o a certain selfishness
of which he was quite aware--even to a certain hardness such as he had
hinted to Hermione. Those who strove, or seemed likely to strive to
interrupt him in his work, he pushed out of his life. Even if they were
charming women he got rid of them. And the fact that he did so proved
to him, and not improbably to them, that he was more wrapped up in the
gratification of the mind than in the gratification of the heart, or
of the body. It was not that the charm of charming women had ceased to
please him, but it seemed to have ceased really to fascinate him.

Long ago, before Hermione married, he had felt for her a warm and
intimate friendship. He had even been jealous of Maurice. Without being
at all in love, he had cared enough for Hermione to be jealous. Before
her marriage he had looked forward in imagination down a vista of long
years, and had seen her with a husband, then with children, always more
definitely separated from himself.

And he had seen himself exceptionally alone, even almost miserably
alone.

Then fate had spun tragedy into her web. He had nearly died in Africa,
and had been nursed back to life by this friend of whom he had been
jealous. And they had gone together to Sicily, to the husband whose
memory Hermione still adored. And then had followed swiftly the murder,
the murderer's departure to America, saved by the silence of Gaspare,
and the journey of the bereaved woman to Italy, where Artois had left
her and returned to France.

Once more Artois had his friend, released from the love of another man.
But he wished it were not so. Hermione's generosity met with a full
response of generosity from him. All his egotism and selfishness dropped
from him then, shaken down like dead leaves by the tempest of a genuine
emotion. His knowledge of her grief, his understanding of its depth,
brought to him a sorrow that was keen, and even exquisitely painful. For
a long while he was preoccupied by an intense desire to assuage it. He
strove to do so by acting almost in defiance of his nature, by fostering
deception. From the Abetone Hermione had written him letters, human
documents--the tale of the suffering of a woman's heart. Many reserves
she had from him and from every one. The most intimate agony was for her
alone, and she kept it in her soul as the priest keeps the Sacred Host
in its tabernacle. But some of her grief she showed in her letters, and
some of her desire for comfort. And wit