iven to them, for
all that."

"That's true. I have never seen Vere pay any particular attention to the
fishermen who come to the island. In a way she loves them all because
they belong to the sea, she loves them as a decor. But Ruffo is
different. I felt it myself."

"Did you?"

He looked at her, then looked out of the window and pulled his beard
slowly.

"Yes. In my case, perhaps, the interest was roused partly by what Vere
told me. The boy is a Sicilian, you see, and just Vere's age."

"Vere's interest perhaps comes from the same reason."

"Very likely it does."

Hermione spoke the last words without conviction. Perhaps they both
felt that they were not talking very frankly--were not expressing their
thoughts to each other with their accustomed sincerity. At any rate,
Artois suddenly introduced another topic of conversation, the reason
of his hurried visit to Paris, and for the next hour they
discussed literary affairs with a gradually increasing vivacity and
open-heartedness. The little difficulty between them--of which both
had been sensitive and fully conscious--passed away, and when at length
Hermione got up to go to her bedroom and change her dress for the
evening, there was no cloud about them.

When Hermione had gone Artois took up a book, but he sat till the
evening was falling and Giulia came smiling to light the lamp, without
reading a word of it. Her entry roused him from his reverie, and he took
out his watch. It was already past eight. The Marchesino would soon be
coming. And then--the dinner at Frisio's!

He got up and moved about the room, picking up a book here and there,
glancing at some pages, then putting it down. He felt restless and
uneasy.

"I am tired from the journey," he thought. "Or--I wonder what the
weather is this evening. The heat seems to have become suffocating since
Hermione went away."

He went to one of the windows and looked out. Twilight was stealing over
the sea, which was so calm that it resembled a huge sheet of steel.
The sky over the island was clear. He turned and went to the opposite
window. Above Ischia there was a great blackness like a pall. He stood
looking at it for some minutes. His erring thoughts, which wandered like
things fatigued that cannot rest, went to a mountain village in
Sicily, through which he had once ridden at night during a terrific
thunder-storm. In a sudden, fierce glare of lightning he had seen upon
the great door of a gaunt Palazzo,