e kissed her for the last time, had looked at her like
that. It could not be fancy. It was not.

Was this the very first time she had noticed in Ruffo a likeness to her
dead husband? She asked herself if it was. Yes. She had never--or had
there been something? Not in the face, perhaps. But--the voice? Ruffo's
singing? His attitude as he stood up in the boat? Had there not been
something? She remembered her conversation with Artois in the cave. She
had said to him that--she did not know why--the boy, Ruffo, had made
her feel, had stirred up within her slumbering desires, slumbering
yearnings.

"I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay--and just this one touches
some chord, and all the strings of my soul quiver."

She had said that.

Then there was something in the boy, something not merely fleeting like
that look of gentleness--something permanent, subtle, that resembled
Maurice.

Now she no longer felt frightened, but she had a passionate wish to go
down to the boat, to see Ruffo again, to be with him again, now that she
was awake to this strange, and perhaps only faint, imitation by another
of the one whom she had lost. No--not imitation; this fragmentary
reproduction of some characteristic, some--

She lifted herself up from the railing. And now she knew that her eyes
were wet. She wiped them with her handkerchief, drew a deep breath, and
went back to the house. She felt for the handle of the door, and, when
she found it, opened the door, went in, and shut it rather heavily, then
locked it. As she bent down to push home the bolt at the bottom a voice
called out:

"Who's there?"

She was startled and turned quickly.

"Gaspare!"

He stood before her half dressed, with his hair over his eyes, and a
revolver in his hand.

"Signora! It is you!"

"Si. What did you think? That it was a robber?"

Gaspare looked at her almost sternly, went to the door, bent down and
bolted it, then he said:

"Signora, I heard a noise in the house a few minutes ago. I listened,
but I heard nothing more. Still, I thought it best to get up. I had just
put on my clothes when again I heard a noise at the door. I myself had
locked it for the night. What should I think?"

"I was outside. I came back for something. That was what you heard. Then
I went out again."

"Si."

He stood there staring at her in a way that seemed, she fancied, to
rebuke her. She knew that he wished to know why she had gone out so
late, returned to t