"Ah! Who's that?" she asked, with the boldness which she made pass for eccentricity.

"A lady of my acquaintance," said Staniford, at his laziest again.

"A lady?" said the other, with an inflection that she saw hurt. "Why the marine animal, then? She bowed very prettily; she blushed prettily, too."

"She's a very pretty girl," replied Staniford.

"Charming! But why blush?"

"I've heard that there are ladies who blush for nothing."

"Is she Italian?"

"Yes,—in voice."

"Oh, an American prima donna!" Staniford did not answer. "Who is she? Where is she from?"

"South Bradfield, Mass." Staniford's eyes twinkled at her pursuit, which he did not trouble himself to turn aside, but baffled by mere impenetrability.

The party at the hotel suggested that the young men should leave their ship and go on with them to Naples; Dunham was tempted, for he could have reached Dresden sooner by land; but Staniford overruled him, and at the end of four days they went back to the Aroostook. They said it was like getting home, but in fact they felt the change from the airy heights and breadths of the hotel to the small cabin and the closets in which they slept; it was not so great alleviation as Captain Jenness seemed to think that one of them could now have Hicks's stateroom. But Dunham took everything sweetly, as his habit was; and, after all, they were meeting their hardships voluntarily. Some of the ladies came with them in the boat which rowed them to the Aroostook; the name made them laugh; that lady who wished Staniford to regret her waved him her hand kerchief as the boat rowed away again. She had with difficulty been kept from coming on board by the refusal of the others to come with her. She had contrived to associate herself with him again in the minds of the others, and this, perhaps, was all that she desired. But the sense of her frivolity—her not so much vacant- mindedness as vacant-heartedness—was like a stain, and he painted in Lydia's face when they first met the reproach which was in his own breast.

Her greeting, however, was frank and cordial; it was a real welcome. Staniford wondered if it were not more frank and cordial than he quite liked, and whether she was merely relieved by Hicks's absence, or had freed herself from that certain subjection in which she had hitherto been to himself.

Yet it was charming to see her again as she had been in the happiest moments of the past, and to feel that, Hicks being out of her world, her trust of everybody in it was perfect once more. She treated that interval of coldness and diffidence as all women know how to treat a thing which they wish not to have been; and Staniford, a man on whom no pleasing art of her sex was ever lost, admired and gratefully accepted the effect of this. He fell luxuriously into the old habits again. They had still almost the time of a steamer's voyage to Europe before them; it was as if they were newly setting sail from America. The first night after they left Messina Staniford found her in her place in the waist of the ship, and sat down beside her there, and talked; the next night she did not come; the third she came, and he asked her to walk with him. The elastic touch of her hand on his arm, the rhythmic movement of her steps beside him, were things that seemed always to have been. She told him of what she had seen and done in Messina. This glimpse of Italy had vividly animated her; she had apparently found a world within herself as well as without.

With a suddenly depressing sense of loss, Staniford had a prevision of splendor in her, when she should have wholly blossomed out in that fervid air of art and beauty; he would fain have kept her still a wilding rosebud of the New England wayside. He hated the officers who should wonder at her when she first came into the Square of St. Mark with her aunt and uncle.

Her talk about Messina went on; he was thinking of her, and not of her talk; but he saw that she was not going to refer to their encounter. "You make me jealous of the objects of interest in Messina," he said. "You seem to remember seeing everything but me, there."

She stopped abruptly. "Yes," she said, after a deep breath, "I saw you there;" and she did not offer to go on again.

"Where were you going, that morning?"

"Oh, to the cathedral. Captain Jenness left me there, and I looked all through it till he came back from the consulate."

"Left you there alone!" cried Staniford.

"Yes; I told him I should not feel lonely, and I should not stir out of it till he came back. I took one of those little pine chairs and sat down, when I got tired, and looked at the people coming to worship, and the strangers with their guide-books."

"Did any of them look at you?"

"They stared a good deal. It seems to be the custom in Europe; but I told Captain Jenness I should probably have to go about by myself in Venice, as my aunt's an invalid, and I had better get used to it."

She paused, and seemed to be referring the point to Staniford.

"Yes,—oh, yes," he said.

"Captain Jenness said it was their way, over here," she resumed; "but he guessed I had as much right in a church as anybody."

"The captain's common sense is infallible," answered Staniford. He was ashamed to know that the beautiful young girl was as improperly alone in church as she would have been in a cafe, and he began to hate the European world for the fact. It seemed better to him that the Aroostook should put about and sail back to Boston with her, as she was,—better that she should be going to her aunt in South Bradfield than to her aunt in Venice. "We shall soon be at our journey's end, now," he said, after a while.

"Yes; the captain thinks in about eight days, if we have good weather."

"Shall you be sorry?"

"Oh, I like the sea very well."

"But the new life you are coming to,—doesn't that alarm you sometimes?"

"Yes, it does," she admitted, with a kind of reluctance.

"So much that you would like to turn back from it?"

"Oh, no!" she answered quickly. Of course not, Staniford thought; nothing could be worse than going back to South Bradfield. "I keep thinking about it," she added. "You say Venice is such a very strange place. Is it any use my having seen Messina?"

"Oh, all Italian cities have something in common."

"I presume," she went on, "that after I get there everything will become natural. But I don't like to look forward. It—scares me. I can't form any idea of it."

"You needn't be afraid," said Staniford. "It's only more beautiful than anything you can imagine."

"Yes—yes; I know," Lydia answered.

"And do you really dread getting there?"

"Yes, I dread it," she said.

"Why," returned Staniford lightly, "so do I; but it's for a different reason, I'm afraid. I should like such a voyage as this to go on forever. Now and then I think it will; it seems always to have gone on. Can you remember when it began?"

"A great while ago," she answered, humoring his fantasy, "but I can remember." She paused a long while. "I don't know," she said at last, "whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me as if I had died, and this long voyage was a kind of dream that I was going to wake up from in another world. I often used to think, when I was a little girl, that when I got to heaven it would be lonesome—I don't know whether I can express it. You say that Italy—that Venice —is so beautiful; but if I don't know any one there—" She stopped, as if she had gone too far.

"But you do know somebody there," said Staniford. "Your aunt—"

"Yes," said the girl, and looked away.

"But the people in this long dream,—you're going to let some of them appear to you there," he suggested.

"Oh, yes," she said, reflecting his lighter humor, "I shall want to see them, or I shall not know I am the same person, and I must be sure of myself, at least."

"And you wouldn't like to go back to earth—to South Bradfield again?" he asked presently.

"No," she answered. "All that seems over forever. I couldn't go back there and be what I was. I could have stayed there, but I couldn't go back."

Staniford laughed. "I see that it isn't the other world that's got hold of you! It's this world! I don't believe you'll be unhappy in Italy. But it's pleasant to think you've been so contented on the Aroostook that you hate to leave it. I don't believe there's a man on the ship that wouldn't feel personally flattered to know that you liked being here. Even that poor fellow who parted from us at Messina was anxious that you should think as kindly of him as you could. He knew that he had behaved in a way to shock you, and he was very sorry. He left a message with me for you. He thought you would like to know that he was ashamed of himself."

"I pitied him," said Lydia succinctly. It was the first time that she had referred to Hicks, and Staniford found it in character for her to limit herself to this sparse comment. Evidently, her compassion was a religious duty. Staniford's generosity came easy to him.

"I feel bound to say that Hicks was not a bad fellow. I disliked him immensely, and I ought to do him justice, now he's gone. He deserved all your pity. He's a doomed man; his vice is irreparable; he can't resist it." Lydia did not say anything: women do not generalize in these matters; perhaps they cannot pity the faults of those they do not love. Staniford only forgave Hicks the more. "I can't say that up to the last moment I thought him anything but a poor, common little creature; and yet I certainly did feel a greater kindness for him after—what I—after what had happened. He left something more than a message for you, Miss Blood; he left his steamer chair yonder, for you."

"For me?" demanded Lydia. Staniford felt her thrill and grow rigid upon his arm, with refusal. "I will not have it. He had no right to do so. He—he—was dreadful! I will give it to you!" she said, suddenly. "He ought to have given it to you. You did everything for him; you saved his life."

It was clear that she did not sentimentalize Hicks's case; and Staniford had some doubt as to the value she set upon what he had done, even now she had recognized it.

He said, "I think you overestimate my service to him, possibly. I dare say the boat could have picked him up in good time."

"Yes, that's what the captain and Mr. Watterson and Mr. Mason all said," assented Lydia.

Staniford was nettled. He would have preferred a devoted belief that but for him Hicks must have perished. Besides, what she said still gave no clew to her feeling in regard to himself. He was obliged to go on, but he went on as indifferently as he could. "However, it was hardly a question for me at the time whether he could have been got out without my help. If I had thought about it at all—which I didn't—I suppose I should have thought that it wouldn't do to take any chances."

"Oh, no," said Lydia, simply, "you couldn't have done anything less than you did."

