did you read?"

"The _Arabian Nights_."

She stretched herself on the rug.

"To lie here and read the _Arabian Nights_! And you want to go away,
Maurice?"

"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here I should become fit
for nothing."

"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But--Maurice, it's so strange--I have a
feeling as if you would always be in Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet
I have it. I feel as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean
to part from you."

"That can't be. How could I stay here always?"

"I know."

"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started suddenly into his
mind--"unless I were--"

He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in the sea that gray morning
of sirocco. He had remembered how he had played at dying.

"What?"

She looked at him and understood.

"Maurice--don't! I--I can't bear that!"

"Not one of us can know," he answered.

"I--I thought of that once," she said--"long ago, on the first night that
we were here. I don't know why--but perhaps it was because I was so
happy. I think it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there
must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought it may stop soon, it
may end. But why should it? Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be
happy."

"If he wants us--"

"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy. But we won't do that,
Maurice--you and I--will we?"

He did not answer.

"This world--nature--is so wonderfully beautiful, so happily beautiful.
Surely we can learn to be happy, to keep happy in it. Look at that sky,
that sea! Look at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the
coast-line fading away, and Etna. The God who created it all must have
meant men to be happy in such a world. It isn't my brain tells me that,
Maurice, it's my heart, my whole heart that you have made whole. And I
know it tells the truth."

Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step, a figure standing
before her, a few Sicilian words--and all this world in which she gloried
would be changed for her. But she must not know. He felt that he would be
willing to die to keep her ignorant of the truth forever.

"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her from speaking any
more of the words that were torturing him. "We must have our siesta. I
had very little sleep last night."

"And I had none at all. But now--we're together."

He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft shadow and could see
the