mutilated life was more vehemently centred upon Vere than she had
understood. Of Vere she could be jealous. If Vere put any one before
her, trusted any one more than her, confided anything to another
rather than to her, she could be frightfully jealous.

Recently she had suspected--she had imagined--

Restlessly she moved on her bed. A mosquito-curtain protected it. She
was glad of that, as if it kept out prying eyes. For sometimes she was
ashamed of the vehemence within her.

She thought of her friend Emile, whom she had dragged back from death.

He, too, had he not drifted a little from her in these last days? It
seemed to her that it was so. She knew that it was so. Women are so
sure of certain things, more almost than men are ever sure of
anything. And why should Vere have drifted, Emile have drifted, if
there were not some link between them--some link between the child and
the middle-aged man which they would not have her know of?

Vere had told to Emile something that she had kept, that she still
kept from her mother. When Vere had been shut up in her room she had
not been reading. Emile knew what it was that she did during those
long hours when she was alone. Emile knew that, and perhaps other
things of Vere that she, Hermione, did not know, was not allowed to
know.

Hermione, in their long intimacy, had learned to read Artois more
clearly, more certainly than he realized. Although often impulsive,
and seemingly unconscious of the thoughts of others, she could be both