to which he
responded with force. He had been almost without cessation, since his
arrival, at Palazzo Leporelli, where, as happened, a turn of bad
weather on the second day had kept the whole party continuously at
home. The episode had passed for him like a series of hours in a
museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled
something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name
for. He might have been looking for the name while he gave himself up,
subsequently, to the ramble--he saw that even after years he couldn't
lose his way--crowned with his stare across the water at the little
white papers.

He was to dine at the palace in an hour or two, and he had lunched
there, at an early luncheon, that morning. He had then been out with
the three ladies, the three being Mrs. Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate,
and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until
Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale. Of
two circumstances connected with this disposition of his person he was
even now not unmindful; the first being that the lady of Lancaster Gate
had addressed him with high publicity and as if expressing equally the
sense of her companions, who had not spoken, but who might have been
taken--yes, Susan Shepherd quite equally with Kate--for inscrutable
parties to her plan. What he could as little contrive to forget was
that he had, before the two others, as it struck him--that was to say
especially before Kate--done exactly as he was bidden; gathered himself
up without a protest and retraced his way to the palace. Present with
him still was the question of whether he looked a fool for it, of
whether the awkwardness he felt as the gondola rocked with the business
of his leaving it--they could but make, in submission, for a
landing-place that was none of the best--had furnished his friends with
such entertainment as was to cause them, behind his back, to exchange
intelligent smiles. He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later
alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The
strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily
easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because
when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that
made it so. At the time, in her presence, it was as simple as sitting
with his sister might have been, and not, if the point were urged, very
much mo