though he
was only a boy. He was Sicilian and he would understand.

"Gaspare," he began.

"Si, signore."

"As you understand so much--"

"Si, signore?"

"Perhaps you--" He checked himself, realizing that he was on the edge of
doing an outrageous thing. "You must know that the friends of the signora
are my friends and that I am always glad to welcome them."

"Va bene, signorino! Va bene!"

The boy began to look glum, understanding at once that he was being
played with.

"I must go to give Tito his food."

And he stuck his hands in his pockets and went away round the corner of
the cottage, whistling the tune of the "Canzone di Marechiaro."

Maurice began to feel as if he were in the dark, but as if he were being
watched there. He wondered how clearly Gaspare read him, how much he
knew. And Artois? When he came, with his watchful eyes, there would be
another observer of the Sicilian change. He did not much mind Gaspare,
but he would hate Artois. He grew hot at the mere thought of Artois being
there with him, observing, analyzing, playing the literary man's part in
this out-door life of the mountains and of the sea.

"I'm not a specimen," he said to himself, "and I'm damned if I'll be
treated as one!"

It did not occur to him that he was anticipating that which might never
happen. He was as unreasonable as a boy who foresees possible
interference with his pleasures.

This decision of Hermione to bring with her to Sicily Artois, and its
communication to Maurice, pushed him on to the recklessness which he had
previously resolved to hold in check. Had Hermione been returning to him
alone he would have felt that a gay and thoughtless holiday time was
coming to an end, but he must have felt, too, that only tenderness and
strong affection were crossing the sea from Africa to bind him in chains
that already he had worn with happiness and peace. But the knowledge that
with Hermione was coming Artois gave to him a definite vision of
something that was like a cage. Without consciously saying it to himself,
he had in London been vaguely aware of Artois's coldness of feeling
towards him. Had any one spoken of it to him he would probably have
denied that this was so. There are hidden things in a man that he himself
does not say to himself that he knows of. But Maurice's vision of a cage
was conjured up by Artois's mental attitude towards him in London, the
attitude of the observer who might, in certain circumstances, be