omething ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if
he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence
in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks
in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the
trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again
in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green
glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like
Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she
imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing,
light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent
spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a
"fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did
not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her
by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had
been struck by in a London restaurant.

This charm increased in Sicily. In London Maurice Delarey had seemed a
handsome youth, with a delightfully fresh and almost woodland aspect that
set him apart from the English people by whom he was surrounded. In
Sicily he seemed at once to be in his right setting. He had said when he
arrived that he felt as if he belonged to Sicily, and each day Sicily and
he seemed to Hermione to be more dear to each other, more suited to each
other. With a loving woman's fondness, which breeds fancies deliciously
absurd, laughably touching, she thought of Sicily as having wanted this
son of hers who was not in her bosom, as sinking into a golden calm of
satisfaction now that he was there, hearing her "Pastorale," wandering
upon her mountain-sides, filling his nostrils with the scent of her
orange blossoms, swimming through the liquid silver of her cherishing
seas.

"I think Sicily's very glad that you are here," she said to him on one
morning of peculiar radiance, when there was a freshness as of the
world's first day in the air, and the shining on the sea was as the
shining that came in answer to the words--"Let there be light!"

In her worship, however, Hermione was not wholly blind. Because of the
wakefulness of her powerful heart her powerful mind did not cease to be
busy, but its work was supplementary to the work of her heart. She had
realized in London that the man she loved was not a clever man, that
there was nothing remarkable i