“How strange that is!”
“You think so, my friend?”
“Yes. I never can understand how human beings can pass from love to love, as many of them do. I never could understand it, even before I—even before Sicily.”
“You are not made to understand such a thing.”
“But you do?”
“I? Well, perhaps. But the loves of men are not as your love.”
“Yet his was,” she answered. “And he was a true Southerner, despite his father.
“Yes, he was a true Southerner,” Artois replied.
For once he was off his guard with her, and uttered his real thought of Maurice, not without a touch of the irony that was characteristic of him.
Immediately he had spoken he was aware of his indiscretion. But Hermione had not noticed it. He saw by her eyes that she was far away in Sicily. And when the boat slipped into the Saint’s Pool, and Gaspare came to the water’s edge to hold the prow while they got out, she rose from her seat slowly, and almost reluctantly, like one disturbed in a dream that she would fain continue.