donkeys.

"Buona notte, signora!"

It was a very happy voice.

"Buona notte, Gaspare. Sleep well."

Maurice caught at the last words.

"We must sleep," he said. "To-morrow we'll--we'll----"

"Tell each other everything. Yes, to-morrow!"

She put her arm through his.

"Maurice, if you knew how I feel!"

"Yes?" he said, trying to make his voice eager, buoyant. "Yes?"

"If you knew how I've been longing to be back! And so often I've thought
that I never should be here with you again, just in the way we were!"

He cleared his throat.

"Why?"

"It is so difficult to repeat a great, an intense happiness, I think. But
we will, we are repeating it, aren't we?"

"Yes."

"When I got to the station to-day, and--and you weren't there, I had a
dreadful foreboding. It was foolish. The explanation of your not being
there was so simple. Of course I might have guessed it."

"Of course."

"But in the first moment I felt as if you weren't there because I had
lost you forever, because you had been taken away from me forever. It was
such an intense feeling that it frightened me--it frightened me horribly.
Put your arm round me, Maurice. Let me feel what an idiot I have been!"

He obeyed her and put his arm round her, and he felt as if his arm must
tell her what she had not learned from his lips. And she thought that now
he must know the truth she had not told him.

"Don't think of dreadful things," he said.

"I won't any more. I don't think I could with you. To me you always mean
the sun, light, and life, and all that is brave and beautiful!"

He took his arm away from her.

"Come, we must sleep, Hermione!" he said. "It's nearly dawn. I can almost
see the smoke on Etna."

He shut the French window and drew the bolt.

She had gone into the bedroom and was standing by the dressing-table. She
did not know why, but a great shyness had come upon her. It was like a
cloud enveloping her. Never before had she felt like this with Maurice,
not even when they were first married. She had loved him too utterly to
be shy with him. Maurice was still in the sitting-room, fastening the
shutters of the window. She heard the creak of wood, the clatter of the
iron bar falling into the fastener. Now he would come.

But he did not come. He was moving about in the room. She heard papers
rustling, then the lid of the piano shut down. He was putting everything
in order.

This orderliness was so unusual in Maurice that it made a dis