d had paid a
fortnight's visit to the family at Nice shortly after he came to live
with them. She was "pure and refined," as Amy said over the banjo, and
had the air of not knowing what they meant when they talked, and of
keeping something rather important back. Pemberton judged that what she
kept back was an approval of many of their ways; therefore it was to be
supposed that she too was of a good type, and that Mr. and Mrs. Moreen
and Ulick and Paula and Amy might easily have been of a better one if
they would.

But that they wouldn't was more and more perceptible from day to day.
They continued to "chivey," as Morgan called it, and in due time became
aware of a variety of reasons for proceeding to Venice. They mentioned a
great many of them--they were always strikingly frank and had the
brightest friendly chatter, at the late foreign breakfast in especial,
before the ladies had made up their faces, when they leaned their arms on
the table, had something to follow the demitasse, and, in the heat of
familiar discussion as to what they "really ought" to do, fell inevitably
into the languages in which they could tutoyer. Even Pemberton liked
them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little
flat voice for the "sweet sea-city." That was what made him have a
sneaking kindness for them--that they were so out of the workaday world
and kept him so out of it. The summer had waned when, with cries of
ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand
Canal. The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived.
The Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn't talked of at breakfast;
but the reasons they didn't talk of at breakfast always came out in the
end. The Dorringtons on the other hand came out very little; or else
when they did they stayed--as was natural--for hours, during which
periods Mrs. Moreen and the girls sometimes called at their hotel (to see
if they had returned) as many as three times running. The gondola was
for the ladies, as in Venice too there were "days," which Mrs. Moreen
knew in their order an hour after she arrived. She immediately took one
herself, to which the Dorringtons never came, though on a certain
occasion when Pemberton and his pupil were together at St. Mark's--where,
taking the best walks they had ever had and haunting a hundred churches,
they spent a great deal of time--they saw the old lord turn up with Mr.
Moreen and Ulick, who sh