and I
continued to say this even while I observed that she quite failed to
comply with my earnest request (I had given her two or three addresses,
at little towns, post restante) that she would let me know how she was
getting on. I would have made my servant write to me but that he was
unable to manage a pen. It struck me there was a kind of scorn in Miss
Tita's silence (little disdainful as she had ever been), so that I was
uncomfortable and sore. I had scruples about going back and yet I
had others about not doing so, for I wanted to put myself on a better
footing. The end of it was that I did return to Venice on the twelfth
day; and as my gondola gently bumped against Miss Bordereau's steps
a certain palpitation of suspense told me that I had done myself a
violence in holding off so long.

I had faced about so abruptly that I had not telegraphed to my servant.
He was therefore not at the station to meet me, but he poked out his
head from an upper window when I reached the house. "They have put her
into the earth, la vecchia," he said to me in the lower hall, while he
shouldered my valise; and he grinned and almost winked, as if he knew I
should be pleased at the news.

"She's dead!" I exclaimed, giving him a very different look.

"So it appears, since they have buried her."

"It's all over? When was the funeral?"

"The other yesterday. But a funeral you could scarcely call it, signore;
it was a dull little passeggio of two gondolas. Poveretta!" the man
continued, referring apparently to Miss Tita. His conception of funerals
was apparently that they were mainly to amuse the living.

I wanted to know about Miss Tita--how she was and where she was--but I
asked him no more questions till we had got upstairs. Now that the fact
had met me I took a bad view of it, especially of the idea that poor
Miss Tita had had to manage by herself after the end. What did she know
about arrangements, about the steps to take in such a case? Poveretta
indeed! I could only hope that the doctor had given her assistance and
that she had not been neglected by the old friends of whom she had told
me, the little band of the faithful whose fidelity consisted in coming
to the house once a year. I elicited from my servant that two old
ladies and an old gentleman had in fact rallied round Miss Tita and had
supported her (they had come for her in a gondola of their own) during
the journey to the cemetery, the little red-walled island of tombs w