovering about him like a warm cloud of fragrant incense, my gentle criticism, leading him to efforts which would win from the world, and from me, more admiration of and wonder at his energy and genius. I needed some one to stir within me woman's soft passion for forgiveness, woman's delight in petting the child who has been naughty, but who puts the naughtiness aside and runs home to be good again. I needed some one to set upon a pedestal.

"These needs you fully satisfied.

"You gave me generously opportunities for kindness, for thoughtfulness, for impersonal ambition, for looking forward on your behalf, for unselfishness, for the sacrifice of my little personal desires, plans, and intentions, for encouragement of you, for admiration of your abilities, for sympathy—even for gentle criticism leading you to efforts which won from me eventually a greater respect for your powers and for secret forgiveness which ended in open petting. When I prepared the pedestal you were quite ready to mount it, and to remain upon it without any demonstration of fatigue.

"And so many needs of mine you satisfied.

"But I had more needs, and far other needs, than these.

"I needed not only to make many gifts, to satisfy my passion for generosity, but to have many gifts, and gifts of a special nature, made in return to me. I needed to feel another often, if not perpetually and exclusively, intent on me. I needed to feel tenderness—watchful, quick, eager tenderness, not tenderness slow-footed and in blinkers—round about me.

"I needed a little blindness in my friend. That is true. But the blindness that I needed was not blindness to my little sacrifices, but blindness to my little faults.

"To a woman there is such a world of difference between the two! I longed for my friend to see the smoke ascending from my small burnt-offerings of self made for his sake. But I longed, too, for him not always to see with calm, clear eyes my petty failings, my minute vanities, my inconsistencies, my incongruities, my frequent lack of reasoning power and logical sequence, my gusts of occasional injustice—ending nearly always in a rain of undue benefits—my surely forgivable follies of sentiment, my irritabilities—how often due to physical causes which no man could ever understand!—my blunders of the head—of the heart I made but few, or none—my weak depressions, struggled against but not always conquered, my perhaps childish anxieties and apprehensions, my forebodings, not invariably well founded, my fleeting absurdities of temper, of temperament, of manner, or of word.

"But as definitely as my friend did not see my little sacrifices he saw my little faults, and he made me see that he saw them. Men are so free from the tender deceits that women are compact of.

"And as I needed blindness in some directions, in others I needed clear sight.

"I needed some one to see that my woman's heart was not only the heart of a happy mother, to whom God had given an almost perfect child, but also the heart of a lover—not of a grande amoureuse, perhaps, but of a lover who had been deprived of the love that is the complement of woman's, and who suffered perpetually in woman's peculiar and terrible way because of that deprivation.

"I needed an understanding of my sacred hunger, a comprehension of my desolation, a realization that my efforts to fill my time with work were as the efforts of a traveller in a forest to escape from the wolves whose voices he hears behind him. I needed the recognition of a simple truth—that the thing one is passionately eager to give is nearly always the thing one is passionately eager to receive, and that when I poured forth sympathy upon others I was longing to have it poured forth upon me. I gave because secretly I realized the hunger I was sharing. And often, having satisfied your hunger, I was left to starve, no longer in company, but entirely alone.

"I needed great things, perhaps, but I needed them expressed in little ways; and I needed little cares, little attentions, little thoughtfulnesses, little preventions, little, little, absurd kindnesses, tendernesses, recognitions, forgivenesses. Perhaps, indeed, even more than anything magnificent or great, I needed the so-called little things. It is not enough for a woman to know that a man would do for her something important, something even superb, if the occasion for it arose. Such an occasion probably never would arise—and she cannot wait. She wants to be shown at every moment that some one is thinking kindly of her, is making little, kind plots and plans for her, is wishing to ward off from her the chill winds, to keep from pricking her the thorns of the roses, to shut out from her the shadows of life and let in the sunbeams to her pathway.

"I needed the tender, passing touch to show me my secret grief was understood, and my inconsistency was pardoned. I needed the generous smile to prove to me that my greed for kindness, even when perhaps inopportune, was met in an ungrudging spirit. I needed now and then—I needed this sometimes terribly, more, perhaps, than any other thing—a sacrifice of some very small, very personal desire of yours, because it was not mine or because it was opposite to mine. Never, never, did my heart and my nature demand of yours any great sacrifice of self, such as mine could have made—such as mine once did make—for you. But it did demand, often—often it demanded some small sacrifice: the giving up of some trifle, the resignation of some advantage, perhaps, that your man's intellect gave you over my woman's intellect, the abandoning of some argumentative position, or the not taking of it, the sweet pretence—scarcely a sin against the Holy Ghost of truth!—that I was a tiny bit more persuasive, or more clear-sighted, or more happy in some contention, or more just in some decision, than perhaps I really was. I needed to be shown your affection for me, as I was ever ready, ever anxious, to show mine for you, in all the little ways that are the language of the heart and that fill a woman's life with music.

"All this I needed. My nature cried out for it as instinctively as the nature of man cries out for God. But all this I needed generally in vain. You were not always a niggard. You were ready sometimes to give in your way. But were you ever ready to give in mine when you saw—and sometimes you must have seen, sometimes you did see—what mine was? I longed always to give you all you wanted in the way you wanted it. But you gave when you wished and as you chose to give. I was often grateful. I was too often grateful. I was unduly grateful. Because I was giving, I was always giving far more than I received.

"But all that time I had something. All that time I had a memory that I counted sacred. All that time, like an idiot child, I was clasping in my hand a farthing, which I believed, which I stated, to be a shining piece of gold.

"You knew what it was. You knew it was a farthing! You knew—you knew!

"And now that the hour has come when I know, too, can't you understand that I realize not only that that farthing is a farthing, but that all farthings are farthings? Can't you understand that I hate those who have given me farthings when my hands were stretched out for gold—my hands that were giving gold?

"Can't you understand? Can't you? Then I'll make you understand! I'll make you! I'll make you!"

Again the blackness gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon Artois to overwhelm him. He stood firm and received the shock. For he was beginning to understand. He was no longer confronting waves of hatred which were also waves of mystery.

He had thought that Hermione hated him, hated every one just then, because of what Ruffo had silently told her that day at Mergellina. But as he stood there in the dark at the door of that black chamber, hearing the distant murmur of the sea about the palace walls, there were borne in upon him, as if in words she told him, all the reasons for present hatred of him which preceded the great reason of that day; reasons for hatred which sprang, perhaps, which surely must spring, from other reasons of love.

His mind was exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely moved, yet it discerned much truth. And it was very strange, but his now acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of the darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes, causes which nevertheless would surely never have produced the effect he felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute consciousness of a personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois a new sensation of something that was not hatred, that was the reverse of hatred. Vere had once compared him to a sleepy lion. The lion was now awake.

