ss had
said of him, he would be running away. He would be running from the
evidences of a moneyless, self-abnegating youth, from the plain surfaces
of efficiency and womanliness, not hedged about and enfolded, but pushed
to the extremity of its use. He had, however, when he had taken that in
from every side, the grace to be ashamed of it.

He was ashamed, too, of finding himself at their next meeting involved
in a wordless appeal to be helped from his state to some larger grounds.
If the girl had but appealed to him he could have done with a fine
generosity what he felt was beyond him to invite. He could have married
Savilla Dassonville to be kind to her; what he didn't enjoy was putting
it on a basis of her being kind to him.

Miss Dassonville, however, afforded him no help beyond the negative one
of not talking too much and taking perhaps a shade less interest in
Venice. They had two quiet days together in which it was evident,
whatever Peter settled with himself as to his relation to the girl, it
had taken on for Mrs. Merrithew the pointedness known in Bloombury as
"attentions." She paid in to the possibilities of the situation the
tribute of her absence for long sessions in which, so far as Peter could
discover, the situation rather fell to the ground. It began to appear
that he had missed as he was doomed with women, the crucial instant, and
was to come out of this as of other encounters, empty. And then quite
suddenly the girl put out a hand to him.

It was along about the end of the afternoon they had come out of the
church of Saint George the Greater, which as being most accessible had
been left to the latter end of their explorations. Mrs. Merrithew had
just sent Giuseppe back for a shawl which she had dropped in the
cloister. They sat rocking in the gondola looking toward the fairy
arcade of the ducal palace and the pillars of the saints, and suddenly
Miss Dassonville spoke to excuse her quietness.

"I must look all I can," she said; "we are leaving the day after
to-morrow."

If she had retired behind Mrs. Merrithew's comfortable breadth in order
to deliver her shot the more effectively, she missed seeing how plumply
it landed in the midst of Peter's defences and scattered them.

"Leaving Venice?" he said. "Leaving me?" It took a moment for that fact,
dropping the depth of his indecision, to show him where he stood. "But I
thought you understood," he protested, "that I wanted you to stay ... to
stay wit