f intense
scrutiny, and the eyes of her child still questioned her with a sort of
bright and searching eagerness.

"You make me feel as if I were with detectives," she said, laughing, but
uneasily. "There's really nothing the matter."

"And your tooth, Madre? Is it better?"

"Yes, quite well. I am perfectly well. Let us go in."

Hermione had said to herself that if she could see Emile and Vere
together, without any third person, she would know something that she
felt she must know. When she was with them she meant to be a watcher.
And now her whole being was strung to attention. But it seemed to her
that for some reason they, too, were on the alert, and so were not
quite natural. And she could not be sure of certain things unless the
atmosphere was normal. So she said to herself now, though before she had
had the inimitable confidence of woman in certain detective instincts
claimed by the whole sex. At one moment the thing she feared--and her
whole being recoiled from the thought of it with a shaking disgust--the
thing she feared seemed to her fact. Then something occurred to make
her distrust herself. And she felt that betraying imagination of hers at
work, obscuring all issues, tricking her, punishing her.

And when the meal was over she did not know at all. And she felt as if
she had perhaps been deliberately baffled--not, of course, by Vere, of
whose attitude she was not, and never had been, doubtful, but by Emile.

When they got up from the table Vere said:

"I'm going to take the siesta."

"You look remarkably wide awake, Vere," Artois said, smiling.

"But I'm going to, because I've had you all to myself the whole morning.
Now it's Madre's turn. Isn't it, Madre?"

The girl's remark showed her sense of their complete triple intimacy,
but it emphasized to Hermione her own cruel sense of being in the
wilderness. And she even felt vexed that it should be supposed she
wanted Emile's company. Nevertheless, she restrained herself from making
any disclaimer. Vere went up-stairs, and she and Artois went out and sat
down under the trellis. But with the removal of Vere a protection and
safety-valve seemed to be removed, and neither Hermione nor Emile could
for a moment continue the conversation. Again a sense of humiliation,
of being mindless, nothing in the eyes of Artois came to Hermione,
diminishing all her powers. She was never a conceited, but she had often
been a self-reliant woman. Now she felt a humbleness