"How imaginative you are, Vere!"

"So are you, Madre! But you try to hide it from me."

Hermione was startled. She took Vere's hand, and held it for a moment
in silence, pressing it with a force that was nervous. And her
luminous, expressive eyes, immensely sensitive, beautiful in their
sensitiveness, showed that she was moved. At last she said:

"Perhaps that is true. Yes, I suppose it is."

"Why do you try to hide it?"

"I suppose--I think because--because it has brought to me a great deal
of pain. And what we hide from others we sometimes seem almost to be
destroying by that very act, though of course we are not."

"No. But I think I should like to encourage my imagination."

"Do you encourage it?" the mother asked, looking at her closely.

Again, as Vere had been on the edge of telling her mother all she knew
about Peppina, she was on the edge of telling her about the poems of
the sea. And again, moved by some sudden, obstinate reluctance, come
she knew not why, she withheld the words that were almost on her lips.

And each time the mother was aware of something avoided, of an impulse
stifled, and therefore of a secret deliberately kept. The first time
Hermione had not allowed her knowledge to appear. But on this second