y must spring, from other
reasons of love.

His mind was exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely
moved, yet it discerned much truth. And it was very strange, but his now
acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of
the darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes,
causes which nevertheless would surely never have produced the effect he
felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute consciousness
of a personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois a new sensation
of something that was not hatred, that was the reverse of hatred. Vere
had once compared him to a sleepy lion. The lion was now awake.

"Hermione," he said--and now his voice was strong and unfaltering--"I
seem to have been listening to you all this time that I have been
standing here. Surely I have been listening to you, hearing your
thoughts. Don't you know it? Haven't you felt it? When I left the
island, when I followed you, I thought I understood. I thought I
understood what you were feeling, almost all that you were feeling. I
know now how little I understood. I didn't realize how much there was to
understand. You've been telling me. Haven't you, Hermione? Haven't you?"

He paused. But there was no answer.

"I am sure you have been telling me. We must get down to the truth at
last. I thought--till now I have thought that I was more able to read
the truth than most men. You must often have laughed--how you must have
laughed--secretly at my pretensions. Only once--one night in the garden
on the island--I think I saw you laughing. And even then I didn't
understand. Mon Dieu!"

He was becoming fiercely concentrated now on what he was saying. He was
losing all self-consciousness. He was even losing consciousness of
the strange fact that he was addressing a void. It was as if he saw
Hermione, so strongly did he feel her.

"Mon Dieu! It is as if I'd been blind all the time I have known you,
blind to the truth of you and blinder still to my own truth. Perhaps
I am blind now. I don't know. But, Hermione, I can see something. I do
know something of you and of myself. I do know that even now there is a
link between us. You want to deny it. You wouldn't acknowledge it. But
it is there. We are not quite apart from each other. We can't be that.
for there is something--there has always been something, since that
night we met in Paris, at Madame Enthoven's"--he paused again,
so vividly flashed t