as she listened, to every sound, not only with
the ears but with the imagination. The flush of the almond blossoms upon
the lower slopes of the hills about Marechiaro, a virginal tint of joy
against gray walls, gray rocks, made her look into the soul of the spring
as her first lover alone looks into the soul of a maiden. She asked
Maurice to look with her into that place of dreams, and to ponder with
her over the mystery of the everlasting renewal of life. The sight of the
sea took her away into a fairy-land of thought. Far down below, seen over
rocks and tree-tops and downward falling mountain flanks, it spread away
towards Africa in a plain that seemed to slope upward to a horizon-line
immensely distant. Often it was empty of ships, but when a sail came,
like a feather on the blue, moving imperceptibly, growing clearer, then
fading until taken softly by eternity--that was Hermione's feeling--that
sail was to her like a voice from the worlds we never know, but can
imagine, some of us, worlds of mystery that is not sad, and of joys
elusive but ineffable, sweet and strange as the cry of echo at twilight,
when the first shadows clasp each other by the hand, and the horn of the
little moon floats with a shy radiance out of its hiding-place in the
bosom of the sky. She tried to take Maurice with her whence the sail
came, whither it went. She saw Sicily perhaps as it was, but also as she
was. She felt the spring in Sicily, but not only as that spring, spring
of one year, but as all the springs that have dawned on loving women, and
laughed with green growing things about their feet. Her passionate
imagination now threw gossamers before, now drew gossamers away from a
holy of holies that no man could ever enter. And she tried to make that
holy of holies Maurice's habitual sitting-room. It was a tender, glorious
attempt to compass the impossible.

All this was at first. But Hermione was generally too clear-brained to be
long tricked even by her own enthusiasms. She soon began to understand
that though Maurice might wish to see, to feel all things as she saw and
felt them, his effort to do so was but a gallant attempt of love in a man
who thought he had married his superior. Really his outlook on Sicily and
the spring was naturally far more like Gaspare's. She watched in a
rapture of wonder, enjoyed with a passion of gratitude. But Gaspare was
in and was of all that she was wondering about, thanking God for, part of
the phenomen