"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.

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

"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.

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