se to see
Venice if you had the chance?"

Instead of answering her, he wondered whether he should tell her
something that was quite true about himself; and as he wondered, he told
her.

"I've planned out my life in sections ever since I was a child, to make
it last longer. You see, I'm always afraid that I'm missing something--"

"And so am I!" Katharine exclaimed. "But, after all," she added, "why
should you miss anything?"

"Why? Because I'm poor, for one thing," Ralph rejoined. "You, I suppose,
can have Venice and India and Dante every day of your life."

She said nothing for a moment, but rested one hand, which was bare
of glove, upon the rail in front of her, meditating upon a variety of
things, of which one was that this strange young man pronounced Dante
as she was used to hearing it pronounced, and another, that he had, most
unexpectedly, a feeling about life that was familiar to her. Perhaps,
then, he was the sort of person she might take an interest in, if she
came to know him better, and as she had placed him among those whom she
would never want to know better, this was enough to make her silent.
She hastily recalled her first view of him, in the little room where
the relics were kept, and ran a bar through half her impressions, as one
cancels a badly written sentence, having found the right one.

"But to know that one might have things doesn't alter the fact that one
hasn't got them," she said, in some confusion. "How could I go to India,
for example? Besides," she began impulsively, and stopped herself. Here
the conductor came round, and interrupted them. Ralph waited for her to
resume her sentence, but she said no more.

"I have a message to give your father," he remarked. "Perhaps you would
give it him, or I could come--"

"Yes, do come," Katharine replied.

"Still, I don't see why you shouldn't go to India," Ralph began, in
order to keep her from rising, as she threatened to do.

But she got up in spite of him, and said good-bye with her usual air of
decision, and left him with a quickness which Ralph connected now with
all her movements. He looked down and saw her standing on the pavement
edge, an alert, commanding figure, which waited its season to cross,
and then walked boldly and swiftly to the other side. That gesture and
action would be added to the picture he had of her, but at present the
real woman completely routed the phantom one.

CHAPTER VII

"And little Augustus Pelham s