: a
powerful, an almost terrific inattention, like that of the sphinx that
gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house. She
walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was
fond of. Presently she would go to the bridge and look over into the
Pool and listen for the voices of the fishermen. She sat there for some
time gaining a certain peace, losing something of her feeling of weary
excitement and desolation under the stars. At last she thought that
sleep might come if she went to bed. But before doing so she made her
way to the bridge and leaned on the rail, looking down into the Pool.

It was very dark, but she saw the shadowy shape of a fishing-boat lying
close to the rock. She stood and watched it, and presently she lost
herself in a thicket of night thoughts, and forgot where she was and
why she had come there. She was recalled by hearing a very faint voice
singing, scarcely more than humming, beneath her.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la marina:
Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina."

It was the same song that Artois had heard that day as he leaned on the
balcony of the Ristorante della Stella. But this singer of it sang the
Italian words, and not the dialetto. The song that wins the prize at the
Piedigrotta Festival is on the lips of every one in Naples. In houses,
in streets, in the harbor, in every piazza, and upon the sea it is heard
incessantly.

And now Ruffo was singing it softly and rather proudly in the Italian,
to attract the attention of the dark figure he saw above him. He was not
certain who it was, but he thought it was the mother of the Signorina,
and--he did not exactly know why--he wished her to find out that he was
there, squatting on the dry rock with his back against the cliff wall.
The ladies of the Casa del Mare had been very kind to him, and to-night
he was not very happy, and vaguely he longed for sympathy.

Hermione listened to the pretty, tripping words, the happy, youthful
words. And Ruffo sang them again, still very softly.

"Oh, dolce luna bianca de l' Estate--"

And the poor nomad wandering in the desert? But she had known the
rapture of youth, the sweet white moons of summer in the South. She
had known them long ago for a little while, and therefore she knew them
while she lived. A woman's heart is tenacious, and wide as the world,
when it contains