o!" "Carta da vente!" throwing down the soldi and
picking them up greedily in "Sette e mezzo." Stories would be told, bets
given and taken. The smoke would curl up from the long, black cigars the
Sicilians love. Dark-browed men and women, wild-haired boys, and girls in
gay shawls, with great rings swinging from their ears, would give
themselves up as only southerners can to the joy of the passing moment,
forgetting poverty, hardship, and toil, grinding taxation, all the cares
and the sorrows that encompass the peasant's life, forgetting the flight
of the hours, forgetting everything in the passion of the festa, the
dedication of all their powers to the laughing worship of fun.

Yes, the passing hour would be forgotten. That was certain. It would be
dawn ere Lucrezia and Gaspare returned.

Delarey's cigar was burned to a stump. He took it from his lips and threw
it with all his force over the wall towards the sea. Then he put his
hands on the wall and leaned over it, fixing his eyes on the sea. The
sense of injury grew in him. He resented the joys of others in this
beautiful night, and he felt as if all the world were at a festa, as if
all the world were doing wonderful things in the wonderful night, while
he was left solitary to eat out his heart beneath the moon. He did not
reason against his feelings and tell himself they were absurd. The
dancing faun does not reason in his moments of ennui. He rebels. Delarey
rebelled.

He had been invited to the festa and he had refused to go--almost eagerly
he had refused. Why? There had been something secret in his mind which
had prompted him. He had said--and even to himself--that he did not go
lest his presence might bring a disturbing element into the peasants'
gayety. But was that his reason?

Leaning over the wall he looked down upon the sea. The star that seemed
caught in the sea smiled at him, summoned him. Its gold was like the
gold, the little feathers of gold in the dark hair of a Sicilian girl
singing the song of the May beside the sea:

"Maju torna, maju veni
Cu li belli soi ciureri--"

He tried to hum the tune, but it had left his memory. He longed to hear
it once more under the olive-trees of the Sirens' Isle.

Again his thought went to Hermione. Very soon she would be out there, far
out on the silver of the sea. Had she wanted him to go with her? He knew
that she had. Yet she had not asked him to go, had not hinted at his
going.