understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois
himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into
the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and
infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the
important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what
could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of
existence?

"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across
the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy
beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and
cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"

"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel
so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You
do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written
begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"

"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in
many."

"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."

"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by
your impulses."

She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a
distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide.
Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said:

"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly--don't be afraid now.
What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little
red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at
himself if she began to laugh.

But she said, gravely:

"Go on."

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery
will be born."

"Yes? What sort of misery?"

"I don't know."

"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"

"To you."

"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"

"I think it must have been."

"Well?"

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see
the South in him."

"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has
he faithfulness?"

"Oh, Emile!"

"You told me to be frank."

"And I wish