abrupt departure. His fear had been hers.
His relief was hers, too, and she was moved to hide it. He was left
alone with the death-charm.

He sat down by the table on which it lay among the bright toys of
silver. Released from his great fear, released from his undertaking to
force his way into the darkness of that room which had been silent,
he seemed suddenly to regain his identity, to be put once more into
possession of his normal character. He had gone out from it. He returned
to it. The cloud of superstition, in which even he had been for a moment
involved with Vere and with the servants, evaporated, and he was able
to smile secretly at them and at himself. Yet while he smiled thus
secretly, and while he looked at the lemon with its perforating nails,
he realized his own smallness, helplessness, the smallness and the
helplessness of every man, as he had never realized them before. And he
realized also something, much, of what it would have meant to him, had
the body of his fear been the body of a truth, not of a lie.

If death had really come into the Casa del Mare that night with the
death-charm!

He stretched out his hand to the table, lifted the death-charm from
among the silver ornaments, held it, kept it in his hand, which he laid
upon his knee.

If Ruffo had carried death in his boy's hand over the sea to the island,
had carried death to Hermione!

Artois tried to imagine that house without Hermione, his life without
Hermione.

For a long time he sat, always holding the death-charm in his hand,
always with his eyes fixed upon it, until at last in it, as in a magic
mirror, among the scars of its burning, and among the nails that pierced
it, as the woman who had fashioned it, and fired it, and muttered
witch's words over it, longed to pierce the heart of her enemy, he saw
scenes of the past, and shadowy, moving figures. He saw among the scars
and among the nails Hermione and himself!

They were in Paris, at a table strewn with flowers. That was the first
scene in the magic mirror of the _fattura della morte_, the scene in
which they met for the first time. Hermione regarded him almost with
timidity. And he looked at her doubtfully, because she had no beauty.

Then they were in another part of Paris, in his "Morocco slipper of a
room," crammed with books, and dim with Oriental incense and tobacco
smoke, his room red and yellow, tinted with the brilliant colors of
the East. And he turned to her for symp