“But I must occasionally go in to Naples!” she protested.
“Si, Signora.”
“Well, but mustn’t I?”
“Non lo so, Signora. Perhaps we have been here long enough. Perhaps we had better go away from here.”
He spoke slowly, and with something less than his usual firmness, as if in his mind there was uncertainty, some indecision or some conflict of desires.
“Do you want to go away?” she said.
“It is not for me to want, Signora.”
“I don’t think the Signorina would like to go, Gaspare. She hates the idea of leaving the island.”
“The Signorina is not every one,” he returned.
Habitually blunt as Gaspare was, Hermione had never before heard him speak of Vere like this, not with the least impertinence, but with a certain roughness. To-day it did not hurt her. Nor, indeed, could it ever have hurt her, coming from some one so proven as Gaspare. But to-day it even warmed her, for it made her feel that some one was thinking exclusively of her—was putting her first. She longed for some expression of affection from some one. She felt that she was starving for it. And this feeling made her say: