"Frightened! Why?" he said.
He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.
"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 purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild
heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady
life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of
husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his
country.
"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.
But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice
had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them,
lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was
difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.