sea, Hermione?" he asked, pointing to it. "Do they fish
there at night?"

"Oh yes. No doubt it is a fisherman."

Gaspare shook his head.

"You understand?" said Hermione to him in Italian.

"Si, signora. That is the light in the Casa delle Sirene."

"But no one lives there."

"Oh, it has been built up now, and Salvatore Buonavista lives there with
Maddalena. Buon riposo, signora. Buon riposo, signore."

"Buon riposo, Gaspare."

And Maurice echoed it:

"Buon riposo."

As Gaspare went away round the angle of the cottage to his room near
Tito's stable, Maurice added:

"Buon riposo. It's an awfully nice way of saying good-night. I feel as if
I'd said it before, somehow."

"Your blood has said it without your knowing it, perhaps many times. Are
you coming, Maurice?"

He turned once more, looked down at the light shining in the house of the
sirens, then followed Hermione in through the open door.

V

That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such
as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world--a world that
never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to
hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the
dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see
it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to
enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked
up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of
worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of
when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or
a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past
years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a
youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt
when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased,
instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes
surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of
Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity,
had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and
had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living
being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material.
Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty
something strange, s