"Why, Hermione?" he asked, simply.
He was looking a little puzzled, but still reverential.
"I love Emile as a friend. You know that."
"Yes. Would you go to Kairouan if you didn't?"
"If he were to die it would be a great sorrow, a great loss to me. I pray
that he may live. And yet--"
Suddenly she took his other hand in hers.
"Oh, Maurice, I've been thinking to-day, I'm thinking now--suppose it
were you who lay ill, perhaps dying! Oh, the difference in my feeling, in
my dread! If you were to be taken from me, the gap in my life! There
would be nothing--nothing left."
He put his arm round her, and was going to speak, but she went on: "And if you were to be taken from me how terrible it would be to feel
that I'd ever had one unkind thought of you, that I'd ever misinterpreted
one look or word or action of yours, that I'd ever, in my egoism or my
greed, striven to thwart one natural impulse of yours, or to force you
into travesty away from simplicity! Don't--don't ever be unnatural or
insincere with me, Maurice, even for a moment, even for fear of hurting
me. Be always yourself, be the boy that you still are and that I love you
for being."
She put her head on his shoulder, and he felt her body trembling.
"I think I'm always natural with you," he said.
"You're as natural as Gaspare. Only once, and--and that was my fault, I
know; but you mean so much to me, everything, and your honesty with me is
like God walking with me."
She lifted her head and stood up.
"Please God we'll have many more nights together here," she said--"many
more blessed, blessed nights. The stillness of the hills is like all the
truth of the world, sifted from the falsehood and made into one beautiful
whole. Oh, Maurice, there is a Heaven on earth--when two people love
each other in the midst of such a silence as this."
They went slowly back through the archway to the terrace. Far below them
the sea gleamed delicately, almost like a pearl. In the distance,
towering above the sea, the snow of Etna gleamed more coldly, with a
bleaker purity, a suggestion of remote mysteries and of untrodden
heights. Above the snow of Etna shone the star of evening. Beside the sea
shone the little light in the house of the sirens.
And as they stood for a moment before the cottage in the deep silence of
the night, Hermione looked up at the star above the snow. But Maurice
looked down at the little light beside the sea.