“Gaspare has gone.”
“It would have been better if he had never come!”
“Hermione,” he said, “has it come to this, that I must defend Gaspare to you?”
“I think Gaspare might have kept with Vere, ought to have kept with Vere.”
Artois felt a burning desire to make Hermione understand the Sicilian, but he only said, gently:
“Some day, perhaps, you will know Gaspare’s character better, you will understand all this.”
“I can’t understand it now. But—oh, if Vere—No, that’s impossible, impossible!”
She spoke with intense vehemence.
“Some things cannot happen,” she exclaimed, with a force that seemed to be commanding destiny.
Artois said nothing. And his apparent calm seemed to punish her, almost as if he struck her with a whip.