hich
lies to the north of the town, on the way to Murano. It appeared
from these circumstances that the Misses Bordereau were Catholics, a
discovery I had never made, as the old woman could not go to church and
her niece, so far as I perceived, either did not or went only to early
mass in the parish, before I was stirring. Certainly even the priests
respected their seclusion; I had never caught the whisk of the curato's
skirt. That evening, an hour later, I sent my servant down with five
words written on a card, to ask Miss Tita if she would see me for a few
moments. She was not in the house, where he had sought her, he told me
when he came back, but in the garden walking about to refresh herself
and gathering flowers. He had found her there and she would be very
happy to see me.

I went down and passed half an hour with poor Miss Tita. She had always
had a look of musty mourning (as if she were wearing out old robes of
sorrow that would not come to an end), and in this respect there was no
appreciable change in her appearance. But she evidently had been crying,
crying a great deal--simply, satisfyingly, refreshingly, with a sort of
primitive, retarded sense of loneliness and violence. But she had none
of the formalism or the self-consciousness of grief, and I was almost
surprised to see her standing there in the first dusk with her hands
full of flowers, smiling at me with her reddened eyes. Her white face,
in the frame of her mantilla, looked longer, leaner than usual. I had
had an idea that she would be a good deal disgusted with me--would
consider that I ought to have been on the spot to advise her, to help
her; and, though I was sure there was no rancor in her composition and
no great conviction of the importance of her affairs, I had prepared
myself for a difference in her manner, for some little injured look,
half-familiar, half-estranged, which should say to my conscience, "Well,
you are a nice person to have professed things!" But historic truth
compels me to declare that Tita Bordereau's countenance expressed
unqualified pleasure in seeing her late aunt's lodger. That touched him
extremely, and he thought it simplified his situation until he found it
did not. I was as kind to her that evening as I knew how to be, and
I walked about the garden with her for half an hour. There was no
explanation of any sort between us; I did not ask her why she had not
answered my letter. Still less did I repeat what I had said