a little prim with him, had lent to
their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly
apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of the _Merrythought_ at
the door of the Consulate. Mr. Weatheral had some papers which Lessing
had sent him to acknowledge there, and it was a piece of the morning's
performance, when he had come back from that business, to find that the
meeting had taken on--from some mutual discovery of the captain's and
Mrs. Merrithew's of a cousin's wife's sister who had married one of the
Applegates who was a Dunham on the mother's side--quite the aspect of a
family party. It came in the end to the four of them going off at
Peter's invitation to have lunch together in a cafe overhanging the
_calle_. He told himself afterward that he would not have done it if he
had recalled in time the friendly seaman's romantic appreciation of the
situation between himself and Miss Dassonville. He saw himself so
intrigued by it that, by the time lunch was over, he felt himself in a
position which to his own sensitiveness, demanded that he must
immediately leave Venice or propose to Miss Dassonville. To see the way
he was going and to go on in it, had for him the fascination of the
abyss. He caught himself in the act even of trying to fix Miss
Dassonville's eye to include her by complicity in the beguilement of the
captain, a business which she seemed to have undertaken on her own
account on quite other grounds. He perceived with a kind of pride for
her that she had the ways of elderly sea-going gentlemen by heart. It
was something even if she had failed to charm Peter, that she shouldn't
be found quite wanting in it by other men.

When they had put him back aboard of the _Merrythought_ they had come to
such a pitch among them all, that as the captain leaned above the rail
to launch an invitation, he addressed it to Miss Dassonville, as, if not
quite the giver of the feast, the mistress of the situation.

"When are you coming to lunch with me?" demanded the captain.

"Never!" declared Miss Dassonville. "It would be quite out of the
question to have hot cakes for luncheon, and I absolutely refuse to
come for anything less."

"There's something quite as good," asserted the captain, "that I'll bet
you haven't had in as long."

"Better than hot cakes?" Miss Dassonville was skeptical.

"Pie," said the captain.

"Oh, _Pie!_" in mock ecstasy. "Well, I'd come for pie," and with that
they parted