ughter."

"In some things only?" asked Hermione.

"Don't you think so? Don't you think she has much of you in her also? I
do."

"Has she? I don't know that I see it. I don't know that I want to see
it. I always look for him in Vere. You see, I dreamed of having a boy.
Vere is instead of the boy I dreamed of, the boy--who never came, who
will never come."

"My friend," said Artois, very seriously and gently, "are you still
allowing your mind to dwell upon that old imagination? And with Vere
before you, can you regard her merely as a substitute, an understudy?"

An energy that was not free from passion suddenly flamed up in Hermione.

"I love Vere," she said. "She is very close to me. She knows it. She
does not doubt me or my love."

"But," he quietly persisted, "you still allow your mind to rove
ungoverned among those dangerous ways of the past?"

"Emile," she said, still speaking with vehemence, "it may be very easy
to a strong man like you to direct his thoughts, to keep them out of one
path and guide them along another. It may be--I don't know whether it
is; but I don't pretend to such strength. I don't believe it is ever
given to women. Perhaps even strength has its sex--I sometimes think
so. I have my strength, believe me. But don't require of me the peculiar
strength that is male."

"The truth is that you love living in the past as the Bedouin loves
living in the desert."

"It was my oasis," she answered, simply.

"And all these years--they have made no difference?"

"Did you think they would? Did you think they had?"

"I hoped so. I thought--I had begun to think that you lived again in
Vere."

"Emile, you can always stand the truth, can't you? Don't say you can't.
That would hurt me horribly. Perhaps you do not know how sometimes I
mentally lean on you. And I like to feel that if you knew the
absolute truth of me you would still look upon me with the same kind,
understanding eyes as now. Perhaps no one else would. Would you, do you
think?"

"I hope and believe I could," he said. "You do not live in Vere. Is that
it?"

"I know it is considered the right, the perfectly natural thing that a
mother, stricken as I have been, should find in time perfect peace and
contentment in her child. Even you--you spoke of 'living again.' It's
the consecrated phrase, Emile, isn't it? I ought to be living again in
Vere. Well, I'm not doing that. With my nature I could never do that. Is
that horrible?"

"Ma pa