a bead shop where she
spent a great many hours in a state of delightful indecision.

Mrs. Merrithew proving quite in the mood for it, they went to the Lido
with an extra gondolier--Miss Dassonville had stipulated for one who
could sing--and came home in time to see Venice all a-flower, with the
continual slither of the gondolas about it like some slim sort of moth.
They explored Saint George of the Sea Weed after that, took tea in the
public gardens and had a day at Torcello. On such occasions when Peter
and Mrs. Merrithew talked apart, the good lady who got on excellently
with the rich Mr. Weatheral grew more than communicative on the subject
of Savilla Dassonville. It was not that she talked of the girl so much
nor so freely, but that she left him with the sense of her own
exasperation at the whole performance. It was a thin little waif of a
story as it came from Mrs. Merrithew, needing to be taken in and
comforted before it would yield even to Peter, who as a rich man had
come to have a fair discernment in pitiable cases, the faint hope of a
rescue. There had been, to begin with, the death of the girl's mother at
her birth, followed by long years of neglect growing out of just that
likeness to the beloved wife which first excited her father's aversion
and afterward became the object of a jealous, insistent tenderness.

After his wife's death, Dave Dassonville had lost his grip on his
property as he had on all the means of living. Later he was visited by a
stringency which Mrs. Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence,
which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the
motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its
consequences. Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father
to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that
she had taught the village school.

The winter before, tramping through the heavy snow, she had contracted a
bronchitis that had developed so alarmingly as to demand, by the
authority of the local doctor, "a trip somewhere"--"and nobody," said
Mrs. Merrithew, "but me to go with her."

"Not," she added, "that I'm complainin'. Merrithew left me well off, and
there's no denyin' travellin's improvin' to the mind, though at my age
it's some wearin' to the body. I'm glad," she further confided to Peter
at Torcello, "she takes so to Venice. It's a lot more comfortable goin'
about in a gondola. At Rome, now, I nearly run my leg