She thought she saw him look at her incredulously in the dark, but was not sure.
"Be kind to me to-night, Gaspare!" she said.
She felt a sudden passionate need of gentleness, of support, a woman's need of sympathy.
"Won't you?" she added.
"Signora!" he said.
His voice sounded shocked, she thought; but in a moment, when they came to an awkward bit of the path, he put his hand under her arm, and very carefully, almost tenderly, helped her over it. Tears rushed into her eyes. For such a small thing she was crying! She turned her head so that Gaspare should not see, and tried to control her emotion. That terrible question kept on returning to her heart.
"Was I praying for myself when I prayed at the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"
Hermione was gifted, or cursed, with imagination, and as she never made use of her imaginative faculty in any of the arts, it was, perhaps, too much at the service of her own life. In happiness it was a beautiful handmaid, helping her to greater joy, but in unhappy, or in only anxious moments, it was, as it usually is, a cursed thing. It stood at her elbow, then, like a demon full of suggestions that were terrible. With an inventiveness that was diabolic it brought vividly before her scenes to shake the stoutest courage. It painted the future black. It showed her the world as a void. And in that void she was as something falling, falling, yet reaching nothing.
Now it was with her in the ravine, and as she asked questions, terrible questions, it gave her terrible answers. And it reminded her of other omens—it told her these facts were really omens—which till now she had not thought of.
Why had both she and Maurice been led to think and to speak of death to-day?