se of that confidence given to Emile, and
of Emile because of his secret advice and help to Vere--advice and help
which he had not given to the mother, because he had plainly seen that
to do so would be useless.

And when she remembered this Hermione was jealous, too, of the talent
Vere must have, a talent she had longed for, but which had been denied
to her. For even if Emile... and then again came the most hateful
suspicion of all--but Emile could not lie about the things of art.

Had they spoken together of her failure? Again and again she asked
herself the question. They must have spoken. They had spoken. She could
almost hear their words--words of regret or of pity. "We must not hurt
her. We must keep it from her. We must temper the wind to the shorn
lamb." The elderly man and the child had read together the tragedy of
her failure. To the extremes of life, youth and age, she had appeared an
object of pity.

And then she thought of her dead husband's reverence of her intellect,
boyish admiration of her mental gifts; and an agony of longing for his
love swept over her again, and she felt that he was the only person who
had been able to love her really, and that now he was gone there was no
one.

At that moment she forgot Gaspare. Her sense of being abandoned, and of
being humiliated, swept out many things from her memory. Only Maurice
had loved her really. Only he had set her on high, where even the
humblest woman longs to be set by some one. Only he had thought her
better, braver, more worshipful, more loveable, than any other woman.
Such love, without bringing conceit to the creature loved, gives power,
creates much of what it believes in. The lack of any such love seems to
withdraw the little power that there is.

Hermione, feeling in this humiliation of the imagination that she
was less than nothing, clung desperately to the memory of him who
had thought her much. The dividing years were gone. With a strange, a
beautiful and terrible freshness, the days of her love came back. She
saw Maurice's eyes looking at her with that simple, almost reverent
admiration which she had smiled at and adored.

And she gripped her memory. She clung to it feverishly as she had never
clung to it before. She told herself that she would live in it as in a
house of shelter. For there was the desolate wind outside.

And she thought much of Ruffo, and with a strange desire--to be with
him, to search for the look she loved in him.