"I've never done God any harm," she was saying to herself now. "I've never meant to. I've always tried to do the right thing. God knows that! God wouldn't be cruel to me."
In this moment all the subtlety of her mind deserted her, all that in her might have been called "cleverness." She was reduced to an extraordinary simplicity like that of a child, or a very instinctive, uneducated person.
"I don't think I'm bad," she thought. "And God—He isn't bad. He wouldn't wish to hurt me. He wouldn't wish to kill me."
She was walking on mechanically while she thought this, but presently she remembered again that Gaspare had told her to wait in the road. She looked over the wall down to the narrow strip of beach that edged the inlet between the main-land and the Sirens' Isle. The boat which she had seen there was gone. Gaspare had taken it. She stood staring at the place where the boat had been. Then she sought a means of descending to that strip of beach. She would wait there. A little lower down the road some of the masonry of the wall had been broken away, perhaps by a winter flood, and at this point there was a faint track, trodden by fishermen's feet, leading down to the line. Hermione got over the wall at this point and was soon on the beach, standing almost on the spot where Maurice had stripped off his clothes in the night to seek the voice that had cried out to him in the darkness. She waited here. Gaspare would presently come back. His arms were strong. He could row fast. She would only have to wait a few minutes. In a few minutes she would know. She strained her eyes to catch sight of the boat rounding the promontory as it returned from the open sea. At first she stood, but presently, as the minutes went by and the boat did not come, her sense of physical weakness returned and she sat down on the stones with her feet almost touching the water.
"Gaspare knows now," she thought. "I don't know, but Gaspare knows."
That seemed to her strange, that any one should know the truth of this thing before she did. For what did it matter to any one but her? Maurice was hers—was so absolutely hers that she felt as if no one else had any concern in him. He was Gaspare's padrone. Gaspare loved him as a Sicilian may love his padrone. Others in England, too, loved him—his mother, his father. But what was any love compared with the love of the one woman to whom he belonged. His mother had her husband. Gaspare—he was a boy. He would love some girl presently; he would marry. No, she was right. The truth about that "something in the water" only concerned her. God's dealing with this creature of his to-night only really mattered to her.
As she waited, pressing her hands on the stones and looking always at the point of the dark land round which the boat must come, a strange and terrible feeling came to her, a feeling that she knew she ought to drive out of her soul, but that she was powerless to expel.
She felt as if at this moment God were on His trial before her—before a poor woman who loved.
"If God has taken Maurice from me," she thought, "He is cruel, frightfully cruel, and I cannot love Him. If He has not taken Maurice from me, He is the God who is love, the God I can, I must worship!"
Which God was he?