"You didn't remember about tea-time!"
"Signora," he answered, "I am sorry."
He looked at her fixedly while he spoke.
"I am sorry," he said again.
"Never mind," Hermione said, unable to blame him on this first day of her
return. "I dare say you have got out of regular habits while I've been
away. What have you been doing all the time?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Niente."
Again she wondered what was the matter with the boy to-day. Where were
his life and gayety? Where was his sense of fun? He used to be always
joking, singing. But now he was serious, almost heavy in demeanor.
"Gaspare," she said, jokingly, "I think you've all become very solemn
without me. I am the old person of the party, but I begin to believe that
it is I who keep you lively. I mustn't go away again."
"No, signora," he answered, earnestly; "you must never go away from us
again. You should never have gone away from us."
The deep solemnity of his great eyes startled her. He put on his hat and
went away round the angle of the cottage.
"What can be the matter with him?" she thought.
She remained sitting there on the terrace, wondering. Now she thought
over things quietly, it struck her as strange the fact that she had left
behind her in the priest's house three light-hearted people, and had
come back to find Lucrezia drowned in sorrow, Gaspare solemn, even
mysterious in his manner, and her husband--but here her thoughts paused,
not labelling Maurice. At first he had puzzled her the most. But she
thought she had found reasons for the change--a passing one, she felt
sure--in him. He had secretly resented her absence, and, though utterly
free from any ignoble suspicion of her, he had felt boyishly jealous of
her friendship with Emile. That was very natural. For this was their
honeymoon. She considered it their honeymoon prolonged, delightfully
prolonged, beyond any fashionable limit. Lucrezia's depression was easily
comprehensible. The change in her husband she accounted for; but now here
was Gaspare looking dismal!
"I must cheer them all up," she thought to herself. "This beautiful time
mustn't end dismally."
And then she thought of the inevitable departure. Was Maurice looking
forward to it, desiring it? He had spoken that day as if he wished to be
off. In London she had been able to imagine him in the South, in the
highway of the sun. But now that she was here in Sicily she could not
imagine him in London.