sitting-room when she was saying good-night, and just now when she sat
on the bed. Youth is terribly quick to feel hostility, however subtle.
The thought that her mother could be hostile to her had never
entered Vere's head. Nevertheless, the mother's faint and creeping
hostility--for at times Hermione's feeling was really that, thought she
would doubtless have denied it even to herself--disagreeably affected
the child.

"What can be the matter with Madre?" she thought.

She went over to the writing-table, where she had hastily shut up her
poems on hearing the knock at the door, but she did not take them out
again. Instead she sat down and wrote the note to Monsieur Emile. As
she wrote the sense of mystery, of uneasiness, departed from her, chased
away, perhaps, by the memory of Monsieur Emile's kindness to her and
warm encouragement, by the thought of having a long talk with him again,
of showing him certain corrections and developments carried out by her
since she had seen him. The sympathy of the big man meant a great deal
to her, more even than he was aware of. It lifted up her eager young
heart. It sent the blood coursing through her veins with a new and
ardent strength. Hermione's enthusiasm had been inherited by Vere, and
with it something else that gave it a peculiar vitality, a power of
lasting--the secret consciousness of talent.

Now, as she wrote her letter, she forgot all her uneasiness, and her pen
flew.

At last she sighed her name--"Vere."

She was just going to put the letter into its envelope when something
struck her, and she paused. The she added:

"P.S.--Just now Madre gave me leave to read your books."

CHAPTER XXV

The words of the old Oriental lingered in the mind of Artois. He was by
nature more fatalistic than Hermione, and moreover he knew what she did
not. Long ago he had striven against a fate. With the help of Gaspare
he had conquered it--or so he had believed till now. But now he asked
himself whether he had not only delayed its coming. If his suspicion
were well founded,--and since his last visit to the island he felt as if
it must be,--then surely all he had done with Gaspare would be in vain
at the last.

If his suspicion were well founded, then certain things are ordained.
They have to happen for some reason, known only to the hidden
Intelligence that fashions each man's character, that develops it in joy
or grief, that makes it glad with feasting, or forces it to feed