simplicity like that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated
person.

"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God--He isn't bad. He wouldn't
wish to hurt me. He wouldn't wish to kill me."

She was walking on mechanically while she thought this, but presently
she remembered again that Gaspare had told her to wait in the road. She
looked over the wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the
inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The boat which she had
seen there was gone. Gaspare had taken it. She stood staring at the place
where the boat had been. Then she sought a means of descending to that
strip of beach. She would wait there. A little lower down the road some
of the masonry of the wall had been broken away, perhaps by a winter
flood, and at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's
feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over the wall at this point
and was soon on the beach, standing almost on the spot where Maurice had
stripped off his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried
out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare would presently come
back. His arms were strong. He could row fast. She would only have to
wait a few minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She strained her
eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding the promontory as it returned
from the open sea. At first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went
by and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness returned and
she sat down on the stones with her feet almost touching the water.

"Gaspare knows now," she thought. "I don't know, but Gaspare knows."

That seemed to her strange, that any one should know the truth of this
thing before she did. For what did it matter to any one but her? Maurice
was hers--was so absolutely hers that she felt as if no one else had any
concern in him. He was Gaspare's padrone. Gaspare loved him as a Sicilian
may love his padrone. Others in England, too, loved him--his mother, his
father. But what was any love compared with the love of the one woman to
whom he belonged. His mother had her husband. Gaspare--he was a boy. He
would love some girl presently; he would marry. No, she was right. The
truth about that "something in the water" only concerned her. God's
dealing with this creature of his to-night only really mattered to her.

As she waited, pressing her hands on the stones and looking always at the
point of the dark land round whi