In his heart Staniford had often thought that he could have done very much less than jump overboard after Hicks, and could very properly have left him to the ordinary life-saving apparatus of the ship. But if he had been putting the matter to some lady in society who was aggressively praising him for his action, he would have said just what Lydia had said for him,—that he could not have done anything less. He might have said it, however, in such a way that the lady would have pursued his retreat from her praises with still fonder applause; whereas this girl seemed to think there was nothing else to be said. He began to stand in awe of her heroic simplicity. If she drew every-day breath in that lofty air, what could she really think of him, who preferred on principle the atmosphere of the valley? "Do you know, Miss Blood," he said gravely, "that you pay me a very high compliment?"

"How?" she asked.

"You rate my maximum as my mean temperature." He felt that she listened inquiringly. "I don't think I'm habitually up to a thing of that kind," he explained.

"Oh, no," she assented, quietly; "but when he struck at you so, you had to do everything."

"Ah, you have the pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of us all!" cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled, shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take it away. "I was a long time laboring up to that point. I suppose you are always there!"

"I don't understand," she said, turning her head round with the slow motion of her beauty, and looking him full in the face.

"I can't explain now. I will, by and by,—when we get to Venice," he added, with quick lightness.

"You put off everything till we get to Venice," she said, doubtfully.

"I beg your pardon. It was you who did it the last time."

"Was it?" She laughed. "So it was! I was thinking it was you."

It consoled him a little that she should have confused them in her thought, in this way. "What was it you were to tell me in Venice?" he asked.

"I can't think, now."

"Very likely something of yourself—or myself. A third person might say our conversational range was limited."

"Do you think it is very egotistical?" she asked, in the gay tone which gave him relief from the sense of oppressive elevation of mind in her.

"It is in me,—not in you."

"But I don't see the difference."

"I will explain sometime,"

"When we get to Venice?"

They both laughed. It was very nonsensical; but nonsense is sometimes enough.

When they were serious again, "Tell me," he said, "what you thought of that lady in Messina, the other day."

She did not affect not to know whom he meant. She merely said, "I only saw her a moment."

"But you thought something. If we only see people a second we form some opinion of them."

"She is very fine-appearing," said Lydia.

Staniford smiled at the countrified phrase; he had observed that when she spoke her mind she used an instinctive good language; when she would not speak it, she fell into the phraseology of the people with whom she had lived. "I see you don't wish to say, because you think she is a friend of mine. But you can speak out freely. We were not friends; we were enemies, if anything."

Staniford's meaning was clear enough to himself; but Lydia paused, as if in doubt whether he was jesting or not, before she asked, "Why were you riding with her then?"

"I was driving with her," he replied, "I suppose, because she asked me."

"Asked you!" cried the girl; and he perceived her moral recoil both from himself and from a woman who could be so unseemly. That lady would have found it delicious if she could have known that a girl placed like Lydia was shocked at her behavior. But he was not amused. He was touched by the simple self-respect that would not let her suffer from what was not wrong in itself, but that made her shrink from a voluntary semblance of unwomanliness. It endeared her not only to his pity, but to that sense which in every man consecrates womanhood, and waits for some woman to be better than all her sex. Again he felt the pang he had remotely known before. What would she do with these ideals of hers in that depraved Old World,—so long past trouble for its sins as to have got a sort of sweetness and innocence in them,—where her facts would be utterly irreconcilable with her ideals, and equally incomprehensible?

They walked up and down a few turns without speaking again of that lady. He knew that she grew momently more constrained toward him; that the pleasure of the time was spoiled for her; that she had lost her trust in him, and this half amused, half afflicted him. It did not surprise him when, at their third approach to the cabin gangway, she withdrew her hand from his arm and said, stiffly, "I think I will go down." But she did not go at once. She lingered, and after a certain hesitation she said, without looking at him, "I didn't express what I wanted to, about Mr. Hicks, and—what you did. It is what I thought you would do."

"Thanks," said Staniford, with sincere humility. He understood how she had had this in her mind, and how she would not withhold justice from him because he had fallen in her esteem; how rather she would be the more resolute to do him justice for that reason.



XIX.

He could see that she avoided being alone with him the next day, but he took it for a sign of relenting, perhaps helpless relenting, that she was in her usual place on deck in the evening. He went to her, and, "I see that you haven't forgiven me," he said.

"Forgiven you?" she echoed.

"Yes," he said, "for letting that lady ask me to drive with her."

"I never said—" she began.

"Oh, no! But I knew it, all the same. It was not such a very wicked thing, as those things go. But I liked your not liking it. Will you let me say something to you?"

"Yes," she answered, rather breathlessly.

"You must think it's rather an odd thing to say, as I ask leave. It is; and I hardly know how to say it. I want to tell you that I've made bold to depend a great deal upon your good opinion for my peace of mind, of late, and that I can't well do without it now."

She stole the quickest of her bird-like glances at him, but did not speak; and though she seemed, to his anxious fancy, poising for flight, she remained, and merely looked away, like the bird that will not or cannot fly.

"You don't resent my making you my outer conscience, do you, and my knowing that you're not quite pleased with me?"

She looked down and away with one of those turns of the head, so precious when one who beholds them is young, and caught at the fringe of her shawl. "I have no right," she began.

"Oh, I give you the right!" he cried, with passionate urgence. "You have the right. Judge me!" She only looked more grave, and he hurried on. "It was no great harm of her to ask me; that's common enough; but it was harm of me to go if I didn't quite respect her,—if I thought her silly, and was willing to be amused with her. One hasn't any right to do that. I saw this when I saw you." She still hung her head, and looked away. "I want you to tell me something," he pursued. "Do you remember once—the second time we talked together—that you said Dunham was in earnest, and you wouldn't answer when I asked you about myself? Do you remember?"

"Yes," said the girl.

"I didn't care, then. I care very much now. You don't think me—you think I can be in earnest when I will, don't you? And that I can regret—that I really wish—" He took the hand that played with the shawl-fringe, but she softly drew it away.

"Ah, I see!" he said. "You can't believe in me. You don't believe that I can be a good man—like Dunham!"

She answered in the same breathless murmur, "I think you are good." Her averted face drooped lower.

"I will tell you all about it, some day!" he cried, with joyful vehemence. "Will you let me?"

"Yes," she answered, with the swift expulsion of breath that sometimes comes with tears. She rose quickly and turned away. He did not try to keep her from leaving him. His heart beat tumultuously; his brain seemed in a whirl. It all meant nothing, or it meant everything.

"What is the matter with Miss Blood?" asked Dunham, who joined him at this moment. "I just spoke to her at the foot of the gangway stairs, and she wouldn't answer me."

"Oh, I don't know about Miss Blood—I don't know what's the matter," said Staniford. "Look here, Dunham; I want to talk with you—I want to tell you something—I want you to advise me—I—There's only one thing that can explain it, that can excuse it. There's only one thing that can justify all that I've done and said, and that can not only justify it, but can make it sacredly and eternally right,—right for her and right for me. Yes, it's reason for all, and for a thousand times more. It makes it fair for me to have let her see that I thought her beautiful and charming, that I delighted to be with her, that I—Dunham," cried Staniford, "I'm in love!"

Dunham started at the burst in which these ravings ended. "Staniford," he faltered, with grave regret, "I hope not!"

"You hope not? You—you—What do you mean? How else can I free myself from the self-reproach of having trifled with her, of—"

Dunham shook his head compassionately. "You can't do it that way. Your only safety is to fight it to the death,—to run from it."

"But if I don't choose to fight it?" shouted Staniford,—"if I don't choose to run from it? If I—"

"For Heaven's sake, hush! The whole ship will hear you, and you oughtn't to breathe it in the desert. I saw how it was going! I dreaded it; I knew it; and I longed to speak. I'm to blame for not speaking!"

"I should like to know what would have authorized you to speak?" demanded Staniford, haughtily.

"Only my regard for you; only what urges me to speak now! You must fight it, Staniford, whether you choose or not. Think of yourself,—think of her! Think—you have always been my ideal of honor and truth and loyalty—think of her husband—"

"Her husband!" gasped Staniford. "Whose husband? What the deuce— who the deuce—are you talking about, Dunham?"

"Mrs. Rivers."

"Mrs. Rivers? That flimsy, feather-headed, empty-hearted—eyes-maker! That frivolous, ridiculous—Pah! And did you think that I was talking of her? Did you think I was in love with her?"

"Why," stammered Dunham, "I supposed—I thought—At Messina, you know—"

"Oh!" Staniford walked the deck's length away. "Well, Dunham," he said, as he came back, "you've spoilt a pretty scene with your rot about Mrs. Rivers. I was going to be romantic! But perhaps I'd better say in ordinary newspaper English that I've just found out that I'm in love with Miss Blood."

"With her!" cried Dunham, springing at his hand.

"Oh, come now! Don't you be romantic, after knocking my chance."

"Why, but Staniford!" said Dunham, wringing his hand with a lover's joy in another's love and his relief that it was not Mrs. Rivers. "I never should have dreamt of such a thing!"

"Why?" asked Staniford, shortly.

"Oh, the way you talked at first, you know, and—"

"I suppose even people who get married have something to take back about each other," said Staniford, rather sheepishly. "However," he added, with an impulse of frankness, "I don't know that I should have dreamt of it myself, and I don't blame you. But it's a fact, nevertheless."

"Why, of course. It's splendid! Certainly. It's magnificent!" There was undoubtedly a qualification, a reservation, in Dunham's tone. He might have thought it right to bring the inequalities of the affair to Staniford's mind. With all his effusive kindliness of heart and manner, he had a keen sense of social fitness, a nice feeling for convention. But a man does not easily suggest to another that the girl with whom he has just declared himself in love is his inferior. What Dunham finally did say was: "It jumps with all your ideas—all your old talk about not caring to marry a society girl—"

"Society might be very glad of such a girl!" said Staniford, stiffly.

"Yes, yes, certainly; but I mean—"

"Oh, I know what you mean. It's all right," said Staniford. "But it isn't a question of marrying yet. I can't be sure she understood me, —I've been so long understanding myself. And yet, she must, she must! She must believe it by this time, or else that I'm the most infamous scoundrel alive. When I think how I have sought her out, and followed her up, and asked her judgment, and hung upon her words, I feel that I oughtn't to lose a moment in being explicit. I don't care for myself; she can take me or leave me, as she likes; but if she doesn't understand, she mustn't be left in suspense as to my meaning." He seemed to be speaking to Dunham, but he was really thinking aloud, and Dunham waited for some sort of question before he spoke. "But it's a great satisfaction to have had it out with myself. I haven't got to pretend any more that I hang about her, and look at her, and go mooning round after her, for this no-reason and that; I've got the best reason in the world for playing the fool,—I'm in love!" He drew a long, deep breath. "It simplifies matters immensely to have reached the point of acknowledging that. Why, Dunham, those four days at Messina almost killed me! They settled it. When that woman was in full fascination it made me gasp. I choked for a breath of fresh air; for a taste of spring-water; for—Lurella!" It was a long time since Staniford had used this name, and the sound of it made him laugh. "It's droll—but I always think of her as Lurella; I wish it was her name! Why, it was like heaven to see her face when I got back to the ship. After we met her that day at Messina, Mrs. Rivers tried her best to get out of me who it was, and where I met her. But I flatter myself that I was equal to that emergency."

Dunham said nothing, at once. Then, "Staniford," he faltered, "she got it out of me."

"Did you tell her who Lu—who Miss Blood was?"

"Yes."

"And how I happened to be acquainted with her?"

"Yes."

"And that we were going on to Trieste with her?"

"She had it out of me before I knew," said Dunham. "I didn't realize what she was after; and I didn't realize how peculiar the situation might seem—"

"I see nothing peculiar in the situation," interrupted Staniford, haughtily. Then he laughed consciously. "Or, yes, I do; of course I do! You must know her to appreciate it, though." He mused a while before he added: "No wonder Mrs. Rivers was determined to come aboard! I wish we had let her,—confound her! She'll think I was ashamed of it. There's nothing to be ashamed of! By Heaven, I should like to hear any one—" Staniford broke off, and laughed, and then bit his lip, smiling. Suddenly he burst out again, frowning: "I won't view it in that light. I refuse to consider it from that point of view. As far as I'm concerned, it's as regular as anything else in life. It's the same to me as if she were in her own house, and I had come there to tell her that she has my future in her hand. She's such a lady by instinct that she's made it all a triumph, and I thank God that I haven't done or said anything to mar it. Even that beast of a Hicks didn't; it's no merit. I've made love to her,—I own it; of course I have, because I was in love with her; and my fault has been that I haven't made love to her openly, but have gone on fancying that I was studying her character, or some rubbish of that sort. But the fault is easily repaired." He turned about, as if he were going to look for Lydia at once, and ask her to be his wife. But he halted abruptly, and sat down. "No; that won't do," he said. "That won't do at all." He remained thinking, and Dunham, unwilling to interrupt his reverie, moved a few paces off. "Dunham, don't go. I want your advice. Perhaps I don't see it in the right light."

"How is it you see it, my dear fellow?" asked Dunham.

"I don't know whether I've a right to be explicit with her, here. It seems like taking an advantage. In a few days she will be with her friends—"

"You must wait," said Dunham, decisively. "You can't speak to her before she is in their care; it wouldn't be the thing. You're quite right about that."

"No, it wouldn't be the thing," groaned Staniford. "But how is it all to go on till then?" he demanded desperately.

"Why, just as it has before," answered Dunham, with easy confidence.

"But is that fair to her?"

"Why not? You mean to say to her at the right time all that a man can. Till that time comes I haven't the least doubt she understands you."

"Do you think so?" asked Staniford, simply. He had suddenly grown very subject and meek to Dunham.

"Yes," said the other, with the superiority of a betrothed lover; "women are very quick about those things."

"I suppose you're right," sighed Staniford, with nothing of his wonted arrogant pretension in regard to women's moods and minds, "I suppose you're right. And you would go on just as before?"

"I would, indeed. How could you change without making her unhappy—if she's interested in you?"

"That's true. I could imagine worse things than going on just as before. I suppose," he added, "that something more explicit has its charms; but a mutual understanding is very pleasant,—if it is a mutual understanding." He looked inquiringly at Dunham.

"Why, as to that, of course I don't know. You ought to be the best judge of that. But I don't believe your impressions would deceive you."

"Yours did, once," suggested Staniford, in suspense.

"Yes; but I was not in love with her," explained Dunham.

"Of course," said Staniford, with a breath of relief. "And you think —Well, I must wait!" he concluded, grimly. "But don't—don't mention this matter, Dunham, unless I do. Don't keep an eye on me, old fellow. Or, yes, you must! You can't help it. I want to tell you, Dunham, what makes me think she may be a not wholly uninterested spectator of my —sentiments." He made full statement of words and looks and tones. Dunham listened with the patience which one lover has with another.



XX.

The few days that yet remained of their voyage were falling in the latter half of September, and Staniford tried to make the young girl see the surpassing loveliness of that season under Italian skies; the fierceness of the summer is then past, and at night, when chiefly they inspected the firmament, the heaven has begun to assume something of the intense blue it wears in winter. She said yes, it was very beautiful, but she could not see that the days were finer, or the skies bluer, than those of September at home; and he laughed at her loyalty to the American weather. "Don't you think so, too?" she asked, as if it pained her that he should like Italian weather better.

"Oh, yes,—yes," he said. Then he turned the talk on her, as he did whenever he could. "I like your meteorological patriotism. If I were a woman, I should stand by America in everything."

"Don't you as a man?" she pursued, still anxiously.

"Oh, certainly," he answered. "But women owe our continent a double debt of fidelity. It's the Paradise of women, it's their Promised Land, where they've been led up out of the Egyptian bondage of Europe. It's the home of their freedom. It is recognized in America that women have consciences and souls."

Lydia looked very grave. "Is it—is it so different with women in Europe?" she faltered.

"Very," he replied, and glanced at her half-laughingly, half-tenderly.

After a while, "I wish you would tell me," she said, "just what you mean. I wish you would tell me what is the difference."

"Oh, it's a long story. I will tell you—when we get to Venice." The well-worn jest served its purpose again; she laughed, and he continued: "By the way, just when will that be? The captain says that if this wind holds we shall be in Trieste by Friday afternoon. I suppose your friends will meet you there on Saturday, and that you'll go back with them to Venice at once."

"Yes," assented Lydia.

"Well, if I should come on Monday, would that be too soon?"

"Oh, no!" she answered. He wondered if she had been vaguely hoping that he might go directly on with her to Venice. They were together all day, now, and the long talks went on from early morning, when they met before breakfast on deck, until late at night, when they parted there, with blushed and laughed good-nights. Sometimes the trust she put upon his unspoken promises was terrible; it seemed to condemn his reticence as fantastic and hazardous. With her, at least, it was clear that this love was the first; her living and loving were one. He longed to testify the devotion which he felt, to leave it unmistakable and safe past accident; he thought of making his will, in which he should give her everything, and declare her supremely dear; he could only rid himself of this by drawing up the paper in writing, and then he easily tore it in pieces.

They drew nearer together, not only in their talk about each other, but in what they said of different people in their relation to themselves. But Staniford's pleasure in the metaphysics of reciprocal appreciation, his wonder at the quickness with which she divined characters he painfully analyzed, was not greater than his joy in the pretty hitch of the shoulder with which she tucked her handkerchief into the back pocket of her sack, or the picturesqueness with, which she sat facing him, and leant upon the rail, with her elbow wrapped in her shawl, and the fringe gathered in the hand which propped her cheek. He scribbled his sketch-book full of her contours and poses, which sometimes he caught unawares, and which sometimes she sat for him to draw. One day, as they sat occupied in this, "I wonder," he said, "if you have anything of my feeling, nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure excursion, without taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very much at home."

"Why, yes," she said, joyously; "do you have that feeling, too?"

"I wonder what it is makes us feel so," he ventured.

"Perhaps," she returned, "the long voyage."

"I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe," he said, reverting to the original figure. "Shall you?"

"You know I don't know much about it," she answered, in lithe evasion, for which she more than atoned with a conscious look and one of her dark blushes. Yet he chose, with a curious cruelty, to try how far she was his.

"How odd it would be," he said, "if we never should have a chance to talk up this voyage of ours when it is over!"

She started, in a way that made his heart smite him. "Why, you said you—" And then she caught herself, and struggled pitifully for the self-possession she had lost. She turned her head away; his pulse bounded.

"Did you think I wouldn't? I am living for that." He took the hand that lay in her lap; she seemed to try to free it, but she had not the strength or will; she could only keep her face turned from him.



XXI.

They arrived Friday afternoon in Trieste, and Captain Jenness telegraphed his arrival to Lydia's uncle as he went up to the consulate with his ship's papers. The next morning the young men sent their baggage to a hotel, but they came back for a last dinner on the Aroostook. They all pretended to be very gay, but everybody was perturbed and distraught. Staniford and Dunham had paid their way handsomely with the sailors, and they had returned with remembrances in florid scarfs and jewelry for Thomas and the captain and the officers. Dunham had thought they ought to get something to give Lydia as a souvenir of their voyage; it was part of his devotion to young ladies to offer them little presents; but Staniford overruled him, and said there should be nothing of the kind. They agreed to be out of the way when her uncle came, and they said good-by after dinner. She came on deck to watch them ashore. Staniford would be the last to take leave. As he looked into her eyes, he saw brave trust of him, but he thought a sort of troubled wonder, too, as if she could not understand his reticence, and suffered from it. There was the same latent appeal and reproach in the pose in which she watched their boat row away. She stood with one hand resting on the rail, and her slim grace outlined against the sky. He waved his hand; she answered with a little languid wave of hers; then she turned away. He felt as if he had forsaken her.

The afternoon was very long. Toward night-fall he eluded Dunham, and wandered back to the ship in the hope that she might still be there. But she was gone. Already everything was changed. There was bustle and discomfort; it seemed years since he had been there. Captain Jenness was ashore somewhere; it was the second mate who told Staniford of her uncle's coming.

"What sort of person was he?" he asked vaguely.

"Oh, well! Dum an Englishman, any way," said Mason, in a tone of easy, sociable explanation.

The scruple to which Staniford had been holding himself for the past four or five days seemed the most incredible of follies,—the most fantastic, the most cruel. He hurried back to the hotel; when he found Dunham coming out from the table d'hote he was wild.

"I have been the greatest fool in the world, Dunham," he said. "I have let a quixotic quibble keep me from speaking when I ought to have spoken."

Dunham looked at him in stupefaction. "Where have you been?" he inquired.

"Down to the ship. I was in hopes that she might be still there. But she's gone."

"The Aroostook gone?"

"Look here, Dunham," cried Staniford, angrily, "this is the second time you've done that! If you are merely thick-witted, much can be forgiven to your infirmity; but if you've a mind to joke, let me tell you you choose your time badly."

"I'm not joking. I don't know what you're talking about. I may be thick-witted, as you say; or you may be scatter-witted," said Dunham, indignantly. "What are you after, any way?"

"What was my reason for not being explicit with her; for going away from her without one honest, manly, downright word; for sneaking off without telling her that she was more than life to me, and that if she cared for me as I cared for her I would go on with her to Venice, and meet her people with her?"

"Why, I don't know," replied Dunham, vaguely. "We agreed that there would be a sort of—that she ought to be in their care before—"

"Then I can tell you," interrupted Staniford, "that we agreed upon the greatest piece of nonsense that ever was. A man can do no more than offer himself, and if he does less, after he's tried everything to show that he's in love with a woman, and to make her in love with him, he's a scamp to refrain from a bad motive, and an ass to refrain from a good one. Why in the name of Heaven shouldn't I have spoken, instead of leaving her to eat her heart out in wonder at my delay, and to doubt and suspect and dread—Oh!" he shouted, in supreme self-contempt.

Dunham had nothing to urge in reply. He had fallen in with what he thought Staniford's own mind in regard to the course he ought to take; since he had now changed his mind, there seemed never to have been any reason for that course.

"My dear fellow," he said, "it isn't too late yet to see her, I dare say. Let us go and find what time the trains leave for Venice."

"Do you suppose I can offer myself in the salle d'attente?" sneered Staniford. But he went with Dunham to the coffee-room, where they found the Osservatore Triestino and the time-table of the railroad. The last train left for Venice at ten, and it was now seven; the Austrian Lloyd steamer for Venice sailed at nine.

"Pshaw!" said Staniford, and pushed the paper away. He sat brooding over the matter before the table on which the journals were scattered, while Dunham waited for him to speak. At last he said, "I can't stand it; I must see her. I don't know whether I told her I should come on to-morrow night or not. If she should be expecting me on Monday morning, and I should be delayed—Dunham, will you drive round with me to the Austrian Lloyd's wharf? They may be going by the boat, and if they are they'll have left their hotel. We'll try the train later. I should like to find out if they are on board. I don't know that I'll try to speak with them; very likely not."

"I'll go, certainly," answered Dunham, cordially.

"I'll have some dinner first," said Staniford. "I'm hungry."

It was quite dark when they drove on to the wharf at which the boat for Venice lay. When they arrived, a plan had occurred to Staniford, through the timidity which had already succeeded the boldness of his desperation. "Dunham," he said, "I want you to go on board, and see if she's there. I don't think I could stand not finding her. Besides, if she's cheerful and happy, perhaps I'd better not see her. You can come back and report. Confound it, you know, I should be so conscious before that infernal uncle of hers. You understand!"

"Yes, yes," returned Dunham, eager to serve Staniford in a case like this. "I'll manage it."

"Well," said Staniford, beginning to doubt the wisdom of either going aboard, "do it if you think best. I don't know—"

"Don't know what?" asked Dunham, pausing in the door of the fiacre.

"Oh, nothing, nothing! I hope we're not making fools of ourselves."

"You're morbid, old fellow!" said Dunham, gayly. He disappeared in the darkness, and Staniford waited, with set teeth, till he came back. He seemed a long time gone. When he returned, he stood holding fast to the open fiacre-door, without speaking.

"Well!" cried Staniford, with bitter impatience.

"Well what?" Dunham asked, in a stupid voice.

"Were they there?"

"I don't know. I can't tell."

"Can't tell, man? Did you go to see?"

"I think so. I'm not sure."

A heavy sense of calamity descended upon Staniford's heart, but patience came with it. "What's the matter, Dunham?" he asked, getting out tremulously.

"I don't know. I think I've had a fall, somewhere. Help me in."

Staniford got out and helped him gently to the seat, and then mounted beside him, giving the order for their return. "Where is your hat?" he asked, finding that Dunham was bareheaded.

"I don't know. It doesn't matter. Am I bleeding?"

"It's so dark, I can't see."

"Put your hand here." He carried Staniford's hand to the back of his head.

"There's no blood; but you've had an ugly knock there."

"Yes, that's it," said Dunham. "I remember now; I slipped and struck my head." He lapsed away in a torpor; Staniford could learn nothing more from him.

The hurt was not what Staniford in his first anxiety had feared, but the doctor whom they called at the hotel was vague and guarded as to everything but the time and care which must be given in any event. Staniford despaired; but there was only one thing to do. He sat down beside his friend to take care of him.

His mind was a turmoil of regrets, of anxieties, of apprehensions; but he had a superficial calmness that enabled him to meet the emergencies of the case. He wrote a letter to Lydia which he somehow knew to be rightly worded, telling her of the accident. In terms which conveyed to her all that he felt, he said that he should not see her at the time he had hoped, but promised to come to Venice as soon as he could quit his friend. Then, with a deep breath, he put that affair away for the time, and seemed to turn a key upon it.

He called a waiter, and charged him to have his letter posted at once. The man said he would give it to the portier, who was sending out some other letters. He returned, ten minutes later, with a number of letters which he said the portier had found for him at the post-office. Staniford glanced at them. It was no time to read them then, and he put them into the breast pocket of his coat.



XXII.

At the hotel in Trieste, to which Lydia went with her uncle before taking the train for Venice, she found an elderly woman, who made her a courtesy, and, saying something in Italian, startled her by kissing her hand.

"It's our Veronica," her uncle explained; "she wants to know how she can serve you." He gave Veronica the wraps and parcels he had been carrying. "Your aunt thought you might need a maid."

"Oh, no!" said Lydia. "I always help myself."

"Ah, I dare say," returned her uncle. "You American ladies are so—up to snuff, as you say. But your aunt thought we'd better have her with us, in any case."

"And she sent her all the way from Venice?"

"Yes."

"Well, I never did!" said Lydia, not lightly, but with something of contemptuous severity.

Her uncle smiled, as if she had said something peculiarly acceptable to him, and asked, hesitatingly, "When you say you never did, you know, what is the full phrase?"

Lydia looked at him. "Oh! I suppose I meant I never heard of such a thing."

"Ah, thanks, thanks!" said her uncle. He was a tall, slender man of fifty-five or sixty, with a straight gray mustache, and not at all the typical Englishman, but much more English-looking than if he had been. His bearing toward Lydia blended a fatherly kindness and a colonial British gallantry, such as one sees in elderly Canadian gentlemen attentive to quite young Canadian ladies at the provincial watering-places. He had an air of adventure, and of uncommon pleasure and no small astonishment in Lydia's beauty. They were already good friends; she was at her ease with him; she treated him as if he were an old gentleman. At the station, where Veronica got into the same carriage with them, Lydia found the whole train very queer-looking, and he made her describe its difference from an American train. He said, "Oh, yes—yes, engine," when she mentioned the locomotive, and he apparently prized beyond its worth the word cow-catcher, a fixture which Lydia said was wanting to the European locomotive, and left it very stubby. He asked her if she would allow him to set it down; and he entered the word in his note-book, with several other idioms she had used. He said that he amused himself in picking up these things from his American friends. He wished to know what she called this and that and the other thing, and was equally pleased whether her nomenclature agreed or disagreed with his own. Where it differed, he recorded the fact, with her leave, in his book. He plied her with a thousand questions about America, with all parts of which he seemed to think her familiar; and she explained with difficulty how very little of it she had seen. He begged her not to let him bore her, and to excuse the curiosity of a Britisher, "As I suppose you'd call me," he added.

Lydia lifted her long-lashed lids half-way, and answered, "No, I shouldn't call you so."

"Ah, yes," he returned, "the Americans always disown it. But I don't mind it at all, you know. I like those native expressions." Where they stopped for refreshments he observed that one of the dishes, which was flavored to the national taste, had a pretty tall smell, and seemed disappointed by Lydia's unresponsive blankness at a word which a countryman of hers—from Kentucky—had applied to the odor of the Venetian canals. He suffered in like measure from a like effect in her when he lamented the complications that had kept him the year before from going to America with Mrs. Erwin, when she revisited her old stomping-ground.

As they rolled along, the warm night which had fallen after the beautiful day breathed through the half-dropped window in a rich, soft air, as strange almost as the flying landscape itself. Mr. Erwin began to drowse, and at last he fell asleep; but Veronica kept her eyes vigilantly fixed upon Lydia, always smiling when she caught her glance, and offering service. At the stations, so orderly and yet so noisy, where the passengers were held in the same meek subjection as at Trieste, people got in and out of the carriage; and there were officers, at first in white coats, and after they passed the Italian frontier in blue, who stared at Lydia. One of the Italians, a handsome young hussar, spoke to her. She could not know what he said; but when he crossed over to her side of the carriage, she rose and took her place beside Veronica, where she remained even after he left the carriage. She was sensible of growing drowsy. Then she was aware of nothing till she woke up with her head on Veronica's shoulder, against which she had fallen, and on which she had been patiently supported for hours. "Ecco Venezia!" cried the old woman, pointing to a swarm of lights that seemed to float upon an expanse of sea. Lydia did not understand; she thought she was again on board the Aroostook, and that the lights she saw were the lights of the shipping in Boston harbor. The illusion passed, and left her heart sore. She issued from the glare of the station upon the quay before it, bewildered by the ghostly beauty of the scene, but shivering in the chill of the dawn, and stunned by the clamor of the gondoliers. A tortuous course in the shadow of lofty walls, more deeply darkened from time to time by the arch of a bridge, and again suddenly pierced by the brilliance of a lamp that shot its red across the gloom, or plunged it into the black water, brought them to a palace gate at which they stopped, and where, after a dramatic ceremony of sliding bolts and the reluctant yielding of broad doors on a level with the water, she passed through a marble-paved court and up a stately marble staircase to her uncle's apartment. "You're at home, now, you know," he said, in a kindly way, and took her hand, very cold and lax, in his for welcome. She could not answer, but made haste to follow Veronica to her room, whither the old woman led the way with a candle. It was a gloomily spacious chamber, with sombre walls and a lofty ceiling with a faded splendor of gilded paneling. Some tall, old-fashioned mirrors and bureaus stood about, with rugs before them on the stone floor; in the middle of the room was a bed curtained with mosquito-netting. Carved chairs were pushed here and there against the wall. Lydia dropped into one of these, too strange and heavy-hearted to go to bed in that vastness and darkness, in which her candle seemed only to burn a small round hole. She longed forlornly to be back again in her pretty state-room on the Aroostook; vanishing glimpses and echoes of the faces and voices grown so familiar in the past weeks haunted her; the helpless tears ran down her cheeks.

There came a tap at her door, and her aunt's voice called, "Shall I come in?" and before she could faintly consent, her aunt pushed in, and caught her in her arms, and kissed her, and broke into a twitter of welcome and compassion. "You poor child! Did you think I was going to let you go to sleep without seeing you, after you'd come half round the world to see me?" Her aunt was dark and slight like Lydia, but not so tall; she was still a very pretty woman, and she was a very effective presence now in the long white morning-gown of camel's hair, somewhat fantastically embroidered in crimson silk, in which she drifted about before Lydia's bewildered eyes. "Let me see how you look! Are you as handsome as ever?" She held the candle she carried so as to throw its light full upon Lydia's face. "Yes!" she sighed. "How pretty you are! And at your age you'll look even better by daylight! I had begun to despair of you; I thought you couldn't be all I remembered; but you are,—you're more! I wish I had you in Rome, instead of Venice; there would be some use in it. There's a great deal of society there,—English society; but never mind: I'm going to take you to church with me to-morrow,—the English service; there are lots of English in Venice now, on their way south for the winter. I'm crazy to see what dresses you've brought; your aunt Maria has told me how she fitted you out. I've got two letters from her since you started, and they're all perfectly well, dear. Your black silk will do nicely, with bright ribbons, especially; I hope you haven't got it spotted or anything on the way over." She did not allow Lydia to answer, nor seem to expect it. "You've got your mother's eyes, Lydia, but your father had those straight eyebrows: you're very much like him. Poor Henry! And now I'm having you get something to eat. I'm not going to risk coffee on you, for fear it will keep you awake; though you can drink it in this climate with comparative impunity. Veronica is warming you a bowl of bouillon, and that's all you're to have till breakfast!"

"Why, aunt Josephine," said the girl, not knowing what bouillon was, and abashed by the sound of it, "I'm not the least hungry. You oughtn't to take the trouble—"

"You'll be hungry when you begin to eat. I'm so impatient to hear about your voyage! I am going to introduce you to some very nice people, here,—English people. There are no Americans living in Venice; and the Americans in Europe are so queer! You've no idea how droll our customs seem here; and I much prefer the English. Your poor uncle can never get me to ask Americans. I tell him I'm American enough, and he'll have to get on without others. Of course, he's perfectly delighted to get at you. You've quite taken him by storm, Lydia; he's in raptures about your looks. It's what I told him before you came; but I couldn't believe it till I took a look at you. I couldn't have gone to sleep without it. Did Mr. Erwin talk much with you?"

"He was very pleasant. He talked—as long as he was awake," said Lydia.

"I suppose he was trying to pick up Americanisms from you; he's always doing it. I keep him away from Americans as much as I can: but he will get at them on the cars and at the hotels. He's always asking them such ridiculous questions, and I know some of them just talk nonsense to him."

Veronica came in with a tray, and a bowl of bouillon on it; and Mrs. Erwin pulled up a light table, and slid about, serving her, in her cabalistic dress, like an Oriental sorceress performing her incantations. She volubly watched Lydia while she ate her supper, and at the end she kissed her again. "Now you feel better," she said. "I knew it would cheer you up more than any one thing. There's nothing like something to eat when you're homesick. I found that out when I was off at school."

Lydia was hardly kissed so much at home during a year as she had been since meeting Mrs. Erwin. Her aunt Maria sparely embraced her when she went and came each week from the Mill Village; anything more than this would have come of insincerity between them; but it had been agreed that Mrs. Erwin's demonstrations of affection, of which she had been lavish during her visit to South Bradfield, might not be so false. Lydia accepted them submissively, and she said, when Veronica returned for the tray, "I hate to give you so much trouble. And sending her all the way to Trieste on my account,—I felt ashamed. There wasn' a thing for her to do."

"Why, of course not!" exclaimed her aunt. "But what did you think I was made of? Did you suppose I was going to have you come on a night-journey alone with your uncle? It would have been all over Venice; it would have been ridiculous. I sent Veronica along for a dragon."

"A dragon? I don't understand," faltered Lydia.

"Well, you will," said her aunt, putting the palms of her hands against Lydia's, and so pressing forward to kiss her. "We shall have breakfast at ten. Go to bed!"



XXIII.

When Lydia came to breakfast she found her uncle alone in the room, reading Galignani's Messenger. He put down his paper, and came forward to take her hand. "You are all right this morning, I see, Miss Lydia," he said. "You were quite up a stump, last night, as your countrymen say."

At the same time hands were laid upon her shoulders from behind, and she was pulled half round, and pushed back, and held at arm's-length. It was Mrs. Erwin, who, entering after her, first scanned her face, and then, with one devouring glance, seized every detail of her dress—the black silk which had already made its effect—before she kissed her. "You are lovely, my dear! I shall spoil you, I know; but you're worth it! What lashes you have, child! And your aunt Maria made and fitted that dress? She's a genius!"

"Miss Lydia," said Mr. Erwin, as they sat down, "is of the fortunate age when one rises young every morning." He looked very fresh himself in his clean-shaven chin, and his striking evidence of snowy wristbands and shirt-bosom. "Later in life, you can't do that. She looks as blooming," he added, gallantly, "as a basket of chips,—as you say in America."

"Smiling," said Lydia, mechanically correcting him.

"Ah! It is? Smiling,—yes; thanks. It's very good either way; very characteristic. It would be curious to know the origin of a saying like that. I imagine it goes back to the days of the first settlers. It suggests a wood-chopping period. Is it—ah—in general use?" he inquired.

"Of course it isn't, Henshaw!" said his wife.

"You've been a great while out of the country, my dear," suggested Mr. Erwin.

"Not so long as not to know that your Americanisms are enough to make one wish we had held our tongues ever since we were discovered, or had never been discovered at all. I want to ask Lydia about her voyage. I haven't heard a word yet. Did your aunt Maria come down to Boston with you?"

"No, grandfather brought me."

"And you had good weather coming over? Mr. Erwin told me you were not seasick."

"We had one bad storm, before we reached Gibraltar; but I wasn't seasick."

"Were the other passengers?"

"One was." Lydia reddened a little, and then turned somewhat paler than at first.

"What is it, Lydia?" her aunt subtly demanded. "Who was the one that was sick?"

"Oh, a gentleman," answered Lydia.

Her aunt looked at her keenly, and for whatever reason abruptly left the subject. "Your silk," she said, "will do very well for church, Lydia."

"Oh, I say, now!" cried her husband, "you're not going to make her go to church to-day!"

"Yes, I am! There will be more people there to-day than any other time this fall. She must go."

"But she's tired to death,—quite tuckered, you know."

"Oh, I'm rested, now," said Lydia. "I shouldn't like to miss going to church."

"Your silk," continued her aunt, "will be quite the thing for church." She looked hard at the dress, as if it were not quite the thing for breakfast. Mrs. Erwin herself wore a morning-dress of becoming delicacy, and an airy French cap; she had a light fall of powder on her face. "What kind of overthing have you got?" she asked.

"There's a sack goes with this," said the girl, suggestively.

"That's nice! What is your bonnet?"

"I haven't any bonnet. But my best hat is nice. I could—"

"No one goes to church in a hat! You can't do it. It's simply impossible."

"Why, my dear," said her husband, "I saw some very pretty American girls in hats at church, last Sunday."

"Yes, and everybody knew they were Americans by their hats!" retorted Mrs. Erwin.

"I knew they were Americans by their good looks," said Mr. Erwin, "and what you call their stylishness."

"Oh, it's all well enough for you to talk. You're an Englishman, and you could wear a hat, if you liked. It would be set down to character. But in an American it would be set down to greenness. If you were an American, you would have to wear a bonnet."

"I'm glad, then, I'm not an American," said her husband; "I don't think I should look well in a bonnet."

"Oh, stuff, Henshaw! You know what I mean. And I'm not going to have English people thinking we're ignorant of the common decencies of life. Lydia shall not go to church in a hat; she had better never go. I will lend her one of my bonnets. Let me see, which one." She gazed at Lydia in critical abstraction. "I wear rather young bonnets," she mused aloud, "and we're both rather dark. The only difficulty is I'm so much more delicate—" She brooded upon the question in a silence, from which she burst exulting. "The very thing! I can fuss it up in no time. It won't take two minutes to get it ready. And you'll look just killing in it." She turned grave again. "Henshaw," she said, "I wish you would go to church this morning!"

"I would do almost anything for you, Josephine; but really, you know, you oughtn't to ask that. I was there last Sunday; I can't go every Sunday. It's bad enough in England; a man ought to have some relief on the Continent."

"Well, well. I suppose I oughtn't to ask you," sighed his wife, "especially as you're going with us to-night."

"I'll go to-night, with pleasure," said Mr. Erwin. He rose when his wife and Lydia left the table, and opened the door for them with a certain courtesy he had; it struck even Lydia's uneducated sense as something peculiarly sweet and fine, and it did not overawe her own simplicity, but seemed of kind with it.

The bonnet, when put to proof, did not turn out to be all that it was vaunted. It looked a little odd, from the first; and Mrs. Erwin, when she was herself dressed, ended by taking it off, and putting on Lydia the hat previously condemned. "You're divine in that," she said. "And after all, you are a traveler, and I can say that some of your things were spoiled coming over,—people always get things ruined in a sea voyage,—and they'll think it was your bonnet."

"I kept my things very nicely, aunt Josephine," said Lydia conscientiously. "I don't believe anything was hurt."

"Oh, well, you can't tell till you've unpacked; and we're not responsible for what people happen to think, you know. Wait!" her aunt suddenly cried. She pulled open a drawer, and snatched two ribbons from it, which she pinned to the sides of Lydia's hat, and tied in a bow under her chin; she caught out a lace veil, and drew that over the front of the hat, and let it hang in a loose knot behind. "Now," she said, pushing her up to a mirror, that she might see, "it's a bonnet; and I needn't say anything!"

They went in Mrs. Erwin's gondola to the palace in which the English service was held, and Lydia was silent, as she looked shyly, almost fearfully, round on the visionary splendors of Venice.

Mrs. Erwin did not like to be still. "What are you thinking of, Lydia?" she asked.

"Oh! I suppose I was thinking that the leaves were beginning to turn in the sugar orchard," answered Lydia faithfully. "I was thinking how still the sun would be in the pastures, there, this morning. I suppose the stillness here put me in mind of it. One of these bells has the same tone as our bell at home."

"Yes," said Mrs. Erwin. "Everybody finds a familiar bell in Venice. There are enough of them, goodness knows. I don't see why you call it still, with all this clashing and banging. I suppose this seems very odd to you, Lydia," she continued, indicating the general Venetian effect. "It's an old story to me, though. The great beauty of Venice is that you get more for your money here than you can anywhere else in the world. There isn't much society, however, and you mustn't expect to be very gay."

"I have never been gay," said Lydia.

"Well, that's no reason you shouldn't be," returned her aunt. "If you were in Florence, or Rome, or even Naples, you could have a good time. There! I'm glad your uncle didn't hear me say that!"

"What?" asked Lydia.

"Good time; that's an Americanism."

"Is it?"

"Yes. He's perfectly delighted when he catches me in one. I try to break myself of them, but I don't always know them myself. Sometimes I feel almost like never talking at all. But you can't do that, you know."

"No," assented Lydia.

"And you have to talk Americanisms if you're an American. You mustn't think your uncle isn't obliging, Lydia. He is. I oughtn't to have asked him to go to church,—it bores him so much. I used to feel terribly about it once, when we were first married. But things have changed very much of late years, especially with all this scientific talk. In England it's quite different from what it used to be. Some of the best people in society are skeptics now, and that makes it quite another thing." Lydia looked grave, but she said nothing, and her aunt added, "I wouldn't have asked him, but I had a little headache, myself."

"Aunt Josephine," said Lydia, "I'm afraid you're doing too much for me. Why didn't you let me come alone?"

"Come alone? To church!" Mrs. Erwin addressed her in a sort of whispered shriek. "It would have been perfectly scandalous."

"To go to church alone?" demanded Lydia, astounded.

"Yes. A young girl mustn't go anywhere alone."

"Why?"

"I'll explain to you, sometime, Lydia; or rather, you'll learn for yourself. In Italy it's very different from what it is in America." Mrs. Erwin suddenly started up and bowed with great impressiveness, as a gondola swept towards them. The gondoliers wore shirts of blue silk, and long crimson sashes. On the cushions of the boat, beside a hideous little man who was sucking the top of an ivory-handled stick, reclined a beautiful woman, pale, with purplish rings round the large black eyes with which, faintly smiling, she acknowledged Mrs. Erwin's salutation, and then stared at Lydia.

"Oh, you may look, and you may look, and you may look!" cried Mrs. Erwin, under her breath. "You've met more than your match at last! The Countess Tatocka," she explained to Lydia. "That was her palace we passed just now,—the one with the iron balconies. Did you notice the gentleman with her? She always takes to those monsters. He's a Neapolitan painter, and ever so talented,—clever, that is. He's dead in love with her, they say."

"Are they engaged?" asked Lydia.

"Engaged!" exclaimed Mrs. Erwin, with her shriek in dumb show. "Why, child, she's married!"

"To him?" demanded the girl, with a recoil.

"No! To her husband."

"To her husband?" gasped Lydia. "And she—"

"Why, she isn't quite well seen, even in Venice," Mrs. Erwin explained. "But she's rich, and her conversazioni are perfectly brilliant. She's very artistic, and she writes poetry,—Polish poetry. I wish she could hear you sing, Lydia! I know she'll be frantic to see you again. But I don't see how it's to be managed; her house isn't one you can take a young girl to. And I can't ask her: your uncle detests her."

"Do you go to her house?" Lydia inquired stiffly.

"Why, as a foreigner, I can go. Of course, Lydia, you can't be as particular about everything on the Continent as you are at home."

The former oratory of the Palazzo Grinzelli, which served as the English chapel, was filled with travelers of both the English-speaking nationalities, as distinguishable by their dress as by their faces. Lydia's aunt affected the English style, but some instinctive elegance betrayed her, and every Englishwoman there knew and hated her for an American, though she was a precisian in her liturgy, instant in all the responses and genuflexions. She found opportunity in the course of the lesson to make Lydia notice every one, and she gave a telegrammic biography of each person she knew, with a criticism of the costume of all the strangers, managing so skillfully that by the time the sermon began she was able to yield the text a statuesquely close attention, and might have been carved in marble where she sat as a realistic conception of Worship.

The sermon came to an end; the ritual proceeded; the hymn, with the hemming and hawing of respectable inability, began, and Lydia lifted her voice with the rest. Few of the people were in their own church; some turned and stared at her; the bonnets and the back hair of those who did not look were intent upon her; the long red neck of one elderly Englishman, restrained by decorum from turning his head toward her, perspired with curiosity. Mrs. Erwin fidgeted, and dropped her eyes from the glances which fell to her for explanation of Lydia, and hurried away with her as soon as the services ended. In the hall on the water-floor of the palace, where they were kept waiting for their gondola a while, she seemed to shrink even from the small, surly greetings with which people whose thoughts are on higher things permit themselves to recognize fellow-beings of their acquaintance in coming out of church. But an old lady, who supported herself with a cane, pushed through the crowd to where they stood aloof, and, without speaking to Mrs. Erwin, put out her hand to Lydia; she had a strong, undaunted, plain face, in which was expressed the habit of doing what she liked. "My dear," she said, "how wonderfully you sing! Where did you get that heavenly voice? You are an American; I see that by your beauty. You are Mrs. Erwin's niece, I suppose, whom she expected. Will you come and sing to me? You must bring her, Mrs. Erwin."

She hobbled away without waiting for an answer, and Lydia and her aunt got into their gondola. "Oh! How glad I am!" cried Mrs. Erwin, in a joyful flutter. "She's the very tip-top of the English here; she has a whole palace, and you meet the very best people at her house. I was afraid when you were singing, Lydia, that they would think your voice was too good to be good form,—that's an expression you must get; it means everything,—it sounded almost professional. I wanted to nudge you to sing a little lower, or different, or something; but I couldn't, everybody was looking so. No matter. It's all right now. If she liked it, nobody else will dare to breathe. You can see that she has taken a fancy to you; she'll make a great pet of you."

"Who is she?" asked Lydia, bluntly.

"Lady Fenleigh. Such a character,—so eccentric! But really, I suppose, very hard to live with. It must have been quite a release for poor Sir Fenleigh."

"She didn't seem in mourning," said Lydia. "Has he been dead long?"

"Why, he isn't dead at all! He is what you call a grass-widower. The best soul in the world, everybody says, and very, very fond of her; but she couldn't stand it; he was too good, don't you understand? They've lived apart a great many years. She's lived a great deal in Asia Minor,—somewhere. She likes Venice; but of course there's no telling how long she may stay. She has another house in Florence, all ready to go and be lived in at a day's notice. I wish I had presented you! It did go through my head; but it didn't seem as if I could get the Blood out. It is a fearful name, Lydia; I always felt it so when I was a girl, and I was so glad to marry out of it; and it sounds so terribly American. I think you must take your mother's name, my dear. Latham is rather flattish, but it's worlds better than Blood."

"I am not ashamed of my father's name," said Lydia.

"But you'll have to change it some day, at any rate,—when you get married."

Lydia turned away. "I will be called Blood till then. If Lady Fenleigh—"

"Yes, my dear," promptly interrupted her aunt, "I know that sort of independence. I used to have whole Declarations of it. But you'll get over that, in Europe. There was a time—just after the war—when the English quite liked our sticking up for ourselves; but that's past now. They like us to be outlandish, but they don't like us to be independent. How did you like the sermon? Didn't you think we had a nicely-dressed congregation?"

"I thought the sermon was very short," answered Lydia.

"Well, that's the English way, and I like it. If you get in all the service, you must make the sermon short."

Lydia did not say anything for a little while. Then she asked, "Is the service the same at the evening meeting?"

"Evening meeting?" repeated Mrs. Erwin.

"Yes,—the church to-night."

"Why, child, there isn't any church to-night! What are you talking about?"

"Didn't uncle—didn't Mr. Erwin say he would go with us to-night?"

Mrs. Erwin seemed about to laugh, and then she looked embarrassed. "Why, Lydia," she cried at last, "he didn't mean church; he meant —opera!"

"Opera! Sunday night! Aunt Josephine, do you go to the theatre on Sabbath evening?"

There was something appalling in the girl's stern voice. Mrs. Erwin gathered herself tremulously together for defense. "Why, of course, Lydia, I don't approve of it, though I never was Orthodox. Your uncle likes to go; and if everybody's there that you want to see, and they will give the best operas Sunday night, what are you to do?"

Lydia said nothing, but a hard look came into her face, and she shut her lips tight.

"Now you see, Lydia," resumed her aunt, with an air of deductive reasoning from the premises, "the advantage of having a bonnet on, even if it's only a make-believe. I don't believe a soul knew it. All those Americans had hats. You were the only American girl there with a bonnet. I'm sure that it had more than half to do with Lady Fenleigh's speaking to you. It showed that you had been well brought up."

"But I never wore a bonnet to church at home," said Lydia.

"That has nothing to do with it, if they thought you did. And Lydia," she continued, "I was thinking while you were singing there that I wouldn't say anything at once about your coming over to cultivate your voice. That's got to be such an American thing, now. I'll let it out little by little,—and after Lady Fenleigh's quite taken you under her wing. Perhaps we may go to Milan with you, or to Naples,—there's a conservatory there, too; and we can pull up stakes as easily as not. Well!" said Mrs. Erwin, interrupting herself, "I'm glad Henshaw wasn't by to hear that speech. He'd have had it down among his Americanisms instantly. I don't know whether it is an Americanism; but he puts down all the outlandish sayings he gets hold of to Americans; he has no end of English slang in his book. Everything has opened beautifully, Lydia, and I intend you shall have the best time!" She looked fondly at her brother's child. "You've no idea how much you remind me of your poor father. You have his looks exactly. I always thought he would come out to Europe before he died. We used to be so proud of his looks at home! I can remember that, though I was the youngest, and he was ten years older than I. But I always did worship beauty. A perfect Greek, Mr. Rose-Black calls me: you'll see him; he's an English painter staying here; he comes a great deal."

"Mrs. Erwin, Mrs. Erwin!" called a lady's voice from a gondola behind them. The accent was perfectly English, but the voice entirely Italian. "Where are you running to?"

"Why, Miss Landini!" retorted Mrs. Erwin, looking back over her shoulder. "Is that you? Where in the world are you going?"

"Oh, I've been to pay a visit to my old English teacher. He's awfully ill with rheumatism; but awfully! He can't turn in bed."

"Why, poor man! This is my niece whom I told you I was expecting! Arrived last night! We've been to church!" Mrs. Erwin exclaimed each of the facts.

The Italian girl stretched her hand across the gunwales of the boats, which their respective gondoliers had brought skillfully side by side, and took Lydia's hand. "I'm glad to see you, my dear. But my God, how beautiful you Americans are! But you don't look American, you know; you look Spanish! I shall come a great deal to see you, and practice my English."

"Come home with, us now, Miss Landini, and have lunch," said Mrs. Erwin.

"No, my dear, I can't. My aunt will be raising the devil if I'm not there to drink coffee with her; and I've been a great while away now. Till tomorrow!" Miss Landini's gondolier pushed his boat away, and rowed it up a narrow canal on the right.

"I suppose," Mrs. Erwin explained, "that she's really her mother,— everybody says so; but she always calls her aunt. Dear knows who her father was. But she's a very bright girl, Lydia, and you'll like her. Don't you think she speaks English wonderfully for a person who's never been out of Venice?"

"Why does she swear?" asked Lydia, stonily.

"Swear? Oh, I know what you mean. That's the funniest thing about Miss Landini. Your uncle says it's a shame to correct her; but I do, whenever I think of it. Why, you know, such words as God and devil don't sound at all wicked in Italian, and ladies use them quite commonly. She understands that it isn't good form to do so in English, but when she gets excited she forgets. Well, you can't say but what she was impressed, Lydia!"

After lunch, various people came to call upon Mrs. Erwin. Several of them were Italians who were learning English, and they seemed to think it inoffensive to say that they were glad of the opportunity to practice the language with Lydia. They talked local gossip with her aunt, and they spoke of an approaching visit to Venice from the king; it seemed to Lydia that the king's character was not good.

