“Yes. In my case, perhaps, the interest was roused partly by what Vere told me. The boy is a Sicilian, you see, and just Vere’s age.”
“Vere’s interest perhaps comes from the same reason.”
“Very likely it does.”
Hermione spoke the last words without conviction. Perhaps they both felt that they were not talking very frankly—were not expressing their thoughts to each other with their accustomed sincerity. At any rate, Artois suddenly introduced another topic of conversation, the reason of his hurried visit to Paris, and for the next hour they discussed literary affairs with a gradually increasing vivacity and open-heartedness. The little difficulty between them—of which both had been sensitive and fully conscious—passed away, and when at length Hermione got up to go to her bedroom and change her dress for the evening, there was no cloud about them.
When Hermione had gone Artois took up a book, but he sat till the evening was falling and Giulia came smiling to light the lamp, without reading a word of it. Her entry roused him from his reverie, and he took out his watch. It was already past eight. The Marchesino would soon be coming. And then—the dinner at Frisio’s!
He got up and moved about the room, picking up a book here and there, glancing at some pages, then putting it down. He felt restless and uneasy.
“I am tired from the journey,” he thought. “Or—I wonder what the weather is this evening. The heat seems to have become suffocating since Hermione went away.”
He went to one of the windows and looked out. Twilight was stealing over the sea, which was so calm that it resembled a huge sheet of steel. The sky over the island was clear. He turned and went to the opposite window. Above Ischia there was a great blackness like a pall. He stood looking at it for some minutes. His erring thoughts, which wandered like things fatigued that cannot rest, went to a mountain village in Sicily, through which he had once ridden at night during a terrific thunder-storm. In a sudden, fierce glare of lightning he had seen upon the great door of a gaunt Palazzo, which looked abandoned, a strip of black cloth. Above it were the words, “Lutto in famiglia.”
That was years ago. Yet now he saw again the palace door, the strip of cloth soaked by the pouring rain, the dreary, almost sinister words which he had read by lightning:
“Lutto in famiglia.”