His reply startled her.
"Have you--have you ever thought of where we are?" he said.
"Where we are!"
"Of the people we are living among?"
"I don't think I understand."
He cleared his throat.
"They're Sicilians. They don't see things as the English do," he said.
There was a silence. Hermione felt a heat rush over her, over all her
body and face. She did not speak, because, if she had, she might have
said something vehement, even headstrong, such as she had never said,
surely never would say, to Maurice.
"Of course I understand. It's not that," he added.
"No, it couldn't be that," she said. "You needn't tell me."
The hot feeling stayed with her. She tried to control it.
"You surely can't mind what ignorant people out here think of an utterly
innocent action!" she said, at last, very quietly.
But even as she spoke she remembered the Sicilian blood in him.
"You have minded it!" she said. "You do mind now."
And suddenly she felt very tender over him, as she might have felt over a
child. In his face she could not see the boy to-day, but his words set
the boy, the inmost nature of the boy that he still surely was, before
her.
The sense of humor in her seemed to 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!'"