,
and she was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she said, and
evidently she thought that God had made them to run wild, careless of
woman's feelings, careless of everything save their own vagrant desires.
The tarantella--that was the dance of the soil here, the dance of the
blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his
own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he
followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up
joyously, eagerly, utterly--to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an
allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that
first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which
brought with it a faint and creeping melancholy.

"Crack! Crack!"

She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing
was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music
better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith,
and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the
reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.

"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the
mountain-top. "Maurice!"

The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were
too intent upon their sport to hear.

"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls
for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun.
Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be
either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of
something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the
mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the
sunshine.

"Signora! Signora!"

Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him
standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's
waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round
Lucrezia.

Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But
something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant
laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself
afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of
fear.

"Am I wanted up there?"

That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her
body. She turned and began to descend towards the ter