"Hermione," he said—and now his voice was strong and unfaltering—"I seem to have been listening to you all this time that I have been standing here. Surely I have been listening to you, hearing your thoughts. Don't you know it? Haven't you felt it? When I left the island, when I followed you, I thought I understood. I thought I understood what you were feeling, almost all that you were feeling. I know now how little I understood. I didn't realize how much there was to understand. You've been telling me. Haven't you, Hermione? Haven't you?"

He paused. But there was no answer.

"I am sure you have been telling me. We must get down to the truth at last. I thought—till now I have thought that I was more able to read the truth than most men. You must often have laughed—how you must have laughed—secretly at my pretensions. Only once—one night in the garden on the island—I think I saw you laughing. And even then I didn't understand. Mon Dieu!"

He was becoming fiercely concentrated now on what he was saying. He was losing all self-consciousness. He was even losing consciousness of the strange fact that he was addressing a void. It was as if he saw Hermione, so strongly did he feel her.

"Mon Dieu! It is as if I'd been blind all the time I have known you, blind to the truth of you and blinder still to my own truth. Perhaps I am blind now. I don't know. But, Hermione, I can see something. I do know something of you and of myself. I do know that even now there is a link between us. You want to deny it. You wouldn't acknowledge it. But it is there. We are not quite apart from each other. We can't be that. for there is something—there has always been something, since that night we met in Paris, at Madame Enthoven's"—he paused again, so vividly flashed the scene of that dinner in Paris upon his memory—"something to draw us together, something to hold us together, something strong. Don't deny it even now. Don't deny it. Can't I be of some help, even now? Don't say I am utterly useless because I have been so useless to you, so damnably useless in the past. I see all that, my wretched uselessness to you through all these years. I am seeing it now while I am speaking. All the time I'm seeing it. What you have deserved and what you have had!"

He stopped, then he said again:

"What you have deserved and what you have had from me! And from—it was so—it was the same long ago, not here. But till to-day you didn't know that. I was wrong. I must have been wrong, hideously wrong, but I didn't want you ever to know that. It isn't that I don't love truth. You know I do. But I thought that he was right. And it is only lately, this summer, that I have had any doubts. But I was wrong. I must have been wrong. It was intended that you should know. God, perhaps, intended it."

He thought he heard a movement. But he was not quite sure. For there was always the noise of the sea in the deserted chambers of the palace.

"It seems to me now as if I had always been deceived, mistaken, blind with you, about you. I thought you need never know. I was mad enough to think that. But I was madder still, for I thought—I must have thought—that you could not bear to know, that you weren't strong enough to endure the knowledge. But"—he was digging deep now, searching for absolute truth: in this moment his natural passion for truth, in one direction repressed for many years deliberately and consciously, in other directions, perhaps almost unconsciously frustrated, took entire possession of his being—"but nothing should ever be allowed to stand in the way of truth. I believe that. I know it. I must, I will always act upon the knowledge from this moment. Never mind if it is bitter, cruel. Perhaps it is sometimes put into the world because of that. I've been a horrible faineant, the last of faineants. I protected you from the truth. With Gaspare I managed to do it. We never spoke of it—never. But I think each of us understood. And we acted together for you in that. And I—it has often seemed to me that it was a fine thing to do, and that my motives in doing it were fine. But sometimes I have wondered whether they weren't selfish—whether, instead of protecting you, I wasn't only protecting myself. For it was all my fault. It all came about through me, through my weakness, my cursed weakness, my cursed weakness and whining for help." He grew scarlet in the dark, realizing how his pride in his strength, his quiet assumption with Hermione that he was the stronger, must often have made her marvel, or almost weep. "I called you away. I called you to Africa. And if I hadn't it would all have been different."

"No, it would all have been the same."

Artois started. Out of the darkness a voice, a low, cold, inexorable voice had spoken—had spoken absolute truth, correcting his lie:

"It would all have been the same!"

The woman's unerring instinct had penetrated much further than the man's. He had been feeling the shell; she plucked out the kernel. He had been speaking of the outward facts, of the actions of the body; she spoke of the inward facts, of the actions of the soul. Her husband's sin against her was not his unfaithfulness, the unfaithfulness at the Fair, but the fact that all the time he had been with her, all the time she had been giving her whole self to him, all the time that she had been surrounding him with her love, he had retained in his soul the power to will to commit it. That he had been given an opportunity to sin was immaterial. What was material was that he had been capable of sinning.

Artois saw his lie. And he stood there silent, rebuked, waiting for the voice to speak again. But it did not speak. And he felt as if Hermione were silently demanding that he should sound the deeper depths of truth, he who had always proclaimed to her his love of truth.

"Perhaps—yes, it would have been the same," he said. "But—but—" His intention was to say, "But we should not have known it." He checked himself. Even as they formed themselves in his mind the words seemed bending like some wretched, flabby reed.

"It would have been the same. But that makes no difference in my conduct. I was weak and called to you. You were strong and came to me. How strong you were! How strong it was of you to come!"

As if for the first time—and indeed it was for the first time—he really and thoroughly comprehended her self-sacrifice, the almost bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the force of her love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a child wonders at things, how he had been able during all these years quite simply, with indeed the almost incredible simplicity of man, never to be shared by any woman, to assume and to feel, when with Hermione, that he was the dominant spirit of the two, that she was, very rightly and properly, and very happily for her, leaning comfortably upon his strength. And in his wonder he knew that the real dominance strikes its roots in the heart, not in the head.

"You were strong, then, and you were strong, you were wonderfully strong, when—afterwards. On Monte Amato—that evening—you were strong."

His mind went to that mountain summit. The eyes of his mind saw the evening calm on Etna, and then—something else, a small, fluttering fragment of white paper at his feet among the stones. And, as if her mind read his, she spoke again, still in that low, cold, and inexorable voice.

"That piece of paper you found—what was it?"

"Hermione—Hermione—it was part of a letter of yours written in Africa, telling him that we were coming to Sicily, the day we were coming."

"It was that!"

The voice had suddenly changed. It struggled with a sob. It sank away in a sob. The sin—that she could speak of with a sound of calm. But all the woman in her was stricken by the thought of her happy letter treated like that, hated, denied, destroyed, and thrown to the winds.

"My letter! My letter!"

"Hermione!"

His heart spoke in his voice, and he made a step forward in the darkness.

"Don't!"

The voice had changed again, had become sharp, almost cutting. Like the lash of a whip it fell upon him. And he stopped at once. It seemed to him as if she had cried out, "If you dare to give me your pity I shall kill you!"

