lvation.

As she felt that, a deep longing filled her heart to look again on
Ruffo's face, to search again for the expression that sent back the
years. But she wished to do that without witnesses, to be alone with
the boy, as she had been alone with him that night upon the bridge. And
suddenly she was impatient of Vere's intercourse with him. Vere could
not know what the tender look meant, if it came. For she had never seen
her father's face.

"Let us go to the cliff," Hermione said, moved by this new feeling of
impatience.

She meant to interrupt the children, to get rid of Vere and Emile, and
have Ruffo to herself for a moment. Just then she felt as if he were
nearer, far nearer, to her than they were: they who kept things from
her, who spoke of her secretly, pitying her.

And again that evening she came into acute antagonism with her friend.
For the instinct was still alive in him not to interrupt the children.
The strange suspicion that had been born and had lived within him,
gathered strength, caused him to feel almost as if they might be upon
holy ground, those two so full of youth, who talked together in the
night; as if they knew mysteriously things that were hidden from their
elders, from those wiser, yet far less full of the wisdom that is
eternal, the wisdom in instinct, than themselves. There is always
something sacred about children. And he had never lost the sense of it
amid the dust of his worldly knowledge. But about these children, about
them or within them, there floated, perhaps, something that was mystic,
something that was awful and must not be disturbed. Hermione did not
feel it. How could she? He himself had withheld from her for many years
the only knowledge that could have made her share his present feeling.
He could tell her nothing. Yet he could not conceal his intense
reluctance to go to that seat upon the cliff.

"But it's delicious here. I love the Pool at night, don't you? Look at
the Saint's light, how quietly it shines!"

She took her hands from the rail. His attempt at detention irritated her
whole being. She looked at the light. On the night of the storm she
had felt as if it shone exclusively for her. That feeling was dead. San
Francesco watched, perhaps, over the fishermen. He did not watch over
her.

And yet that night she, too, had made the sign of the cross when she
knew that the light was shining.

She did not answer Artois' remark, and he continued, always for the
chi