und himself wondering if there had
not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the
morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of
leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal
of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that such a
flight implied.

It came out a little later, perhaps, when after traversing many high and
resounding marble halls, with a great many rooms opening into one
another in a way that suggested rather the avoidance of privacy than its
security, they found themselves in one of those gardens of shut delight
of which the exteriors of Venetian houses give so little intimation.

As she went about from bough to bough of the neglected roses, turned all
inward as if they took their florescence from that still lighted human
passion which had found its release and centre there, her face glowed
for the moment with the colour of her quick sympathies. She turned it on
him with an unconscious, tender confidence, which not to meet seemed to
Peter, in that gentle enclosure full of warmth and fragrance, to assume
the proportions of a betrayal.

He did meet it there as she came back to him for the last look from the
marble balustrade by which they had descended, covering her hand, there
resting, lingeringly with his own. He was awakened only to the
implication of this movement by the discovery that she had deeply and
exquisitely blushed.

It was a further singularity in view of the conviction with which Peter
had come through the night, that the mood of protectingness which the
girl provoked in him should have multiplied itself in pointing out to
him how many ways, if he had not made up his mind not to marry her at
all, such a marriage could be made to serve its primal uses. She had
turned up her cuff to trail her hand overside as they slid through the
lucent water, and the pretty feminine curve of it had brought to mind
what the Princess had told him of the shirt-waists she made herself. He
decided that she made them very well. But she was too thin for their
severity--and if he married her he would have insisted on her wearing
them now and then as a tender way to prevent her suspecting that it was
on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed
whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though
her mind had played into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had
been always, as regards her person,