And he felt as if just then, for such a reason, she would be capable of such an action.

"I will not—" He almost faltered. "I am not—coming."

Never before had he been so completely dominated by any person, or by any fate, or by anything at all.

There was again a silence. Then he said:

"You are strong. I know you will be strong now. You can't go against your nature. I ought to have realized that as I have not realized it. I ought to have trusted to your strength long ago."

If he had known how weak she felt while she listened to him, how her whole being was secretly entreating to be supported, to be taken hold of tenderly, and guarded and cared for like a child! But he was a man. And at one moment he understood her and at another he did not.

"Gaspare and I—we wished to spare you. And perhaps I wished to spare myself. I think I did. I am sure I did. I am sure that was partly my reason. I was secretly ashamed of my cowardice, my weakness in Africa; and when I knew—no, when I guessed, for it was only that—what my appeal to you had caused—all it had caused—"

He paused. He was thinking of Maurice's death, which must have been a murder, which he was certain had been a murder.

"I hadn't—"

But the compelling voice from the darkness interrupted him.

"All?" it said.

He hesitated. Had she read his mind again?

"All?"

"The misery," he answered, slowly. "The sorrow that has lain upon your life ever since."

"Did you mean that? Did you only mean that?"

"No."

"What did you mean?"

"I was thinking of his death," he replied.

He spoke very quietly. He was resolved to have no more subterfuges, whatever the coward or the tender friend, or—the something else that was more than the tender friend within him might prompt him to try to hide.

"I was thinking of his death."

"His death!"

Artois felt cold with apprehension, but he was determined to be sincere.

"I don't understand."

"Don't ask me any more, Hermione. I know nothing more."

"He was coming from the island. He slipped and fell into the sea."

"He fell into the sea."

There was a long silence between them, filled by the perpetual striving of the restless waves within the chambers of the palace. Then she said:

"Her father was on the island that night?"

"I think he was."

"Was it that? Was it that? Did Maurice make that atonement?"

Artois shuddered. Her voice was so strange, or sounded so strange in the dark. Did she wish to think, wish to be sure that her husband had been murdered? He heard the faint rustle of her dress. She had moved. Was she coming nearer? He heard her breathing, or thought he heard it. He longed to be certain. He longed to still the perpetual cry of the baffled sea.

"Then he was brave—at the last. I think he knew—I am sure he knew—when he went down to the sea. I am sure he knew—when he said good-bye."

Her voice was nearer to him. And again it had changed, utterly changed. And in the different sounds of her voice Artois seemed to see the different women who dwelt within her, to understand and to know them as he had never understood and known them before. This woman was pleading, as women will plead for a man they have once loved, so long as they have voices, so long as they have hearts.

"Then that last time he didn't—no, he didn't go to—her."

The voice was almost a whisper, and Artois knew that she was speaking for herself—that she was telling herself that her husband's last action had been—not to creep to the woman, but to stand up and face the man.

"Was it her father?"

The voice was still almost a whisper.

"I think it was."

"Maurice paid then—he paid!"

"Yes. I am sure he paid."

"Gaspare knew. Gaspare knew—that night. He was afraid. He knew—but he didn't tell me. He has never told me."

"He loved his master."

"Gaspare loved Maurice more than he loved me."

By the way she said that Artois knew that Gaspare was forgiven. And a sort of passion of love for woman's love welled up in his heart. At that moment he almost worshipped Hermione for being unable, even in that moment, not to love Gaspare because Gaspare had loved the dead man more than he loved her.

"But Gaspare loves you," he said.

"I don't believe in love. I don't want love any more."

Again the voice was transformed. It had become hollow and weary, without resonance, like the voice of some one very old. And Artois thought of Virgil's Grotto, of all they had said there, and of how the rock above them had broken into deep and sinister murmurings, as if to warn them, or rebuke.

And now, too, there were murmurings about them, but below them from the sea.

"Hermione, we must speak only the truth to-night."

"I am telling you the truth. You chose to follow me. You chose to hunt me—to hunt me when you knew it was necessary to me to be alone. It was brutal to do it. It was brutal. I had earned the right at least to one thing: I had earned the right to be alone. But you didn't care. You wouldn't respect my right. You hunted me as you might have hunted an animal. I tried to escape. But you saw me coming, and you chased me, and you caught me. I can't get away. You have driven me in here. And I can't get away from you. You won't even let me be alone."

"I dare not let you be alone to-night."

"Why not? What are you afraid of? What does it matter to you where I go or what I do? Don't say it matters! Don't dare say that!"

Her voice was fierce now.

"It doesn't matter to anybody, except perhaps a little to Vere and a very little to Gaspare. It never has really mattered to anybody. I thought it did once to some one. I thought I knew it did. But I was wrong. It didn't. It never mattered."

As she spoke an immense, a terrific feeling of desolation poured over her, as if from above, coming down upon her in the dark. It was like a flood that stiffened into ice upon her, making her body and her soul numb for a moment.

"I've never mattered to any one."

She muttered the words to herself. As she did so Artois seemed again to be looking into the magic mirror of the fattura della morte, to see the pale man, across whose face the shadow of a palm-leaf shifted, turning on his bed towards a woman who stood by an open door.

"You have always mattered to me," he said.

As he spoke there was in his voice that peculiar ring of utter sincerity which can no more be simulated, or mistaken, than the ringing music of sterling gold. But perhaps she was not in a condition to hear rightly, or perhaps something within her chose to deny, had a lust for denial because denial hurt her.

"To you least of all," she said. "Only yourself has ever really mattered to you."

In a sentence she summed up the long catalogue that had been given to him by her silence.

His whole body felt as if it reddened. His skin tingled with a sort of physical anger. His mature pride that had grown always, as a strong man's natural pride does grow with the passing of the years, seemed to him instinctively to rush forward to return the blow that had been dealt it.

"That is not quite true," he said.

"It is true. I have always had copper and I have always wanted gold," she answered.

He controlled himself, to prove to himself that she lied, that he was not the eternal egoist she dubbed him. Sometimes he had been genuinely unselfish, sometimes—not often, perhaps, but sometimes—he had really sunk himself in her. She was not being quite just. But how could she be quite just to-night? An almost reckless feeling overtook him, a desire to conquer at all costs in this struggle; to win her back, whether against her will or not, to her old self; to eliminate the shocking impression made upon her soul by the discovery of that day, to wipe it out utterly, to replace it with another; to revive within her that beautiful enthusiasm which had been as a light always shining for her and from her upon people and events and life; to make her understand, to prove to her that, after all allowance has been made for uncertainties and contradictions of fate, for the ironies, the paradoxes, the cruelties, the tragedies, and the despairs of existence, the great, broad fact emerges, that what the human being gives, in the long run the human being generally gets, and that she who persistently gives gold will surely at last receive it.

