"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 G.o.d walking with me."

She lifted her head and stood up.

"Please G.o.d 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.

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: