He tugged at his mustaches.
“Only I think the Signora might trust to us.”
“Tell her so, if you like. Here she is.”
At this moment the door opened and Hermione came in, followed by Vere.
As Artois went to welcome them he was aware of a strange mixture of sensations, which made these two dear and close friends, these intimates of his life, seem almost new. He was acutely conscious of the mist of which Hermione had thought. He wondered about her, as she about him. He saw again that face in the night under the trellis. He heard the voice that had called to him and Vere in the garden. And he knew that enmity, mysterious yet definite, might arise even between Hermione and him; that even they two—inexorably under the law that has made all human beings separate entities, and incapable of perfect fusion—might be victims of misunderstanding, of ignorance of the absolute truth of personality. Even now he was companioned by the sudden and horrible doubt which had attacked him in the garden: that perhaps she had been always playing a part when she had seemed to be deeply interested in his work, that perhaps there was within her some one whom he did not know, had never even caught a glimpse of until lately, once when she was in the tram going to the Scoglio di Frisio, and once the last time they had met. And yet this was the woman who had nursed him in Africa—and this was the woman against whose impulsive actions he had had the instinct to protect Vere—the Hermione Delarey whom he had known for so many years.
Never before had he looked at Hermione quite as he looked at her to-night. His sense of her strangeness woke up in him something that was ill at ease, doubtful, almost even suspicious, but also something that was quivering with interest.
For years this woman had been to him “dear Hermione,” “ma pauvre amie,” comrade, sympathizer, nurse, mother of Vere.
Now—what else was she? A human creature with a heart and brain capable of mystery; a soul with room in it for secret things; a temple whose outside he had seen, but whose god, perhaps, he had never seen.
And Vere was involved in her mother’s strangeness, and had her own strangeness too. Of that he had been conscious before to-night. For Vere was being formed. The plastic fingers were at work about her, moulding her into what she must be as a woman.
But Hermione! She had been a woman so long.