se 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 chil