hat who might have come
from Bloombury, but he did not find her that day nor the next, nor the
day after, and in the meantime Venice took him.

The ineffable consolation of its beauty stole upon him like the breath
of its gardens, as it rose delicately from its sea station, murmurous
like a shell with the whisper of joyous adventure. It was, as he told
himself, a part of the sense of renewal which the girl had afforded him,
that he was able to accept its incomparable charm as the evidence of the
continuity of the world of youth and passion. His being able to see it
so was a sort of consolation for having, by the illusive quality of his
dreams, missed them both on his own account.

It was not, however, until the morning of the fourth day that it drew
him as he had known in the beginning it inevitably must, to the core of
Venice, where in the wide piazza full of sleepy light, the great banners
dropped from their staves broad splashes of colour between the slaty
droves of doves. High over the door the gold horses of Lysippus
breasted the gold air made shadowless by the approaching _temporale_. He
was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was
not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of
the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take
notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the
smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed
instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic
pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of
the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear
gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as
it had been in the House!

It was some time before he was able to draw up out of his boyhood
memories, so newly made a gift to him, the stray, elucidating fact of
his father's early visit to this spot and the possibility of his dream
having shaped itself about some unremembered account of it. He climbed
up to the galleries to give himself room to that wonder of memory which
had failed to preserve to him any image of how his father looked, and
yet had so furnished all his imagination. Which didn't make any less of
a wonder of his knowing as he stood there, Peter Weatheral, of the firm
of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Real Estate Brokers, what it was all about.

"It's a picture-book of the heart of man,"