e simple process of talking out
whatever he was most interested in, occurred to Peter as her natural
limitation. It was not until they had been going out together for a week
or more, in such fashion as his mending health allowed, that he had
moments of realizing, in her swift appropriations of Venice, rich
possibilities of the personal relations with which he believed himself
forever done. Oddly it provoked in him the wish to protect, when the
practical situation had left him dry and bare.

It was the evening of the _Serenata_. They were all there in the
gondola, Mrs. Merrithew and the girl, with Luigi squatting by Giuseppe,
not too far from the music float that sprang mysteriously from the black
water in arching boughs of red and gold and pearly Aladdin's fruit.
Behind them the lurking prows rustled and rocked drunkenly with the
swell to which they seemed at times attentively to lean. They could make
out heads crowded in the gondolas, and silver gleams of the prows as
they drifted past palaces lit intermittently by a red flare that wiped
out for the moment, the seastain and disfiguring patches of restoration.

They had passed the palace of Camerleigh. The jewel-fruited arbour
folded and furled upon itself to pass the slow curve of the Rialto, and
suddenly, Peter's attention, drawn momentarily from the music, was
caught by that other bright company leaning from deserted balconies,
swarming like the summer drift between the pillars of dark loggias. They
were all there, knights and saints and ladies, out of print and paint
and marble, and presently he made out the Princess. She was leaning out
of one of the high, floriated windows, looking down on him with pleased,
secret understanding as she might have smiled from her palace walls on
the festival that brought the young knight George home with the
conquered dragon. It was the compressed and pregnant meaning of her gaze
that drew his own upward, and it was then when the Lovely Lady turned
and waved her hand at him that he felt the girl stir strangely beside
him.

"How full the night is of the sense of presences," she said, "as if all
the loved marbles came to life and the adored had left their canvases. I
cannot think but it is so."

"Oh, I am sure of it."

She moved again with the vague restlessness of one stared upon by
innumerable eyes. "How one would like to speak," she said. "They seem so
near us."

There was a warm tide of that nearness rising in Peter's blood