helplessness.
If she had not saved the papers wherein should I be indebted to her?
I think I winced a little as I asked myself how much, if she HAD saved
them, I should have to recognize and, as it were, to reward such
a courtesy. Might not that circumstance after all saddle me with a
guardianship? If this idea did not make me more uncomfortable as I
walked up and down it was because I was convinced I had nothing to look
to. If the old woman had not destroyed everything before she pounced
upon me in the parlor she had done so afterward.

It took Miss Tita rather longer than I had expected to guess that I was
there; but when at last she came out she looked at me without surprise.
I said to her that I had been waiting for her, and she asked why I had
not let her know. I was glad the next day that I had checked myself
before remarking that I had wished to see if a friendly intuition would
not tell her: it became a satisfaction to me that I had not indulged in
that rather tender joke. What I did say was virtually the truth--that I
was too nervous, since I expected her now to settle my fate.

"Your fate?" said Miss Tita, giving me a queer look; and as she spoke I
noticed a rare change in her. She was different from what she had been
the evening before--less natural, less quiet. She had been crying the
day before and she was not crying now, and yet she struck me as less
confident. It was as if something had happened to her during the
night, or at least as if she had thought of something that troubled
her--something in particular that affected her relations with me, made
them more embarrassing and complicated. Had she simply perceived that
her aunt's not being there now altered my position?

"I mean about our papers. ARE there any? You must know now."

"Yes, there are a great many; more than I supposed." I was struck with
the way her voice trembled as she told me this.

"Do you mean that you have got them in there--and that I may see them?"

"I don't think you can see them," said Miss Tita with an extraordinary
expression of entreaty in her eyes, as if the dearest hope she had in
the world now was that I would not take them from her. But how could
she expect me to make such a sacrifice as that after all that had passed
between us? What had I come back to Venice for but to see them, to take
them? My delight in learning they were still in existence was such that
if the poor woman had gone down on her knees to beseech me nev