ous of. He was not able to speak to her because she was surely
speaking to him, was communicating to him not only her feeling towards
him, but also its reason, its basis, in that wordless language which
is only used and comprehended by human beings in moments of crisis and
intense emotion. That was what he felt, seemed to know.

He stood there, facing the blackness and listening, while she seemed to
be telling him her woman's reasons for her present hatred of the man who
had been for so long a time her closest friend.

And these reasons were not only the reasons born of a day's events, of
the discovery of the lie on which her spirit had been resting. She did
not say--her heart did not say only: "I hate you because you let
me believe in that which never existed except in my imagination--my
husband's complete love of me, complete faithfulness to me. I hate
you because you enclosed me in the prison of a lie. I hate you because
during all these years you have been a witness of my devotion to an
idol, a graven image whose wooden grimace I mistook for the smile of the
god's happy messenger, because you have been a witness of my cult for
the memory of one who betrayed my trust in him, who thought nothing of
my gift to him, who put another in the sanctuary that should have been
sacred to me, and who has poisoned the sources of the holy streams that
flow into and feed the soul of a good woman."

If Hermione had silently told Artois reasons such as these for hating
him she would have roused him to battle with her, to defend himself with
some real hope of holding his own, even of eventual conquest. But other
reasons, too, did they not come from her, creeping out of her brain
and heart and soul into his, reasons against which he had no weapons,
against which he could make no defence?

He had claimed to understand the psychology of women. He had believed he
comprehended women well. Hermione best of all women. But these reasons,
creeping out of her into him, set a ring of illuminating fire about
his misconception. They told him that though perhaps he had known one
Hermione in his friend, there were other Hermiones in her whom he had
never really known. Once in the garden of the island by night he
had seen, or fancied he had seen, a strange smile upon her face that
betokened a secret bitterness; and for a moment he had been confused,
and had faltered in his speech, and had felt as if he were sitting with
a stranger who was hostile