nce. But
there may be some one in the prompter's box--our secret knowledge."

"But is it knowledge of ourselves, or of others?"

"Which do you think?"

"Of ourselves, I suppose. I think we generally know far less of others
than we believe ourselves to know."

She expressed his thought of her earlier in the evening.

"Probably. And nevertheless we may know things of them that we are not
aware we know--till after we have instinctively acted on our knowledge."

Their eyes met again. Hermione felt in that moment as if he knew why she
had given Vere the permission to read his books.

But still she did not know whether he had written that sentence in the
book at Frisio's carelessly, or prompted by some violent impulse to
express a secret thought or feeling of the moment.

"Things good or evil?" she said, slowly.

"Perhaps both."

The Marchesino burst into a laugh. He leaned back in his chair, shaking
his head, and holding the table with his two hands. His white teeth
gleamed.

"What is the joke?" asked Artois.

Vere turned her head.

"Oh, nothing. It's too silly. I can't imagine why the Marchesino is so
much amused by it."

Artois felt shut out. But when Vere and he had laughed over the
tea-table in a blessed community of happy foolishness, who could have
understood their mirth? He remembered how he had pitied the imagined
outsider.

He turned again to Hermione, but such conversation as theirs, and indeed
all serious conversation, now seemed to him heavy, portentous, almost
ludicrous. The young alone knew how to deal with life, chasing it as a
child chases a colored air-ball, and when it would sink, and fall and be
inert, sending it with a gay blow soaring once more towards the blue.

Perhaps Hermione had a similar thought, or perhaps she knew of it in
him. At any rate, for a moment she had nothing to say. Nor had he. And
so, tacitly excluded, as it seemed, from the merriment of the young
ones, the two elders remained looking towards each other in silence,
sunk in a joint exile.

Presently Artois began to fidget with his bread. He pulled out some
of the crumb from his roll, and pressed it softly between his large
fingers, and scattered the tiny fragments mechanically over the
table-cloth near his plate. Hermione watched his moving hand. The
Marchesino was talking now. He was telling Vere about a paper-chase at
Capodimonte, which had started from the Royal Palace. His vivacity,
his excitement made a pape