sibly be allowed. If
the body is buried here it must be in the Campo Santo."

"Thank you."

She turned to the table and wrote after "Don't come yet":

"They are taking him away now to the hospital in the village. I
shall come down. I think the funeral will be to-morrow. They tell
me he must be buried in the Campo Santo. I should have liked him to
lie here under the oak-trees.
HERMIONE."

When Artois read this note tears came into his eyes.

No event in his life had shocked him so much as the death of Delarey.

It had shocked both his intellect and his heart. And yet his intellect
could hardly accept it as a fact. When, early that morning, one of the
servants of the Hotel Regina Margherita had rushed into his room to tell
him, he had refused to believe it. But then he had seen the fishermen,
and finally Dr. Marini. And he had been obliged to believe. His natural
impulse was to go to his friend in her trouble as she had come to him in
his. But he checked it. His agony had been physical. Hers was of the
affections, and how far greater than his had ever been! He could not bear
to think of it. A great and generous indignation seized him, an
indignation against the catastrophes of life. That this should be
Hermione's reward for her noble unselfishness roused in him something
that was like fury; and then there followed a more torturing fury against
himself.

He had deprived her of days and weeks of happiness. Such a short span of
joy had been allotted to her, and he had not allowed her to have even
that. He had called her away. He dared not trust himself to write any
word of sympathy. It seemed to him that to do so would be a hideous
irony, and he sent the line in pencil which she had received. And then he
walked up and down in his little sitting-room, raging against himself,
hating himself.

In his now bitterly acute consideration of his friendship with Hermione
he realized that he had always been selfish, always the egoist claiming
rather than the generous donor. He had taken his burdens to her, not
weakly, for he was not a weak man, but with a desire to be eased of some
of their weight. He had always been calling upon her for sympathy, and
she had always been lavishly responding, scattering upon him the wealth
of her great heart.

And now he had deprived her of nearly all the golden time that had been
stored up for her by the decree of the God