"Si, Signore," said the boy, smiling. "The Signorina gave me ten."

And he blew out a happy cloud.

There was something in his welcoming readiness of response, something
in his look and voice, that seemed to stir within the tenacious mind of
Artois a quivering chord of memory.

"I wonder if I have spoken to that boy in Naples?" he thought, as he
mounted the steps behind Vere.

Hermione met him at the door of her room, and they went in almost
directly to lunch with Vere. When the meal was over Vere disappeared,
without saying why, and Hermione and Artois returned to Hermione's room
to have coffee. By this time the day was absolutely windless, the sky
had become nearly white, and the sea was a pale gray, flecked here and
there with patches of white.

"This is like a June day of scirocco," said Artois, as he lit his pipe
with the air of a man thoroughly at home. "I wonder if it will succeed
in affecting Vere's spirits. This morning, when I arrived, she looked
wildly young. But the day held still some blue then."

Hermione was settling herself slowly in a low chair near the window that
faced Capri. The curious, rather ghastly light from the sea fell over
her.

"Vere is very sensitive to almost all influences," she said. "You know
that, Emile."

"Yes," he said, throwing away the match he had been using; "and the
influence of this morning roused her to joy. What was it?"

"She was very excited watching a diver for _frutti di mare_."

"A boy about seventeen or eighteen, black hair, Arab eyes, bronze
skin, a smile difficult to refuse, and a figure almost as perfect as a
Nubian's, but rather squarer about the shoulders?"

"You have seen him, then?"

"Smoking ten of my special Khali Targa cigarettes, with his bare toes
cocked up, and one hand drooping into the Saint's Pool."

Hermione smiled.

"My cigarettes! They're common property here," she said.

"That boy can't be a pure-bred Neapolitan, surely. And yet he speaks the
language. There's no mistaking the blow he gives to the last syllable of
a sentence."

"He's a Sicilian, Vere says."

"Pure bred?"

"I don't know."

"I fancy I must have run across him somewhere in or about Naples. It is
he who made Vere, as I told her, look so insolently young this morning."

"Ah, you noticed! I, too, thought I had never seen her so full of the
inner spirit of youth--almost as he was in Sicily."

"Yes," Artois said, gravely. "In some things she is very much his
da