she was to leave
him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony
bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching
for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the
remotest implication of the situation. She found at last the barbedest.
All the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for
Peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as
that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places.

"It isn't as if I had ever loved you; I owe it to Mr. Henderson to
remind you that I never said I did.... You know I never liked to have
you kiss me."

He had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of Eunice
Goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little
to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it--days when he
would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he
had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty
that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his. The
sharp edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his
manhood. Never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream
again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the
meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and Ellen had
obliged him to present to destiny. She had beggared him of all those
aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept
himself inwardly alive. The capacity for loving died in him with the
knowledge of not being able to be loved.

Out of the anaesthesia of exhaustion from which Italy had revived him, it
rolled back upon him that by just the walled imperviousness that shut
Eunice Goodward from the appreciation of his passion, he was prevented
now from Savilla Dassonville.

XI

It was odd, then, having come to this conclusion in the middle of the
night, that when he joined the ladies in the morning he should have
experienced a sinking pang in not being able any longer to be sure what
Miss Dassonville thought of him. There was in her manner, as she thanked
him for the flowers, nothing to ruffle the surface of the bright,
impersonal companionship which she had afforded him for weeks past.

The occasion which brought them together was an agreement entered into
some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past
the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he fo