"Is that refreshing or embarrassing?"

"I find it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with
perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's chum with all the good-will in
the world."

Hermione could not help laughing, and Artois echoed her laugh.

"Merely talking about him has made you look years younger," she
declared. "The influence of the day has lifted from you."

"It would not have fallen upon Isidoro, I think. And yet he is full
of sentiment. He is a curious instance of a very common Neapolitan
obsession."

"What is that?"

"He is entirely obsessed by woman. His life centres round woman. You
observe I use the singular. I do that because it is so much more plural
than the plural in this case. His life is passed in love-affairs, in a
sort of chaos of amours."

"How strange that is!"

"You think so, my friend?"

"Yes. I never can understand how human beings can pass from love to
love, as many of them do. I never could understand it, even before
I--even before Sicily."

"You are not made to understand such a thing."

"But you do?"

"I? Well, perhaps. But the loves of men are not as your love."

"Yet his was," she answered. "And he was a true Southerner, despite his
father.

"Yes, he was a true Southerner," Artois replied.

For once he was off his guard with her, and uttered his real thought
of Maurice, not without a touch of the irony that was characteristic of
him.

Immediately he had spoken he was aware of his indiscretion. But Hermione
had not noticed it. He saw by her eyes that she was far away in Sicily.
And when the boat slipped into the Saint's Pool, and Gaspare came to the
water's edge to hold the prow while they got out, she rose from her seat
slowly, and almost reluctantly, like one disturbed in a dream that she
would fain continue.

"Have you seen the Signorina, Gaspare?" she asked him. "Has she been
out?"

"No, Signora. She is still in the house."

"Still reading!" said Artois. "Vere must be quite a book-worm!"

"Will you stay to dinner, Emile?"

"Alas, I have promised the Marchesino Isidoro to dine with him. Give
me a cup of tea _a la Russe_, and one of Ruffo's cigarettes, and then
I must bid you adieu. I'll take the boat to the Antico Giuseppone, and
then get another there as far as the gardens."

"One of Ruffo's cigarettes!" Hermione echoed, as they went up the steps.
"That boy seems to have made himself one of the family already."

"Yet I wish, as I said in th