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.