"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his brown hands on the arms of the chair.
"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't it absurd?"
He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.
"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"
She laughed.
"But I soon learned to delight in—in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.
She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.
"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.
"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.