“Hermione!”
His voice was startled.
“You know it perfectly well. You have known it for a long time.”
Hot tears were in her eyes, were about to fall. With a crude gesture, almost like that of a man, she put up her hands to brush them away.
“You have known it, you have known it, but you try to keep me in the dark.”
Suddenly she was horribly conscious of the darkness of the night in which they were together, of the darkness of the world.
“You love to keep me in the dark, in prison. It is cruel, it is wicked of you.”
“But Hermione—”
“Take care, Emile, take care—or I shall hate you for keeping me in the dark.”
Her passionate words applied only to the later events in which Vere was concerned. But his mind rushed back to Sicily, and suddenly there came to his memory some words he had once read, he did not know when, or where: