nch less secluded,
less confidential, as it were, than the one in the arbor; and we were
still sitting there when I heard midnight ring out from those clear
bells of Venice which vibrate with a solemnity of their own over the
lagoon and hold the air so much more than the chimes of other places.
We were together more than an hour, and our interview gave, as it struck
me, a great lift to my undertaking. Miss Tita accepted the situation
without a protest; she had avoided me for three months, yet now she
treated me almost as if these three months had made me an old friend. If
I had chosen I might have inferred from this that though she had avoided
me she had given a good deal of consideration to doing so. She paid no
attention to the flight of time--never worried at my keeping her so long
away from her aunt. She talked freely, answering questions and asking
them and not even taking advantage of certain longish pauses with which
they inevitably alternated to say she thought she had better go in. It
was almost as if she were waiting for something--something I might say
to her--and intended to give me my opportunity. I was the more struck
by this as she told me that her aunt had been less well for a good many
days and in a way that was rather new. She was weaker; at moments it
seemed as if she had no strength at all; yet more than ever before she
wished to be left alone. That was why she had told her to come out--not
even to remain in her own room, which was alongside; she said her niece
irritated her, made her nervous. She sat still for hours together, as
if she were asleep; she had always done that, musing and dozing; but at
such times formerly she gave at intervals some small sign of life, of
interest, liking her companion to be near her with her work. Miss Tita
confided to me that at present her aunt was so motionless that she
sometimes feared she was dead; moreover she took hardly any food--one
couldn't see what she lived on. The great thing was that she still on
most days got up; the serious job was to dress her, to wheel her out of
her bedroom. She clung to as many of her old habits as possible and she
had always, little company as they had received for years, made a point
of sitting in the parlor.

I scarcely knew what to think of all this--of Miss Tita's sudden
conversion to sociability and of the strange circumstance that the more
the old lady appeared to decline toward her end the less she should
desire to be looked