great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find
some one?"

"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do
without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."

"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist, and yet I have
often longed to be one."

"Why have you never tried to be one?"

"I hardly know. Perhaps in my inmost being I feel I never could be. I am
too impulsive, too unrestrained, too shapeless in mind. If I wrote a book
it might be interesting, human, heart-felt, true to life, I hope, not
stupid, I believe; but it would be a chaos. You--how it would shock your
critical mind! I could never select and prune and blend and graft. I
should have to throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just leave
them there."

"If you did that you might produce a human document that would live
almost as long as literature, that even just criticism would be powerless
to destroy."

"I shall never write that book, but I dare say I shall live it."

"Yes," he said. "You will live it, perhaps with Monsieur Delarey."

And he smiled.

"When is the wedding to be?"

"In January, I think."

"Ah! When you are in your garden of paradise I shall not be very far
off--just across your blue sea on the African shore."

"Why, where are you going, Emile?"

"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan, among the
pilgrims and the mosques, making some studies, taking some notes."

"For a book? Come over to Sicily and see us."

"I don't think you will want me there."

The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye, with a luscious smile
in it, peered down upon them.

"'Ad enough of the river, sir?"

"Comment?" said Artois.

"We'd better go home, I suppose," Hermione said.

She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove in silence to Eaton
Place.

III

Lucrezia Gabbi came out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte
Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the
ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite,
along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by
the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than
huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that
looked towards Etna and the sea. Lucrezia was dressed in her best. She
wore a dark-stuff gown covered in the front by a long blue-and-white
apron. Although really happiest i