ked at Artois to remind him of his words.

"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella, isn't it?" she
asked him. "I think it's the most wildly innocent expression of extreme
joy in the world. And yet"--her expressive face changed, and into her
prominent brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest look--"at
the end--Maurice, do you know that I was almost frightened that day at
the end?"

"Frightened! Why?" he said.

He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.

[Illustration: "'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN--IN MY SICILIAN,' SHE
SAID, TENDERLY"]

"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his
brown hands on the arms of the chair.

"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't
it absurd?"

He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.

"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to
see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"

She laughed.

"But I soon learned to delight in--in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.

She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it
did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most
intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.

"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice
said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.

"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione
protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.

"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a
Sicilian would be much good in England. We--we don't want romance there.
We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense
about them."

"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what
has happened to you while I've been away?"

"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me
here?"

"Do you--are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"

"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I
think I've had a long enough holiday."

He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the
new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more
yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the
sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading
away, sinking into its purpl