efore
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
sharply observant and subtle, especially with those she loved. She
had noticed the difference between his manner when first they spoke of
Vere's hidden occupation and his manner when last they spoke of it. In
the interval he had found out what it was, and that it was not reading.
Of that she was positive. She was positive also that he did not wish her
to suspect this. Vere must have told him what it was.

It was characteristic of Hermione that at this moment she was free from
any common curiosity as to what it was that Vere did during those many
hours when she was shut up in her room. The thing that hurt her, that
seemed to humiliate her, was the Emile should know what it was and not
she, that Vere should have told Emile and not told her.

As she lay there she cowered under the blow a mutual silence can give,
and something woke up in her, something fiery, something surely that
could act with violence. It startled her, almost as a stranger rushing
into her room would have startled her.

For a moment she thought of her child and her loved friend with a
bitterness that