Gaspare said nothing.
“Did you hear, Gaspare?”
“Si, Signora.”
“Gaspare, it seems to me”—Hermione was speaking now very slowly, like one shaping a thought in her mind while she spoke—“it seems to me strange that you and Ruffo’s mother should have known each other so well long before Ruffo was born, and that she should cry because she met you at the Festa, and that—afterwards—she should ask Ruffo that.”
“Strange?”
The fear that had been formless was increasing now in Hermione, and surely it was beginning at last to take a form, but as yet only a form that was vague and shadowy.
“Yes. I think it very strange. Did you”—an intense curiosity was alive in her now—“did you know Ruffo’s mother in Sicily?”
“Signora, it does not matter where I knew her.”
“Why should she say that?”
“What?”