The thought of a lost Hermione struck to his heart a greater fear than had already that night the thought of a dead Hermione. And if she was changed she was lost.

The real, the beautiful Hermione—he must seize her, grip her, hold her fast before it was too late.

"Hermione," he said, "I think you saved me from death; I am sure you did. Did you save me only to hate me?"

She made no reply.

"Do you remember that evening when you came into my room at Kairouan all covered with dust from your journey across the plains? I do. I remember it as if it had happened an hour ago instead of nearly seventeen years. I remember the strange feeling I had when I turned my head and saw you, a feeling that you and Africa would fight for me and that you would conquer. It had seemed to me that Africa meant to have me and would have me. Unless you came I felt certain of that. And I had thought about it all as I lay there in the stifling heat, till I almost felt the feverish earth enclosing me. I had loved Africa, but Africa seemed to me terrible then. I thought of only Arabs, always Arabs, walking above me on the surface of the ground when I was buried. And the thought made me shudder with horror. As if it could have mattered! I was absurd! But one is often absurd when one is very ill. The child in one comes out then, I suppose. And I had wondered—how I had wondered!—whether there was any chance of your coming. I hadn't actually asked you to come. I hadn't dared to do that. But it was the same thing almost. I had let you know—I had let you know. And I saw you come into my room all covered with dust. You had come so quickly—at once. Perhaps—perhaps sometimes you have thought I had forgotten that evening. I may be an egoist. I expect most men are egoists. And perhaps I am the egoist you say I am. Often one doesn't know what one is. But I have never forgotten that day, and that you were covered with dust. It was that—the dust—which seemed to make me realize that you had not lost a moment as to whether you would come or not. You looked as if—almost as if you had run all the way to be in time to save my life—my wretched life. And you saved it. Did you save me to hate me?"

He waited for her to speak. But still she was silent. He heard no sound of her at all, and for a moment he almost wondered whether she had discovered that the chamber had some second outlet, whether she had not escaped while he had been speaking. But he looked round and he saw only dense darkness. She must be there still, close to him, hearing everything he said, whether against her will or with it. He was being perfectly sincere, and he was feeling very deeply, with intensity. But out of his natural reserve now rose a fear—the fear that perhaps his voice, his speech, did not convey his sincerity to her. If she should mistake him! If she should fancy he was trying to play upon her emotions in order to win her away from some desperate resolve. He longed to make her see what he was feeling, feel what he was feeling, be him and herself for one moment. And now the darkness began to distract him. He wanted light. He wanted to see Hermione, to see which of the women in her faced him, which was listening to him.

"Hermione," he said, "I want you—I want—it's hateful speaking like this, always in the darkness. Don't make me feel all the time that I am holding you a prisoner. No, I can't—I won't bear that any more."

He moved suddenly from the doorway back into the room behind him, in which there was a very little, very faint light. There he waited.

Almost immediately the tall shadow which had disappeared into the darkness emerged from it, passed before him, and went into the central chamber of the palace. He followed it, and found Hermione standing by the great doorway that overlooked the sea. Hermione she was, no longer a shadow, but the definite darkness of a human form relieved against the clear but now moonless night. She was waiting. Surely she was waiting for him. She might have escaped, but she stayed. She was willing, then, to hear what he had to say, all he had to say.

He stood still at a little distance from her. But in this hall the sound of the sea which came from the chamber on the left was much more distinct and disturbing than in the chamber where she had hidden. And he came nearer to her, till he was very near, almost close to her.

"If you hated me for—once, when we were standing on the terrace, you said, 'Take care—or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark.' If you hated me because of what I have done, with Gaspare, Hermione, I could bear it. I could bear it, because I think it would pass away. We did keep you in the dark. Now you know it. But you know our reason, and that it was a reason of very deep affection. And I think you would forgive us, I know you would forgive us in the end. But I understand it isn't only that—"

Suddenly he thought of Vere, of that perhaps dawning folly, so utterly dead now, so utterly dead that he could no longer tell whether it had ever even sluggishly stirred with life. He thought of Vere, and of the poems, and of the secret of Peppina's revelation. And he wondered whether the record he seemed to read in the silence had been a true record, or whether his imagination and his intellect of a psychologist, alert even in this hour of intense emotion, had been deceiving him. Hermione had seemed to be speaking to him. But had he really been only impersonating her? Had it been really himself that had spoken to himself? As this question arose in his mind he longed to make Hermione speak. Then he could be sure of all. He must clear away all misconception. Yet, even now, how could he speak of that episode with Vere?

"You say you have always wanted gold, and that you have never been given gold—"

"Yes."

He saw the dark figure near him lift its head. And he felt that Hermione had come out of the darkness with the intention of speaking the truth of what she felt. If she could not have spoken she would have stayed in the inner chamber, or she would have escaped altogether from the palace when he moved from the doorway. He was sure that only if she spoke would she change. In her silence there was damnation for them both. But she meant to speak.

"I have been a fool. I see that now. But I think I have been suspecting it for some time—nearly all this summer."

He could hear by the sound of her voice that while she was speaking she was thinking deeply. Like him, she was in search of absolute truth.

"It is only this summer that I have begun to see why people—you—have often smiled at my enthusiasms. No wonder you smiled! No wonder you laughed at me secretly!"

Her voice was hard and bitter.

"I never laughed at you, never—either secretly or openly!" he said, with a heat almost of anger.

"Oh yes, you did, as a person who can see clearly might laugh at a short-sighted person tumbling over all the little obstacles on a road. I was always tumbling over things—always—and you must always have been laughing. I have been a fool. Instead of growing up, my heart has remained a child—till now. That's what it is. Children who have been kindly treated think the world is all kindness. Because my friends were good to me, the world was good to me, I got into the habit of believing that I was lovable, and of loving in return. And I trusted people. I always thought they were giving me what I was giving them. That has been my great folly, the folly I'm punished for. I have been a credulous fool. I have thought that because I gave a thing with all my heart it was—it must be—given back to me. And yet I was surprised—I could scarcely believe it—when—when—"

He knew she was thinking of her beautiful wonder when Maurice had said he loved her.

"I could scarcely believe it! But, because I was a fool, I got to believe it, and I have believed it till to-day—you have stood by, and watched me believing it, and laughed at me for believing it till to-day."

"Hermione!"

