Vere lay back in her wicker
chair like one at ease. Hermione was leaning forward over her work
with her eyes bent steadily upon it. Far off across the sea the smoke
from the summit of Vesuvius was dyed at regular intervals by the red
fire that issued from the entrails of the mountain. Silently it rose
from its hidden world, glowed angrily, menacingly, faded, then glowed
again. And the life that is in fire, and that seems to some the most
intense of all the forces of life, stirred Artois from his peace. The
pulse of the mountain, whose regular beating was surely indicated by
the regularly recurring glow of the rising flame, seemed for a moment
to be sounding in his ears, and, with it, all the pulses that were
beating through the world. And he thought of the calm of their bodies,
of Hermione's, of Vere's, of his own, as he had thought of the calm of
the steely sky, the steely sea, that had preceded the bursting of the
storm that came from Ischia. He thought of it as something unnatural,
something almost menacing, a sort of combined lie that strove to
conceal, to deny, the leaping fires of the soul.
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