-you know where you go in your mind when you don't like the place
where you are. So like. I used to call it the House of the Shining
Walls."

"I know," she nodded, "mine is a garden."

"_Is?_" said Peter. "There's where you have the advantage of me."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, spreading her hands toward the pictured wall and
the springing domes, "isn't this the evidence that it _is_ always. Let
us look."

The mass was over and the crowd departing; they moved from page to page
to the storied wall and identified in it the springs of a common
experience.

"It's like nothing so much," said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've
seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken
china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on
the ground."

"Something like that," admitted Peter.

"And that's why," said Miss Dassonville, "it doesn't make me feel at
_all_ religious. Just--just--maternal."

It appeared by this time they had become well enough acquainted for
Peter to remark that she didn't seem to feel under any obligation to
experience the prescribed and traditional thrill.

"Well, I'm divided in my mind. I don't want to overlook any of the
facts, and I want to give the poor imprisoned things a chance, if they
have anything to say that the guide books have missed, to get it off
their minds. I've always heard that celebrities grow tired of being
forever taken at their public valuation. I've got a _Baedeker_ and a
_Hare_ and _The Stones of Venice_ but I neglect them quite as much as I
read them, don't you?"

They had come down into the nave and she went about stroking the fair
marbles delicately as though there sprang a conscious communication from
the touch. He felt his mind accommodating to the ease of hers with a
movement of release. They spent so much time in the church that when
they issued on the Piazza at last it was with amazement to discern that
the cloud mass which an hour before had piled ethereal tones of blueness
above Frauli, lit cavernously by soundless flashes, had dissolved in
rain.

"And I haven't even an umbrella," explained Miss Dassonville with a real
dismay.

"But I'll take you home in my gondola," it appeared to him
providentially provided for this contingency; "it is here at the
Piazzetta."

"Oh, have you a gondola, and is it as much of a help as people say? Mrs.
Merrithew hates walking, but we didn't know if we should like it."

They whisked arou