"Yes, you mayn't have meant to laugh, but you must have laughed. Your mind, your intellect must have laughed. Don't say they haven't. I wouldn't believe you. And I know your mind—at any rate, I know that. Not your heart! I shall never pretend—I shall never think again for a moment that I know anything—anything at all—about a man's heart. But I do know something about your mind. And I know the irony in it. What a subject I have presented to you all these years for the exercise of your ironic faculty! You ought to thank me! You ought to go on your knees and thank me and bless me for that!"

"Hermione!"

"Just now you talked of my coming into your room in Kairouan all covered with dust. You asked me if I remembered it. Yes, I do. And I remember something you don't—probably you don't—remember. There was no looking-glass in your room."

She stopped.

"No looking-glass!" he repeated, wondering.

"No, there was no looking-glass. And I remember when I came in I saw there wasn't, and I was glad. Because I couldn't look at myself and see how dreadful and dishevelled and hideous I was—how dirty even I was. My impulse was to go to a glass. And then I was glad I couldn't. And I looked at your face. And I thought 'he doesn't care. He loves me, all dusty and hideous and horrid, as I am.' And then I didn't care either. I said to myself, 'I look an object, and I don't mind a bit, because I see in his face that he loves me for myself, because he sees my heart, and—'"

And suddenly in her voice there was a sharp, hissing catch, and she stopped short. For a full minute she was silent. And Artois did not speak. Nor did he move.

"I felt then, perhaps for the first time, 'the outside doesn't matter to real people.' I felt that. I felt, 'I'm real, and he is real, and—and Maurice is real. And though it is splendid to be beautiful, and beauty means so much, yet it doesn't mean so much as I used to think. Real people get beyond it. And when once they have got beyond it then life begins.' I remember thinking that, feeling that, and—just for a minute loving my own ugliness. And then, suddenly, I wished there was a looking-glass in the room that I might stand before it and see what an object I was, and then look into your face and see that it didn't matter. And I even triumphed in my ugliness. 'I have a husband who doesn't mind,' I thought. 'And I have a friend who doesn't mind. They love me, both of them, whatever I look like. It's me—the woman inside—they love, because they know I care, and how I care for them.' And that thought made me feel as if I could do anything for Maurice and anything for you; heroic things, or small, dreadful, necessary things; as if I could be the servant of, or sacrifice my life easily for, those who loved me so splendidly, who knew how to love so splendidly. And I was happy then even in sacrificing my happiness with Maurice. And I thanked God then for not having given me beauty.

"And I was a fool. But I didn't find it out. And so I revelled in self-sacrifice. You don't know, you could never understand, how I enjoyed doing the most menial things for you in your illness. Often you thanked me, and often you seemed ashamed that I should do such things. And the doctor—that little Frenchman—apologized to me. And you both thought that doing so much in the frightful heat would make me ill. And I blessed the heat and the flies and everything that made what I did for you more difficult to do. Because the doing of what was more difficult, more trying, more fatiguing needed more love. And my gratitude to you for your loving friendship, and for needing me more than any one else, wanted to be tried to the uttermost. And I thought, too, 'When I go back to Maurice I shall be worth a little more, I shall be a little bit finer, and he'll feel it. He'll understand exactly what it was to me to leave him so soon, to leave—to leave what I thought of then as my Garden of Paradise. And he'll love me more because I had the courage to leave it to try and save my friend. He'll realize—he'll realize—' But men don't. They don't want to. Or they can't. I'm sure—I'm positive now that men think less of women who are ready to sacrifice themselves than of women who wish to make slaves of them. I see that now. It's the selfish women they admire, the women who take their own way and insist on having all they want, not the women who love to serve them—not slavishly, but out of love. A selfish woman they can understand; but a woman who gives up something very precious to her they don't understand. Maurice never understood my action in going to Africa. And you—I don't believe you ever understood it. You must have wondered at my coming as much as he did at my going. You were glad I came at the moment. Oh yes, you were glad. I know that. But afterwards you must have wondered, you did wonder. You thought it Quixotic, odd. You said to yourself, 'It was just like Hermione. How could she do it? How could she come to me if she really loved her husband?' And very likely my coming made you doubt my really loving Maurice. I am almost sure it did. I don't believe all these years you have ever understood what I felt about him, what his death meant to me, what life meant to me afterwards. I told—I tried to tell you in the cave—that day. But I don't think you really understood at all. And he—he didn't understand my love for him. But I suppose he didn't even want to. When I went away he simply forgot all about me. That was it. I wasn't there, and he forgot. I wasn't there, and another woman was there—and that was enough for him. And I dare say—now—it is enough for most men, perhaps for every man. And then I'd made another mistake. I was always making mistakes when my heart led me. And I'd made a mistake in thinking that real people get beyond looks, the outside—and that then life begins. They don't—at least real men don't. A woman may spend her heart's blood for a man through years, and for youthful charm and a face that is pretty, for the mere look in a pair of eyes or the curve of a mouth, he'll almost forget that she's alive, even when she's there before him. He'll take the other woman's part against her instinctively, whichever is in the right. If both women do exactly the same thing a man will find that the pretty woman has performed a miracle and the ugly woman made some preposterous mistake. That is how men are. That is how you are, I suppose, and that was Maurice, too. He forgot me for a peasant. But—she must have been pretty once. And I was always ugly!"

"Delarey loved you," Artois said, suddenly, interrupting her in a strong, deep voice, a voice that rang with true conviction.

"He never loved me. Perhaps he thought he did. He must have thought so. And that first day—when we were coming up the mountain-side—"

She stopped. She was seized; she was held fast in the grip of a memory so intense, so poignant, that she made, she could make, no effort to release herself. She heard the drowsy wail of the Ceramella dropping down the mountain-side in the radiant heat of noon. She felt Maurice's warm hand. She remembered her words about the woman's need to love—"I wanted, I needed to love—do men ever feel that? Women do often, nearly always, I think." The Pastorale—it sounded in her ears. Or was it the sea that sounded, the sea in the abandoned chambers of the Palace of the Spirits? She listened. No, it was the Pastorale, that antique, simple, holy tune, that for her must always be connected with the thought of love, man's love for woman, and the Bambino's love for all the creatures of God. It flooded her heart, and beneath it sank down, like a drowning thing, for a moment the frightful bitterness that was alive in her heart to-night.

"Delarey loved you," Artois repeated. "He loved you on the first day in Sicily, and he loved you on the last."

"And—and the days between?"

Her voice spoke falteringly. In her voice there was a sound of pleading that struck into the very depths of his heart. The real Hermione was in that sound, the loving woman who needed love, who deserved a love as deep as that which she had given, as that which she surely still had to give.

