ed itself in her memory, acquiring a sort of
symbolic significance, as of a turning-point in her relations with her
husband. Not that these were less happy, but that she now beheld them,
as she had always formerly beheld such joys, as an unstable islet in
a sea of storms. Her present bliss was as complete as ever, but it was
ringed by the perpetual menace of all she knew she was hiding from Nick,
and of all she suspected him of hiding from her....

She was thinking of these things one afternoon about three weeks after
their arrival in Venice. It was near sunset, and she sat alone on the
balcony, watching the cross-lights on the water weave their pattern
above the flushed reflection of old palace-basements. She was
almost always alone at that hour. Nick had taken to writing in the
afternoons--he had been as good as his word, and so, apparently, had the
Muse and it was his habit to join his wife only at sunset, for a late
row on the lagoon. She had taken Clarissa, as usual, to the Giardino
Pubblico, where that obliging child had politely but indifferently
"played"--Clarissa joined in the diversions of her age as if conforming
to an obsolete tradition--and had brought her back for a music lesson,
echoes of which now drifted down from a distant window.

Susy had come to be extremely thankful for Clarissa. But for the little
girl, her pride in her husband's industry might have been tinged with
a faint sense of being at times left out and forgotten; and as Nick's
industry was the completest justification for their being where they
were, and for her having done what she had, she was grateful to Clarissa
for helping her to feel less alone. Clarissa, indeed, represented the
other half of her justification: it was as much on the child's account
as on Nick's that Susy had held her tongue, remained in Venice, and
slipped out once a week to post one of Ellie's numbered letters. A
day's experience of the Palazzo Vanderlyn had convinced Susy of the
impossibility of deserting Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that
the most crowded households often contain the loneliest nurseries,
and that the rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered
infancy; but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the
uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found herself
feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to
her charged with a new weight of pity.

She was thinking of these things, an