ighting--the battle for a woman, and by a man of more than twice his
age, a man who ought long ago to have been married and have had children
as old as the Signorina Vere.

Well, he had been a good friend to Emilio. Now Emilio should see that
the good friend could be the good enemy. Late that night, as he sat
alone in front of the Caffe Turco smoking innumerable cigarettes, he
resolved to show these foreigners the stuff a Neapolitan was made of.
They did not know. Poor, ignorant beings from cold England, drowned
forever in perpetual yellow fogs, and from France, country of volatility
but not of passion, they did not know what the men of the South, of a
volcanic soil, were capable of, once they were roused, once their blood
spoke and their whole nature responded! It was time they learned. And
he would undertake to teach them. As he drove towards dawn up the dusty
hill to Capodimonte he was in a fever of excitement.

There was excitement, too, in the house on the island, but it did not
centre round the Marchesino.

That night, for the first time in her young life, Vere did not sleep.
She heard the fisherman call, but the enchantment of sea doings did not
stir her. She was aware for the first time of the teeming horrors of
life. There, in the darkness beneath the cliff, Peppina had sobbed out
her story, and Vere, while she listened, had stepped from girlhood into
womanhood.

She had come into the house quietly, and found Artois waiting for her
alone. Hermione had gone to bed, leaving word that she had a headache.
And Vere was glad that night not to see her mother. She wished to see no
one, and she bade Artois good-bye at once, telling him nothing, and not
meeting his eyes when he touched her hand in adieu. And he had asked
nothing. Why should he, when he read the truth in the grave, almost
stern face of the child?

Vere knew.

The veils that hung before the happy eyes of childhood had been torn
away, and those eyes had looked for the first time into the deeps of an
unhappy human heart.

And he had thought it possible to preserve, perhaps for a long while,
Vere's beautiful ignorance untouched. He had thought of the island as
a safe retreat in which her delicate, and as yet childish talent, might
gradually mature under his influence and the influence of the sea. She
had been like some charming and unusual plant of the sea, shot with
sea colors, wet with sea winds, fresh with the freshness of the
smooth-backed waves.