Princess for the first word or two, until
he turned and saw Miss Dassonville. She was staring at the dim old
canvases patched with saints, and her eyes were tender.

"They are not really saints, you know, they are only a sort of
hieroglyphics that spell devotion. It isn't as though they had the
breath of life breathed into them and could come down from their
canvases as some of them do."

"Oh," he protested, "did you think of that for yourself? It was the
Princess who said it to me."

"The Princess of the Dragon?"

"She came to me last night on the lagoon. It was wonderful,--the water
shine and the rosy glow. I was wishing I had insisted on your coming,
and all at once there was the Princess."

"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"

"She declined to commit herself. I suppose it's one of the things a man
has to find out." He experienced a great lift of his spirit in the
girl's light acceptance of his whimsicality, it was the sort of thing
that Eunice Goodward used to be afraid to have any one hear him say lest
they should think it odd. It occurred to him as he turned and walked
beside Miss Dassonville that if he had come to Italy with Eunice there
might have been a great deal that she would not have liked to hear. He
could think things of that sort of her now with a queer lightness as of
ease after strain, and yet not think it a merit of Miss Dassonville's so
to ease him. They walked through the rooms full of the morning coolness,
and let the pictures say what they would to them.

"It is strange to me," said the girl, "the reality of pictures; as if
they had reached a point under the artist's hand where they became
suddenly independent of him and went about saying a great deal more than
he meant and perhaps more than he could understand. I am sure they must
have a world of their own of picture rock and tree and stone, where they
go when they are not being looked at on their canvases."

"Oh, haven't you found them, then?"

"In dreams you mean? Not in Bloombury; they don't get so far from home.
One of these little islands I suspect, that lie so low and look so blue
and airy."

"Will you go with me in the gondola to discover it?"

"To-night?"

"To-morrow." He was full of a plan to take her and Mrs. Merrithew to the
Lido that same evening to have dinner, and to come home after moonrise,
to discover Venice. She agreed to that, subject to Mrs. Merrithew's
consent, and they went out to find that lady at