One only becomes conscious
of some things when one is freed from them. Maurice's happy efforts to
walk on the heights with the enthusiasms of Hermione had surely never
tired him, but rather braced him. Yet, left alone with peasants, with
Lucrezia and Gaspare, there was something in him, some part of his
nature, which began to frolic like a child let out of school. He felt
more utterly at his ease than he had ever felt before. With these
peasants he could let his mind be perfectly lazy. To them he seemed
instructed, almost a god of knowledge.

Suddenly Maurice laughed, showing his white teeth. He stretched up his
arms to the blue heaven and the sun that sent its rays filtering down to
him through the leaves of the oak-trees, and he laughed again gently.

"What is it, signore?"

"It is good to live, Gaspare. It is good to be young out here on the
mountain-side, and to send learning and problems and questions of
conscience to the devil. After all, real life is simple enough if only
you'll let it be. I believe the complications of life, half of them, and
its miseries too, more than half of them, are the inventions of the
brains of the men and women we call clever. They can't let anything
alone. They bother about themselves and everybody else. By Jove, if you
knew how they talk about life in London! They'd make you think it was the
most complicated, rotten, intriguing business imaginable; all
misunderstandings and cross-purposes, and the Lord knows what. But it
isn't. It's jolly simple, or it can be. Here we are, you and I, and we
aren't at loggerheads, and we've got enough to eat and a pair of boots
apiece, and the sun, and the sea, and old Etna behaving nicely--and what
more do we want?"

"Signore--"

"Well?"

"I don't understand English."

"Mamma mia!" Delarey roared with laughter. "And I've been talking
English. Well, Gaspare, I can't say it in Sicilian--can I? Let's see."

He thought a minute. Then he said:

"It's something like this. Life is simple and splendid if you let it
alone. But if you worry it--well, then, like a dog, it bites you."

He imitated a dog biting. Gaspare nodded seriously.

"Mi piace la vita," he remarked, calmly.

"E anche mi piace a me," said Maurice. "Now I'll give you a lesson in
English, and when the signora comes back you can talk to her."

"Si, signore."

The afternoon had gone in a flash. Evening came while they were still
under the oak-trees, and the voice of Lucrezia was