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
n