"He loved you always, but he loved you in his way."

"In his way!" she repeated, with a sort of infinite, hopeless sadness.

"Yes, Hermione, in his way. Oh, we all have our ways, all our different ways of loving. But I don't believe a human being ever existed who had no way at all. Delarey's way was different from your way, so different that, now you know the truth of him, perhaps you can't believe he ever loved you. But he did. He was young, and he was hot-blooded—he was really of the South. And the sun got hold of him. And he betrayed you. But he repented. That last day he was stricken, not by physical fear, but by a tremendous shame at what he had done to you, and perhaps, also, by fear lest you should ever know it. I sat with him by the wall, and I felt without at all fully understanding it the drama in his soul. But now I understand it. I'm sure I understand it. And I think the depth of a shame is very often the exact measure of the depth of a love. Perhaps, indeed, there is no more exact measure."

Again he thought of the episode with Vere, and of his determination always from henceforth to be absolutely sincere with himself and with those whom he really loved.

"I am sure there is no more exact measure. Hermione, it is very difficult, I think, to realize what any human being is, to judge any one quite accurately. Some judge a nature by the distance it can sink, others by the distance it can rise. Which do you do? Do you judge Delarey by his act of faithlessness? And, if you do, how would you judge me?"

"You!"

There was a sound of wonder in her voice.

"Yes. You say I am an egoist. And this that I am saying will seem to you egoism. It is egoism, I suppose. But I want to know—I must know. How would you judge me? How do you judge me?"

She was silent.

"How are you judging me at this moment? Aren't you judging me by the distance I fall, the distance, perhaps, you think I have fallen?"

He spoke slowly. He was delaying. For all the time he spoke he was secretly battling with his pride—and his pride was a strong fighter. But to-night his passion for sincerity, his instinct that for Hermione—and for him, too—salvation lay in their perfect, even in their cruel sincerity to themselves and to each other, was a strong fighter also. In it his pride met an antagonist that was worthy of it. And he went on:

"Are you judging me by this summer?"

He paused.

"Go on," she said.

He could not tell by her voice what she was feeling, thinking. Expression seemed to be withdrawn from it, perhaps deliberately.

"This summer something has come between us, a cloud has come between us. I scarcely know when I first noticed it, when it came. But I have felt it, and you have felt it."

"Yes."

"It might, perhaps, have arisen from the fact of my suspicion who Ruffo was, a suspicion that lately became a certainty. My suspicion, and latterly my knowledge, no doubt changed my manner—made me anxious, perhaps, uneasy, made me watchful, made me often seem very strange to you. That alone might have caused a difference in our relations. But I think there was something else."

"Yes, there was something else."

"And I think, I feel sure now, that it was something to do with Vere. I was, I became deeply interested in Vere—interested in a new way. She was growing up. She was passing from childhood into girlhood. She was developing swiftly. That development fascinated me. Of course I had always been very fond of Vere. But this summer she meant more to me than she had meant. One day—it was the day I came back to the island after my visit to Paris—"

"Yes?"

He looked at her, trying to read what she was feeling in her face, but it was too dark for him to discern it.

"Vere made a confession to me. She told me she was working secretly, that she was writing poems. I asked her to show them to me. She did so. I found some talent in them, enough for me to feel justified in telling her to continue. Once, Hermione, you consulted me. Then my advice was different."

"I know."

"The remembrance of this, and Vere's knowledge that you had suffered in not succeeding with work, prompted us to keep the matter of her attempts to write a secret for the time. It seems a trifle—all this, but looking back now I feel that we were quite wrong in not telling you."

"I found it out."

"You knew?"

"I went to Vere's room. The poems were on the table with your corrections. I read them."

"We ought to have told you."

"I oughtn't to have read them, but I did."

"A mother has the right—"

"Not a mother who has resigned her right to question her child. I had said to Vere, 'Keep your secrets.' So I had no right, and I did wrong in reading them."

He felt that she was instinctively trying to match his sincerity with hers, and that fact helped him to continue.

"The knowledge of this budding talent of Vere's made me take a new interest in her, made me wish very much—at least I thought, I believed it was that, Hermione—that no disturbing influence should come into her life. Isidoro Panacci came—through me. Peppina came—through you. Hermione, on the night when Vere and I went out alone together in the boat Vere learned the truth about Peppina and the life behind the shutter."

"I knew that, too."

"You knew it?"

"Yes. I suspected something. You led me to suspect it."

"I remember—"

"I questioned Peppina. I made her tell me."

He said nothing for a moment. Then, with an effort, he said:

"You knew we had kept those two things from you, Vere and I?"

"Vere and you—yes."

Now he understood almost all, or quite all, that had been strange to him in her recent conduct.

"Sometimes—have you almost hated us for keeping those two secrets?"

"I don't think I have ever hated Vere."

"But me?"

"Do you know why I told Vere she might read your books?"

"Why?"

"Because I thought they might make her feel differently towards you."

"Less—less kindly?"

"Yes."

She spoke very quietly, but he felt—he did not know why—that it had cost her very much to say what she had said.

"You wanted Vere to think badly of me!"

He was honoring her for the moral courage which enabled her to tell him. Yet he felt as if she had struck him. And so absolutely was he accustomed to delicate tenderness, and the most thoughtful, anxious kindness from her, that he suffered acutely and from a double distress. The thing itself was cruel and hurt him. But that Hermione had done it hurt him far more. He could hardly believe it. That by any road she could travel to such an action seemed incredible to him. He stood, realizing it. And the bitter sharpness of his suffering made him understand something. In all its fulness he understood what Hermione's tenderness had been in his life for many, many years. And then—his mind seemed to take another step. "Why does a woman do such a thing as this?" he asked himself. "Why does such a woman as Hermione do such a thing?" And he knew what her suffering must have been, and how her heart must have been storm-tossed, before it was driven to succumb to such an impulse.

And he came quite close to her. And he felt a strange, sudden nearness to her that was no nearness of body.

"Hermione," he said, "I could never judge your character by that action. Don't—don't judge mine by any cruelty of which I have been guilty during this summer. You have told me something that it was very difficult for you to tell. I have something to tell you. And it is—it is not easy to tell."

"Tell it me."

He looked at her. He was now quite close to her, and could see the outline of her face but not the expression in her eyes.

