step. She must not be left alone. She had told Emile that she could
not live again in Vere. And that was true. Vere was not enough. But
Vere was very much. Without Vere, what would her life be?

A wave of melancholy flowed over her to-night, a tide come from she
knew not where. Making an effort to stem it, she recalled her
happiness with Maurice after that day of the Tarantella. How
groundless had really been her melancholy then! She had imagined him
escaping from her, but he had remained with her, and loved her. He had
been good to her until the end, tender and faithful. If she had ever
had a rival, that rival had been Sicily. Always her imagination was
her torturer.

Her failure in art had been a tragedy because of this. If she could
have set her imagination free in an art she would have been far safer
than she was. Emile Artois was really lonelier than she, for he had
not a child. But his art surely saved him securely from her sense of
desolation. And then he was a man, and men must need far less than
women do. Hermione felt that it was so. She thought of Emile in his
most helpless moment, in that period when he was ill in Kairouan
before she came. Even then she believed that he could not have felt
quite so much alone as she did now; for men never long to be taken
care of as women do. And yet she was well, in this tranquil house
which was her own--with Vere, her child, and Gaspare, her devoted
servant.

As mentally she recounted her benefits, the strength there was in her
arose, protesting. She called herself harsh names: egoist, craven,
/faineant/. But it was no use to attack herself. In the deeps of her
poor, eager, passionate, hungry woman's nature something wept, and