ect me to wish to have Artois with us here, could
you, Hermione?" he said, slowly.

She scarcely knew whether she were most pained or pleased. She was pained
that anything she had done had clouded his happiness, but she was
intensely glad to think he loved to be quite alone with her.

"No, I felt that. But I felt, too, as if it would be cruel to stop short,
unworthy in us."

"In us?"

"Yes. You let me go to Africa. You might have asked me, you might even
have told me, not to go. I did not think of it at the time. Everything
went so quickly. But I have thought of it since. And, knowing that,
realizing it, I feel that you had your part, a great part, in Emile's
rescue. For I do believe, Maurice, that if I had not gone he would have
died."

"Then I am glad you went."

He spoke perfunctorily, almost formally. Hermione felt chilled.

"It seemed to me that, having begun to do a good work, it would be finer,
stronger, to carry it quite through, to put aside our own desires and
think of another who had passed through a great ordeal. Was I wrong,
Maurice? Emile is still very weak, very dependent. Ought I to have said,
'Now I see you're not going to die, I'll leave you at once.' Wouldn't it
have been rather selfish, even rather brutal?"

His reply startled her.

"Have you--have you ever thought of where we are?" he said.

"Where we are!"

"Of the people we are living among?"

"I don't think I understand."

He cleared his throat.

"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the English do," he said.

There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over her, over all her
body and face. She did not speak, because, if she had, she might have
said something vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said,
surely never would say, to Maurice.

"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.

"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't tell me."

The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control it.

"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out here think of an utterly
innocent action!" she said, at last, very quietly.

But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian blood in him.

"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind now."

And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she might have felt over a
child. In his face she could not see the boy to-day, but his words set
the boy, the inmost nature of the boy that he still surely was, before
her.

The sense of humor in her seemed t