"My interest in Vere increased. I believed it to be an interest aroused in me by the discovery of this talent in her. I believed the new fondness I felt for her to be a very natural fondness, caused by her charming confidence in me. Our little secret drew us together. And I understand now, Hermione, that it seemed to set you apart from us. I believe I understand all now, all the circumstances that have seemed strange to me this summer. I wanted Vere's talent to develop naturally, unhindered, unaffected—I thought it was merely that—and I became exigent, I even became jealous of all outside interference. On the night we dined at Frisio's I felt strongly irritated at Panacci's interest in Vere. And there were other moments—"

He looked at her again. She stood perfectly still. Her head was slightly bent and she seemed to be looking at the ground.

"And then came the night of the Carmine. Hermione, after you and Vere had gone to bed Panacci and I had a quarrel. He attacked me violently. He told me—he told me that I was in love with Vere, and that you, and even—even that Gaspare knew it. At the moment I think I laughed at him. I thought his accusation ridiculous. But when he was gone—and afterwards—I examined myself. I tried to know myself. I spent hours in self-examination, cruel self-examination. I did not spare myself. Believe that, Hermione! Believe that!"

"I do believe it."

"And at the end I knew that it was not true. I was not, I had never been in love with Vere. When I thought of Vere and myself in such a relation my spirit recoiled. Such a thing seemed to me monstrous. But though I knew that it was not true, I knew also that I had been jealous of Vere, unjust to others because of Vere. I had been, perhaps, foolish, undignified. Perhaps—perhaps—for how can we be quite sure of ourselves. Hermione? How can we be certain of our own natures, our own conduct?—perhaps, if Panacci's coarse brutality had not waked up my whole being, I might have drifted on towards an affection for Vere that, in a man of my age, would have been absurd, have made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. I scarcely think so. But I want to be sincere. I would rather exaggerate than minimize my own shortcomings to you to-night. I scarcely believe it ever could have been so. But Panacci said it was so. And you—I don't know what you have thought—"

"What I have thought doesn't matter now."

She spoke very quietly, but not with bitterness. She knew Artois. And even in that moment of emotion, and of a sort of strange exhaustion following upon emotion, she knew, as no other living person could have known, the effort it must have cost him to speak as he had just spoken.

"That, at any rate, is the exact truth."

"I know it is."

"I have thought myself clear-sighted, Hermione. I have studied others. Just lately I have been forced to study myself. It is as if—it seems to me as if events had conspired against my own crass ignorance of myself, as if a resolve had been come to by the power that directs our destinies that I should know myself. I wish I dared to tell you more. I wish to-night I dared to tell you all that I have come to know. But I dare not, I dare not. You would not believe me. I could not even expect you to believe me."

He stopped. Perhaps he hoped for a word that would deny his last observation. But it did not come to him. And he hesitated for what seemed to him a very long time, almost an eternity. He was beset by indecision, by an extraordinary deep modesty and consciousness of his own unworthiness that he had never before experienced, and also by a new and acute consciousness of the splendor of Hermione's nature, of the power of her heart, of the faithfulness and nobility of her temperament.

"All I can say, Hermione"—he at length went on speaking, and in his voice sounded that strange modesty, a modesty that made his voice seem to her almost like a voice of hesitating youth—"all that I dare to say to-night is this. I told you just now that we all have our different ways of loving. You have loved in your way. You have loved Delarey as your husband. And you have loved me as your friend. Delarey, as your husband, betrayed you. Only to-day you know it. I, as your friend—have I ever betrayed you? Do you believe—even now when you are ready to believe very much of evil—do you really believe that as a friend I could ever betray you?"

He moved, stood in front of her, lifted his hands and laid them on her shoulders.

"Do you believe that?"

"No."

"You have loved us in your way. He is dead. But I am here to love you always in my way. Perhaps my way seems to you such a poor way—it must, it must—that it is hardly worth anything at all. But perhaps, now that I know so much of myself—and of you"—there was a slight break in his voice—"and of you, I shall be able to find a different, a better way. I don't know. To-night I doubt myself. I feel as if I were so unworthy. But I may—I may be able to find a better way of loving you."

Quite unconsciously his two hands, which still rested upon her shoulders, began to lean heavily upon them, to press them, to grip them till she suffered a physical discomfort that almost amounted to pain.

"I shall seek a better way—I shall seek it. And the only thing I ask you to-night is—that you will not forbid me to seek it."

The pressure of his hands upon her shoulders was becoming almost unbearable. But she bore it. She bore it for she loved it. Perhaps that night no words could have quite convinced her of his desperate honesty of soul in that moment, perhaps no sound of his voice could have quite convinced her. But the unconsciously cruel pressure of his hands upon her convinced her absolutely. She felt as if it was his soul—the truth of his soul—which was grasping her—which was closing upon her. And she felt that only a thing that needed could grasp, could close like that.

And even in the midst of her chaos of misery and doubt she felt, she knew, that it was herself that was needed.

"I will not forbid you to seek it," she said.

He sighed deeply. His hands dropped down from her. They stood for a moment quite still. Then he said, in a low voice:

"You took the fattura della morte?"

"Yes," she answered. "It was in—in her room at Mergellina to-day."

"Have you got it still?"

"Yes."

She held out her right hand. He took the death-charm from her.

"She made it—the woman who wronged you made it to bring death into the Casa del Mare."

"Not to me?"

"No, to Peppina. Has it not brought another death? Or, at least, does it not typify another death to-night, the death of a great lie? I think it does. I look upon it as a symbol. But—but—?"

He looked at her. He was at the huge doorway of the palace. The sea murmured below him. Hermione understood and bent her head.

Then Artois threw the death-charm far away into the sea.

"Let me take you to the boat. Let me take you back to the island."

She did not answer him. But when he moved she followed him, till they came to the rocks and saw floating on the dim water the two white boats.

"Gaspare!"

"Vengo!"

That cry—what did it recall to Hermione? Gaspare's cry from the inlet beneath the Isle of the Sirens when he was bringing the body of Maurice from the sea. As she had trembled then, she began to tremble now. She felt exhausted, that she could bear no more, that she must rest, be guarded, cared for, protected, loved. The boat touched shore. Gaspare leaped out. He cast an eager, fiery look of scrutiny on his Padrona. She returned it. Then, suddenly, he seized her hand, bent down and kissed it.

She trembled more. He lifted his head, stared at her again. Then he took her up in his strong arms, as if she were a child, and carried her gently and carefully to the stern of the boat.

"Lei si riposi!" he whispered, as he set her down.

She shut her eyes, leaning back against the seat. She heard Artois get in, the boat pushed off, the splash of the oars. But she did not open her eyes, until presently an instinct told her there was something she must see. Then she looked.

The boat was passing under the blessing hand of San Francesco, under the light of the Saint, which was burning calmly and brightly.