Mr. Rose-Black, the English artist, came. He gave himself the effect of being in Mrs. Erwin's confidence, apparently without her authority, and he bestowed a share of this intimacy upon Lydia. He had the manner of a man who had been taken up by people above him, and the impudence of a talent which had not justified the expectations formed of it. He softly reproached Mrs. Erwin for running away after service before he could speak to her, and told her how much everybody had been enchanted by her niece's singing. "At least, they said it was your niece."

"Oh, yes, Mr. Rose-Black, let me introduce you to Miss—" Lydia looked hard, even to threatening, at her aunt, and Mrs. Erwin added, "Blood."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Rose-Black, with his picked-up politeness, "I didn't get the name."

"Blood," said Mrs. Erwin, more distinctly.

"Aoh!" said Mr. Rose-Black, in a cast-off accent of jaded indifferentism, just touched with displeasure. "Yes," he added, dreamily, to Lydia, "it was divine, you know. You might say it needed training; but it had the naive sweetness we associate with your countrywomen. They're greatly admired in England now, you know, for their beauty. Oh, I assure you, it's quite the thing to admire American ladies. I want to arrange a little lunch at my studio for Mrs. Erwin and yourself; and I want you to abet me in it, Miss Blood." Lydia stared at him, but he was not troubled. "I'm going to ask to sketch you. Really, you know, there's a poise—something bird-like— a sort of repose in movement—" He sat in a corner of the sofa, with his head fallen back, and abandoned to an absent enjoyment of Lydia's pictorial capabilities. He was very red; his full beard, which started as straw color, changed to red when it got a little way from his face. He wore a suit of rough blue, the coat buttoned tightly about him, and he pulled a glove through his hand as he talked. He was scarcely roused from his reverie by the entrance of an Italian officer, with his hussar jacket hanging upon one shoulder, and his sword caught up in his left hand. He ran swiftly to Mrs. Erwin, and took her hand.

"Ah, my compliments! I come practice my English with you a little. Is it well said, a little, or do you say a small?"

"A little, cavaliere," answered Mrs. Erwin, amiably. "But you must say a good deal, in this case."

"Yes, yes,—good deal. For what?"

"Let me introduce you to my niece. Colonel Pazzelli," said Mrs. Erwin.

"Ah! Too much honor, too much honor!" murmured the cavaliere. He brought his heels together with a click, and drooped towards Lydia till his head was on a level with his hips. Recovering himself, he caught up his eye-glasses, and bent them on Lydia. "Very please, very honored, much—" He stopped, and looked confused, and Lydia turned pale and red.

"Now, won't you play that pretty barcarole you played the other night at Lady Fenleigh's?" entreated Mrs. Erwin.

Colonel Pazzelli wrenched himself from the fascination of Lydia's presence, and lavished upon Mrs. Erwin the hoarded English of a week. "Yes, yes; very nice, very good. With much pleasure. I thank you. Yes, I play." He was one of those natives who in all the great Italian cities haunt English-speaking societies; they try to drink tea without grimacing, and sing for the ladies of our race, who innocently pet them, finding them so very like other women in their lady-like sweetness and softness; it is said they boast among their own countrymen of their triumphs. The cavaliere unbuckled his sword, and laying it across a chair sat down at the piano. He played not one but many barcaroles, and seemed loath to leave the instrument.

"Now, Lydia," said Mrs. Erwin, fondly, "won't you sing us something?"

"Do!" called Mr. Rose-Black from the sofa, with the intonation of a spoiled first-cousin, or half-brother.

"I don't feel like singing to-day," answered Lydia, immovably. Mrs. Erwin was about to urge her further, but other people came in,—some Jewish ladies, and then a Russian, whom Lydia took at first for an American. They all came and went, but Mr. Rose-Black remained in his corner of the sofa, and never took his eyes from Lydia's face. At last he went, and then Mr. Erwin looked in.

"Is that beast gone?" he asked. "I shall be obliged to show him the door, yet, Josephine. You ought to snub him. He's worse than his pictures. Well, you've had a whole raft of folks today,—as your countrymen say."

"Yes, thank Heaven," cried Mrs. Erwin, "and they're all gone. I don't want Lydia to think that I let everybody come to see me on Sunday. Thursday is my day, Lydia, but a few privileged friends understand that they can drop in Sunday afternoon." She gave Lydia a sketch of the life and character of each of these friends. "And now I must tell you that your manner is very good, Lydia. That reserved way of yours is quite the thing for a young girl in Europe: I suppose it's a gift; I never could get it, even when I was a girl. But you mustn't show any hauteur, even when you dislike people, and you refused to sing with rather too much aplomb. I don't suppose it was noticed though,—those ladies coming in at the same time. Really, I thought Mr. Rose-Black and Colonel Pazzelli were trying to outstare each other! It was certainly amusing. I never saw such an evident case, Lydia! The poor cavaliere looked as if he had seen you somewhere before in a dream, and was struggling to make it all out."

Lydia remained impassive. Presently she said she would go to her room, and write home before dinner. When she went out Mrs. Erwin fetched a deep sigh, and threw herself upon her husband's sympathy.

"She's terribly unresponsive," she began. "I supposed she'd be in raptures with the place, at least, but you wouldn't know there was anything at all remarkable in Venice from anything she's said. We have met ever so many interesting people to-day,—the Countess Tatocka, and Lady Fenleigh, and Miss Landini, and everybody, but I don't really think she's said a word about a soul. She's too queer for anything."

"I dare say she hasn't the experience to be astonished from," suggested Mr. Erwin easily. "She's here as if she'd been dropped down from her village."

"Yes, that's true," considered his wife. "But it's hard, with Lydia's air and style and self-possession, to realize that she is merely a village girl."

"She may be much more impressed than she chooses to show," Mr. Erwin continued. "I remember a very curious essay by a French writer about your countrymen: he contended that they were characterized by a savage stoicism through their contact with the Indians."

"Nonsense, Henshaw! There hasn't been an Indian near South Bradfield for two hundred years. And besides that, am I stoical?"

"I'm bound to say," replied her husband, "that so far as you go, you're a complete refutation of the theory."

"I hate to see a young girl so close," fretted Mrs. Erwin. "But perhaps," she added, more cheerfully, "she'll be the easier managed, being so passive. She doesn't seem at all willful,—that's one comfort."

She went to Lydia's room just before dinner, and found the girl with her head fallen on her arms upon the table, where she had been writing. She looked up, and faced her aunt with swollen eyes.

"Why, poor thing!" cried Mrs. Erwin. "What is it, dear? What is it, Lydia?" she asked, tenderly, and she pulled Lydia's face down upon her neck.

"Oh, nothing," said Lydia. "I suppose I was a little homesick; writing home made me."

She somewhat coldly suffered Mrs. Erwin to kiss her and smooth her hair, while she began to talk with her of her grandfather and her aunt at home. "But this is going to be home to you now," said Mrs. Erwin, "and I'm not going to let you be sick for any other. I want you to treat me just like a mother, or an older sister. Perhaps I shan't be the wisest mother to you in the world, but I mean to be one of the best. Come, now, bathe your eyes, my dear, and let's go to dinner. I don't like to keep your uncle waiting." She did not go at once, but showed Lydia the appointments of the room, and lightly indicated what she had caused to be done, and what she had done with her own hands, to make the place pretty for her. "And now shall I take your letter, and have your uncle post it this evening?" She picked up the letter from the table. "Hadn't you any wax to seal it? You know they don't generally mucilage their envelopes in Europe."

Lydia blushed. "I left it open for you to read. I thought you ought to know what I wrote."

Mrs. Erwin dropped her hands in front of her, with the open letter stretched between them, and looked at her niece in rapture. "Lydia," she cried, "one would suppose you had lived all your days in Europe! Showing me your letter, this way,—why, it's quite like a Continental girl."

"I thought it was no more than right you should see what I was writing home," said Lydia, unresponsively.

"Well, no matter, even if it was right," replied Mrs. Erwin. "It comes to the same thing. And now, as you've been quite a European daughter, I'm going to be a real American mother." She took up the wax, and sealed Lydia's letter without looking into it. "There!" she said, triumphantly.

She was very good to Lydia all through dinner, and made her talk of the simple life at home, and the village characters whom she remembered from her last summer's visit. That amused Mr. Erwin, who several times, when, his wife was turning the talk upon Lydia's voyage over, intervened with some new question about the life of the queer little Yankee hill-town. He said she must tell Lady Fenleigh about it,—she was fond of picking up those curios; it would make any one's social fortune who could explain such a place intelligibly in London; when they got to having typical villages of the different civilizations at the international expositions,—as no doubt they would,—somebody must really send South Bradfield over. He pleased himself vastly with this fancy, till Mrs. Erwin, who had been eying Lydia critically from time to time, as if making note of her features and complexion, said she had a white cloak, and that in Venice, where one need not dress a great deal for the opera, Lydia could wear it that night.