As he spoke he noticed that a change came in his companion's face. It was fleeting, but it was marked. It made Artois think:
"This man understands Sicilian faithlessness in love."
It made him, too, remember sharply some words of his own said long ago in London:
"I love the South, but I distrust what I love, and I see the South in him."
There was a silence between the two men. Heat was growing in the long summer day, heat that lapped them in the influence of the South. Africa had been hotter, but this seemed the breast of the South, full of glory and of languor, and of that strange and subtle influence which inclines the heart of man to passion and the body of man to yield to its desires. It was glorious, this wonderful magic of the South, but was it wholesome for Northern men? Was it not full of danger? As he looked at the great, shining waste of the sea, purple and gold, dark and intense and jewelled, at the outline of Etna, at the barbaric ruin of the Saracenic castle on the cliff opposite, like a cry from the dead ages echoing out of the quivering blue, at the man before him leaning against the blinding white wall above the steep bank of the ravine, Artois said to himself that the South was dangerous to young, full-blooded men, was dangerous, to such a man as Delarey. And he asked himself the question, "What has this man been doing here in this glorious loneliness of the South, while his wife has been saving my life in Africa?" And a sense of reproach, almost of alarm, smote him. For he had called Hermione away. In the terrible solitude that comes near to the soul with the footfalls of death he had not been strong enough to be silent. He had cried out, and his friend had heard and had answered. And Delarey had been left alone with the sun.
"I'm afraid you must feel as if I were your enemy," he said.
And as he spoke he was thinking, "Have I been this man's enemy?"
"Oh no. Why?"
"I deprived you of your wife. You've been all alone here."
"I made friends of the Sicilians."