Hermione moved. She bent down to the water, the acqua benedetta. She sprinkled it over the boat and made the sign of the cross. When they reached the island Artois got out. As she came on shore he said to her:

"Hermione, I left the—the two children together in the garden. Do you think—will you go to them for a moment? Or—"

"I will go," she answered.

She was no longer trembling. She followed him up the steps, walking slowly but firmly. They came to the house door. Gaspare had kept close behind them. At the door Artois stopped. He felt as if to-night he ought to go no farther.

Hermione looked at him and passed into the house. Gaspare, seeing that Artois did not follow her, hesitated, but Artois said to him:

"Go, Gaspare, go with your Padrona."

Then Gaspare went in, down the passage, and out to the terrace.

Hermione was standing there.

"Do you think they are in the garden, Gaspare?" she said.

"Si, Signora. Listen! I can hear them!"

He held up his hand. Not far away there was a sound of voices speaking together.

"Shall I go and tell them, Signora?"

After a moment Hermione said:

"Yes, Gaspare—go and tell them."

He went away, and she waited, leaning on the balustrade and looking down to the dim sea, from which only the night before Ruffo's voice had floated up to her, singing the song of Mergellina. Only the night before! And it seemed to her centuries ago.

"Madre!"

Vere spoke to her. Vere was beside her. But she gazed beyond her child to Ruffo, who stood with his cap in his hand and his eyes, full of gentleness, looking at her for recognition.

"Ruffo!" she said.

Vere moved to let Ruffo pass. He came up and stood before Hermione.

"Ruffo!" she said again.

It seemed that she was going to say more. They waited for her to say more. But she did not speak. She stood quite still for a moment looking at the boy. Then she put one hand on his shoulder, bent down and touched his forehead with her lips.

And in that kiss the dead man was forgiven.

EPILOGUE

On a radiant day of September in the following year, from the little harbor of Mergellina a white boat with a green line put off. It was rowed by Gaspare, who wore his festa suit, and it contained two people, a man and a women, who had that morning been quietly married.

Another boat preceded theirs, going towards the island, but it was so far ahead of them that they could only see it as a moving dot upon the shining sea, when they rounded the breakwater and set their course for the point of land where lies the Antico Giuseppone.

Gaspare rowed standing up, with his back towards Hermione and Artois and his great eyes staring steadily out to sea. He plied the oars mechanically. During the first few minutes of the voyage to the island his mind was far away. He was a boy in Sicily once more, waiting proudly upon his first, and indeed his only, Padrona in the Casa del Prete on Monte Amato. Then she was quite alone. He could see her sitting at evening upon the terrace with a book in her lap, gazing out across the ravine and the olive-covered mountain slopes to the waters that kissed the shore of the Sirens' Isle. He could see her, when night fell, going slowly up the steps into the lighted cottage, and turning on its threshold to wish him "Buon riposo."

Then there was an interval—and she came again. He was waiting at the station of Cattaro. Outside stood the little train of donkeys, decorated with flowers under his careful supervision. Upon Monte Amato, in the Casa del Prete, everything was in readiness for the arrival of the Padrona—and the Padrone. For this time his Padrona was not to be alone. And the train came in, thundering along by the sea, and he saw a brown eager face looking out of a window—a face which at once had seemed familiar to him almost as if he had always known it in Sicily.

And the new and wonderful period of his boy's life began.

But it passed, and in the early morning he stood in the corner of the Campo Santo where Protestants were buried, and threw flowers from his father's terreno into an open grave.

And once more his Padrona was alone.

Far away from Sicily, from his "Paese," among the great woods of the Abetone he received for the first time into his untutored arms his Padroncina. His Padrone was gone from him forever. But once more, as he would have expressed it to a Sicilian comrade, they were "in three." And still another period began.

And now that period was ended.

As Gaspare rowed slowly on towards the island, in his simple and yet shrewd way he was pondering on life, on its irresistible movement, on its changes, its alternations of grief and joy, loneliness and companionship. He was silently reviewing the combined fates of his Padrona and himself.

Behind him for a long while there was silence. But when the boat was abreast of the sloping gardens of Posilipo Artois spoke at last.

"Hermione!" he said.

"Yes," she answered.

"Do you remember that evening when I met you on the sea?"

"After I had been to Frisio's? Yes I remember it."

"You had been reading what I wrote in the wonderful book."

"And I was wondering why you had written it."

"I had no special reason. I thought of that saying. I had to write something, so I wrote that. I wonder—I wonder now why long ago my conscience did not tell me plainly something. I wonder it did not tell me plainly what you were in my life, all you were."

"Have I—have I really been much?"

"I never knew how much till I thought of you permanently changed towards me, till I thought of you living, but with your affection permanently withdrawn from me. That night—you know—?"

"Yes, I know."

"At first I was not sure—I was afraid for a moment about you. Vere and I were afraid, when your room was dark and we heard nothing. But even then I did not fully understand how much I need you. I only understood that in the Palace of the Spirits, when—when you hated me—"

"I don't think I ever hated you."

"Hatred, you know, is the other side of love."

"Then perhaps I did. Yes—I did."

"How long my conscience was inactive, was useless to me! It needed a lesson, a terrible lesson. It needed a cruel blow to rouse it."

"And mine!" she answered, in a low voice.

"We shall make many mistakes, both of us," he said. "But I think, after that night, we can never for very long misunderstand each other. For that night we were sincere."

"Let us always be sincere."

"Sincerity is the rock on which one should build the house of life."

"Let us—you and I—let us build upon it our palace of the spirits."

Then they were silent again. They were silent until the boat passed the point, until in the distance the island appeared, even until the prow of the boat grated against the rock beneath the window of the Casa del Mare.

As Hermione got out Gaspare bent to kiss her hand.

"Benedicite!" he murmured.

And, as she pressed his hand with both of hers, she answered:

"Benedicite!"

That night, not very late, but when darkness had fallen over the sea, Hermione said to Vere:

"I am going out for a little, Vere."

"Yes, Madre."

The child put her arms round her mother and kissed her. Hermione tenderly returned the kiss, looked at Artois, and went out.

She made her way to the brow of the island, and stood still for a while, drinking in the soft wind that blew to her from Ischia. Then she descended to the bridge and looked down into the Pool of San Francesco.

The Saint's light was burning steadily. She watched it for a moment, and while she watched it she presently heard beneath her a boy's voice singing softly the song of Mergellina:

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' estate

Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina;

Mi destan le dolcissime serate,

Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

The voice died away. There was a moment of silence.

She clasped the rail with her hand; she leaned down over the Pool.

"Buona notte, Ruffino!" she said softly.

And the voice from the sea answered her:

"Buona notte, Signora. Buona notte e buon riposo."

THE END