ing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun
worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his
haunches, clapping his hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees,
shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf promenading
among a crowd of Follies. And always the spirit of the dance seemed to
increase within him, and the intoxication of it to take more hold upon
him, and his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and his body
more active, more utterly untiring, till he was the living embodiment
surely of all the youth and all the gladness of the world.

Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and now, as she danced in
spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced not only in her own joy, but in his,
she thought suddenly of that sentence in it--"Life may seem to most of us
who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured, thing." Life a
tortured thing! She was thinking now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts
were leaping, spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare in the
sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant reality. No dream, it was more
beautiful than any dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than
even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of course, always known
that in the world there is much joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the
joy of the world. She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of
love and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the joy of sane
passion that fights not against any law of God or man, the joy of liberty
in a joyous land where the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and
toil, there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas in
their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of gayety in their bold,
dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the
boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of
joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the
"Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly
sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory
of the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment her heart was
like the heart of a nymph scattering roses in a Bacchic triumph.

Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing quickly.

"What is it, Maurice?" she asked. "You--do you--"

"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she had not fully asked.
"It drives me almost mad