who have ardent
temperaments and eager interests, and passionate desires and fearless
hearts.

To-night Hermione felt very strongly the difference between the father
and the daughter. There was a gravity in Vere, a firmness that Maurice
had lacked. Full of life and warmth as she was, she was not the pure
spirit of joy that he had been in those first days in Sicily. She was
not irresponsible. She was more keenly aware of others, of just how they
were feeling, of just how they were thinking, than Maurice had been.

Vere was very individual.

With that thought there came to Hermione a deeper sense of loneliness.
She was conscious now in this moment, as she had never been conscious
before, of the independence of her child's character. The knowledge of
this independence seemed to come upon her suddenly--she could not tell
why; and she saw Vere apart from her, detached, like a column in a
lonely place.

Vere must not escape from her. She must accompany her child step by
step. She must not be left alone. She had told Emile that she could not
live again in Vere. And that was true. Vere was not enough. But Vere was
very much. Without Vere, what would her life be?

A wave of melancholy flowed over her to-night, a tide come from she knew
not where. Making an effort to stem it, she recalled her happiness with
Maurice after that day of the Tarantella. How groundless had really been
her melancholy then! She had imagined him escaping from her, but he had
remained with her, and loved her. He had been good to her until the end,
tender and faithful. If she had ever had a rival, that rival had been
Sicily. Always her imagination was her torturer.

Her failure in art had been a tragedy because of this. If she could have
set her imagination free in an art she would have been far safer than
she was. Emile Artois was really lonelier than she, for he had not
a child. But his art surely saved him securely from her sense of
desolation. And then he was a man, and men must need far less than
women do. Hermione felt that it was so. She thought of Emile in his most
helpless moment, in that period when he was ill in Kairouan before she
came. Even then she believed that he could not have felt quite so much
alone as she did now; for men never long to be taken care of as women
do. And yet she was well, in this tranquil house which was her own--with
Vere, her child, and Gaspare, her devoted servant.

As mentally she recounted her benefits, the st