mnor's fruitless
feeler would have been a solitary accident.

When midnight sounded Miss Tita got up; but she stopped at the door of
the house only after she had wandered two or three times with me round
the garden. "When shall I see you again?" I asked before she went in; to
which she replied with promptness that she should like to come out the
next night. She added however that she should not come--she was so far
from doing everything she liked.

"You might do a few things that _I_ like," I said with a sigh.

"Oh, you--I don't believe you!" she murmured at this, looking at me with
her simple solemnity.

"Why don't you believe me?"

"Because I don't understand you."

"That is just the sort of occasion to have faith." I could not say more,
though I should have liked to, as I saw that I only mystified her; for
I had no wish to have it on my conscience that I might pass for
having made love to her. Nothing less should I have seemed to do had
I continued to beg a lady to "believe in me" in an Italian garden on
a midsummer night. There was some merit in my scruples, for Miss Tita
lingered and lingered: I perceived that she felt that she should
not really soon come down again and wished therefore to protract the
present. She insisted too on making the talk between us personal to
ourselves; and altogether her behavior was such as would have been
possible only to a completely innocent woman.

"I shall like the flowers better now that I know they are also meant for
me."

"How could you have doubted it? If you will tell me the kind you like
best I will send a double lot of them."

"Oh, I like them all best!" Then she went on, familiarly: "Shall you
study--shall you read and write--when you go up to your rooms?"

"I don't do that at night, at this season. The lamplight brings in the
animals."

"You might have known that when you came."

"I did know it!"

"And in winter do you work at night?"

"I read a good deal, but I don't often write." She listened as if these
details had a rare interest, and suddenly a temptation quite at variance
with the prudence I had been teaching myself associated itself with her
plain, mild face. Ah yes, she was safe and I could make her safer!
It seemed to me from one moment to another that I could not wait
longer--that I really must take a sounding. So I went on: "In general
before I go to sleep--very often in bed (it's a bad habit, but I confess
to it), I read some great poet. In n