She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come yet":
"They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village. I shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow. They tell me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I should have liked him to lie here under the oak-trees."
"Hermione."
When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.
No event in his life had shocked him so much as the death of Delarey.
It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And yet his intellect could hardly accept it as a fact. When, early that morning, one of the servants of the Hôtel Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell him, he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the fishermen, and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been obliged to believe. His natural impulse was to go to his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in his. But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers was of the affections, and how far greater than his had ever been! He could not bear to think of it. A great and generous indignation seized him, an indignation against the catastrophes of life. That this should be Hermione's reward for her noble unselfishness roused in him something that was like fury; and then there followed a more torturing fury against himself.
He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous irony, and he sent the line in pencil which she had received. And then he walked up and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself, hating himself.
In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friendship with Hermione he realized that he had always been selfish, always the egoist claiming rather than the generous donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire to be eased of some of their weight. He had always been calling upon her for sympathy, and she had always been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth of her great heart.
And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden time that had been stored up for her by the decree of the Gods, of God, of Fate, of—whatever it was that ruled, that gave and that deprived.