oar and sat down; Peter laid his hand on the edge of her
gondola and they drifted side by side.

"May I come with you?" he asked presently.

She made a little gesture, past all speech. Peter held up a hand full of
silver toward his gondolier and laid it on the seat as he stepped
lightly over. The man slid away from them without word or motion, and
together they faced the morning. It was one thin web of rose and gold
over lakes of burnished light; islands lifted in mirage, floated
miraculously upon the verge of space. Behind them the mainland banked
like a new created world over which waited the Hosts of the ranked Alps.
Winged boats from Murano slid through the flat lagoons.

There was very little to say. Peter was aware chiefly, in what came from
her to him, of the wish to be very tender toward it, of having it in
hand to support her securely above the abyss into which he felt at the
least rude touch of his, she must immeasurably fall. At the best he
could but keep with her there at the point of her unconsciousness by
knowing the truth himself, as he felt amazingly that he did know it with
all the completeness of his stripped and beggared past.

They drifted and saw the morning widen into the working-day. Market
boats piled with fruit, fish in shining heaps, wood boats of Istria,
went by with Madonna painted sails. Among the crowded goods the women
sat Madonna-wise and nursed their bambini, or cherishing the recurrent
hope, knitted interminably. If he wanted any evidence of what he
admitted between the girl and himself it flashed out for him in the
faces of the market wives, on whom labour and maternity sat not too
heavily to cloud the primal radiance. It was there in their soft _Buon
giorno_ in the way they did not, as the gondola drew beside them, cover
their fruitful breasts from her tender eyes, in the way most fall, they
grasped in the high mood of the _forestieri_ a sublimity untouched by
the niceties of bargaining. A man in the state of mind to which the
girl's visible shine confessed, could hardly be expected to stickle at
the price of the few figs and roses which served as an easy passage from
the wonder of their meeting to the ground of their accustomed gay
pretences. They made of Peter's purchases of fruit and flowers a market
garden of their own from which they had but just come on hopeful
errands. They made believe again as boats thickened like winged things
in a summer garden, to be bent upon discover