Hermione quickly laid her hand on his.
"I was only laughing. You know your padrona trusts you to remember her as
she remembers you."
Gaspare lifted up her hand quickly, kissed it, and hurried away, lifting
his own hand to his eyes.
"These Sicilians know how to make one love them," said Hermione, with a
little catch in her voice. "I believe that boy would die for me if
necessary."
"I'm sure he would," said Maurice. "But one doesn't find a padrona like
you every day."
"Let us walk to the arch," she said. "I must take my last look at the
mountains with you."
Beyond the archway there was a large, flat rock, a natural seat from
which could be seen a range of mountains that was invisible from the
terrace. Hermione often sat on this rock alone, looking at the distant
peaks, whose outlines stirred her imagination like a wild and barbarous
music. Now she drew down Maurice beside her and kept his hand in hers.
She was thinking of many things, among others of the little episode that
had just taken place with Gaspare. His outburst of feeling, like fire
bursting up through a suddenly opened fissure in the crust of the earth,
had touched her and something more. It had comforted her, and removed
from her a shadowy figure that had been approaching her, the figure of a
fear. She fixed her eyes on the mountains, dark under the silver of the
moon.
"Maurice," she said. "Do you often try to read people?"
The pleasant look of almost deprecating modesty that Artois had noticed
on the night when they dined together in London came to Delarey's face.
"I don't know that I do, Hermione," he said. "Is it easy?"
"I think--I'm thinking it especially to-night--that it is horribly
difficult. One's imagination seizes hold of trifles, and magnifies them
and distorts them. From little things, little natural things, one
deduces--I mean one takes a midget and makes of it a monster. How one
ought to pray to see clear in people one loves! It's very strange, but I
think that sometimes, just because one loves, one is ready to be afraid,
to doubt, to exaggerate, to think a thing is gone when it is there. In
friendship one is more ready to give things their proper value--perhaps
because everything is of less value. Do you know that to-night I realize
for the first time the enormous difference there is between the love one
gives in love and the love one gives in friendship?"