hild. He had depended upon her. That fact, that he
had for a time utterly depended upon her, had forged a new link in their
friendship, the strongest link of all. At least she had felt it to be
so. For she was very much of a woman, and full of a secret motherliness.

But perhaps he had forgotten all that.

In these days she often felt as if she did not understand men at all, as
if their natures were hidden from her, and perhaps, of necessity, from
all women.

"We can't understand each other."

She often said that to herself, and partly to comfort herself a little.
She did not want to be only one of a class of women from whom men's
natures were hidden.

And yet it was not true.

For Maurice, at least, she had understood. She had not feared his
gayeties, his boyish love of pleasure, his passion for the sun, his
joy in the peasant life, his almost fierce happiness in the life of
the body. She had feared nothing in him, because she had felt that
she understood him thoroughly. She had read the gay innocence of his
temperament rightly, and so she had never tried to hold him back from
his pleasures, to keep him always with her, as many women would have
done.

And she clung to the memory of her understanding of Maurice as she faced
the mist that had swept up softly and silently over that sea and sky
which had been clear. He had been simple. There was nothing to dread
in cleverness, in complexity. One got lost in a nature that was full of
winding paths. Just then, and for the time, she forgot her love of, even
her passion for, mental things. The beauty of the straight white road
appealed to her. She saw it leading one onward to the glory of the sun.

Vere and she did not see very much of each other during these days. They
met, of course, at meals, and often for a few minutes at other times.
But it seemed as if each tacitly, and almost instinctively, sought to
avoid any prolonged intercourse with the other. Hermione was a great
deal in her sitting-room, reading, or pretending to read. And Vere made
several long expeditions upon the sea in the sailing-boat with Gaspare
and a boy from the nearest village, who was hired as an extra hand.

Hermione had a strange feeling of desertion sometimes, when the white
sail of the boat faded on the blue and she saw the empty sea. She would
watch the boat go out, standing at the window and looking through the
blinds. The sailor-boy pulled at the oars. Vere was at the helm, Gaspare
bus