own desolation. He perceived instead under her
slight appearance a certain warmth and colour like a light behind a
breathed-on window-pane. Illness, overwork, whatever dragon's breath had
dimmed her surfaces, she gave the impression of being inwardly
inexhaustibly alight and alive. Something in her leaped to the day, to
the steady pacing of the gondola on the smooth water tessellated by the
sun in blue and bronze and amber, to the arched and airy palaces that
rose above it.

The awning was up; there was strong sun and pleasant wind: from hidden
gardens they smelled the oleanders. Peter felt the faint stir of
rehabilitation like the breath of passing presences.

The mood augmented in him as he drifted late that evening on the lagoon
beyond the Guidecca, after the sun was gone down and the sea and the sky
reflected each to each, one roseate glow like a hollow shell of pearl.
Lit peaks of the Alps ranged in the upper heaven, and nearer the great
dome of the Saluti signalled whitely; below them, all the islands near
and far floated in twilit blueness on the flat lagoon. There was by
times, a long sea swell, and no sound but the tread of the oar behind
like a woman's silken motion. It drew with it films of recollection in
which his mood suspended like gossamer, a mood capable of going on
independently of his idea of himself as a man cut off from those
experiences, intimations of which pressed upon him everywhere by line
and form and colour.

It had come back, the precious intimacy of beauty, with that fullness
sitting there in the gondola, he realized with the intake of the breath
to express it and the curious throbbing of the palms to grasp. He was
able to identify in his bodily response to all that charged the decaying
wonder of Venice with opulent personality, the source of his boyish
dreams. It was no woman, he told himself, who had gone off with the
bystanders while he had been engaged with the dragons of poverty and
obligation, but merely the appreciations of beauty. There had never been
any woman, there was never going to be. He began to plan how he should
explain his discovery and the bearing of it, to Miss Dassonville. It
would be a pity if she were making the same mistake about it. He leaned
back in the cushioned seat and watched the silver shine of the prow
delicately peering out its way among the shadowy islands; lay so still
and absorbed that he did not know which way they went nor what his
gondolier inquired