He, Artois,
would leave this fight against destiny to the Sicilian. For him the
Oriental's philosophy; for him resignation to the inevitable, whatever
it might be.
He said to himself that to do more than he had already done to ward
off the assaults of truth would be impious. Perhaps he ought never to
have done anything. Perhaps it would have been far better to have let
the wave sweep over Hermione long ago. Perhaps even in that fight of
his there had been secret selfishness, the desire that she should not
know how by his cry from Africa her happy life had been destroyed. And
perhaps he was to be punished some day for that.
He did not know. But he felt, after all these years, that if to that
hermitage of the sea Fate had really found the way he must let things
take their course. And it seemed to him as if the old Oriental had
been mysteriously appointed to come near him just at that moment, to
make him feel that this was so. The Oriental had been like a messenger
sent to him out of that East which he loved, which he had studied, but
from which, perhaps, he had not learned enough.
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