ited an art paper. What in the name of all that was
horrible did he put in it? A light was shed on Signor Leroni, who was,
said the Gem, a good dealer in plaques, and who was, Peter had thought,
a bare-faced purveyor of shams. Peter began to question the quality of
the _osele_, that Leslie had purchased from Signor Sardi.

How curious it was; and rather tragic, too. For Hilary, like Lord Evelyn,
had known once. Had Hilary too, in ruining much else of himself, ruined
his critical faculties? And could one really do that and remain ignorant
of the fact? Or would one rather have a lurking suspicion, and therefore
be all the more defiantly corroborative of one's own judgment? In either
case one was horribly to be pitied; but--but one shouldn't try to edit
art papers. And yet this couldn't be conveyed without a lacerating of
feelings that was unthinkable. There was always this about Hilary--one
simply couldn't bear to hurt him. He was so easily hurt and so often;
life used him so hardly and he felt it so keenly, that it behoved Peter,
at least, to insert as many cushions as possible between him and the
sharp edges of circumstance. Peter was remorseful. He had taken what
he should have seen before was an unforgivable line; he had failed
abominably in comprehension and decent feeling. Poor Hilary. Peter
was moved by the old impulse to be extraordinarily nice to him.

They turned out of the Rio della Madonnetta into the narrow rio that was
the back approach to the Palazzo Amadeo. It is a dark little canal, a rio
of the poor. The doors that stood open in the peeling brick walls above
the water let out straggling shafts of lamplight and quarrelling voices
and singing and the smell of wine. The steep house walls leant to meet
one another from either side; from upper windows the people who hadn't
gone to bed talked across a space of barely six feet.

The gondola crept cautiously under two low bridges, then stopped outside
the water-washed back steps of the Palazzo Amadeo.

One pleasant thing about Lord Evelyn's exquisitely mannered _poppe_ was
that one didn't feel that he was thinking "I am not accustomed to taking
my master's visitors to such low haunts." In the first place, he probably
was. In the second, he was not an English flunkey, and not a snob. He was
no more a snob than the Margerisons were, or Lord Evelyn himself. He
deposited them at the Palace back door, politely saluted, and slipped
away down the shadowy water-street