rt. Casa Frolli, the Zattera." Then the roar of
the train split into the sharp cries of the _facchinos_ that carried
them forward like an explosion into Venice as it rose statelily from the
rippling lustre. Around it wove the black riders with still,
communicating prows, so buoyant, so mysteriously alive and peering, like
some superior sea creatures risen magically from below the frayed
reflection of the station lights. Much as Peter felt that he owed to the
vivid presence of the girl, his new capacity to see and feel it so as it
burst upon them, he hadn't found the courage to address her. So it was
with a distinct sense of deprivation that he saw her with her companion
grasping the side of the gondola as if by that method to keep it afloat,
disappearing down the dim water lanes in the direction of the Zattera.

VII

It was the evidence of how far he had come on the road to recovery that
he was able, when he woke in his bed at the _Britania_, to allow full
play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the
natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I
didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors,
interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened
head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having
made this concession to his acceptance of himself as a man done with
youngness of any sort, he lay listening to the lip-lapping of the water
and the sounds that came up from the garden just below him, the clink of
cups and the women's easy laughter, and wondered what it could have been
about that girl to set him dreaming of all the women who had ever
interested him.

It did not occur to him then, nor in the interval in which the tang of
his dream intervened between him and the full flavour of Venice, that he
had not thought once of Eunice Goodward, but only of those who had
touched his life without hurting it. He was so far indeed from thinking
of women again as beings from whom hurts were expected to come, that he
blamed himself for not having made an occasion out of their enforced
companionship, for speaking to the girl in the train if he should meet
her again.

"I must be twice her age," he told himself determinedly, "and no doubt
she has been brought up to be respectful to her elders."

He looked out very carefully, therefore, as he drifted about the canals,
for a large, widowed lady and a girl in a round