om he had
told to remain at the cottage for the rest of the night, he suddenly
remembered the cigar which he had left upon the table, and he pulled up.

"What is it, Signor Dottore?" said one of the fishermen.

"I've left something, but--never mind. It does not matter."

He rode on again.

"It does not matter," he repeated.

He was thinking of the English signora standing beside the bed in her wet
skirts and holding the hand of the weeping boy.

It was the first time in his life that he had ever sacrificed a good
cigar.

He wondered why he did so now, but he did not care to return just then to
the Casa del Prete.

XXIII

Hermione longed for quiet, for absolute silence.

It seemed strange to her that she still longed for anything--strange and
almost horrible, almost inhuman. But she did long for that, to be able to
sit beside her dead husband and to be undisturbed, to hear no voice
speaking, no human movement, to see no one. If it had been possible she
would have closed the cottage against every one, even against Gaspare and
Lucrezia. But it was not possible. Destiny did not choose that she should
have this calm, this silence. It had seemed to her, when fear first came
upon her, as if no one but herself had any real concern with Maurice, as
if her love conferred upon her a monopoly. This monopoly had been one of
joy. Now it should be one of sorrow. But now it did not exist. She was
not weeping for Maurice. But others were. She had no one to go to. But
others came to her, clung to her. She could not rid herself of the human
burden.

She might have been selfish, determined, she might have driven the
mourners out. But--and that was strange, too--she found herself pitying
them, trying to use her intellect to soothe them.

Lucrezia was terrified, almost like one assailed suddenly by robbers,
terrified and half incredulous. When her hysteria subsided she was at
first unbelieving.

"He cannot be really dead, signora!" she sobbed to Hermione. "The povero
signorino. He was so gay! He was so--"

She talked and talked, as Sicilians do when face to face with tragedy.

She recalled Maurice's characteristics, his kindness, his love of
climbing, fishing, bathing, his love of the sun--all his love of life.

Hermione had to listen to the story with that body lying on her bed.

Gaspare's grief was speechless, but needed comfort more. There was an
element in it of fury which Hermione realized without rightly
under