o be laughing and wiping away a tear at
the same time.

She moved her chair close to his.

"Maurice," she said. "Do you know that sometimes you make me feel
horribly old and motherly?"

"Do I?" he said.

"You do to-day, and yet--do you know that I have been thinking since I
came back that you are looking older, much older than when I went away?"

"Is that Artois?" he said, looking over the wall to the mountain-side
beyond the ravine.

Hermione got up, leaned upon the wall, and followed his eyes.

"I think it must be. I told Gaspare to go to the hotel when he fetched
the provisions in Marechiaro and tell Emile it would be best to come up
in the cool. Yes, it is he, and Gaspare is with him! Maurice, you don't
mind so very much?"

She put her arm through his.

"These people can't talk when they see how ill he looks. And if they
do--oh, Maurice, what does it matter? Surely there's only one thing in
the world that matters, and that is whether one can look one's own
conscience in the face and say, 'I've nothing to be ashamed of!'"

Maurice longed to get away from the touch of her arm. He remembered the
fragment of paper he had seen among the stones on the mountain-side. He
must go up there alone directly he had a moment of freedom. But
now--Artois! He stared at the distant donkeys. His brain felt dry and
shrivelled, his body both feverish and tired. How could he support this
long day's necessities? It seemed to him that he had not the strength and
resolution to endure them. And Artois was so brilliant! Maurice thought
of him at that moment as a sort of monster of intellectuality, terrifying
and repellent.

"Don't you think so?" Hermione said.

"I dare say," he answered. "But I dare say, I suppose--very few of us can
do that. We can't expect to be perfect, and other people oughtn't to
expect it of us."

His voice had changed. Before, it had been almost an accusing voice and
insincere. Now it was surely a voice that pleaded, and it was absolutely
sincere. Hermione remembered how in London long ago the humility of
Maurice had touched her. He had stood out from the mass of conceited men
because of his beauty and his simple readiness to sit at the feet of
others. And surely the simplicity, the humility, still persisted
beautifully in him.

"I don't think I should ever expect anything of you that you wouldn't
give me," she said to him. "Anything of loyalty, of straightness, or of
manhood. Often you seem to me a b