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 the awning beside Fen. They did not talk a great deal.

"He always seems to be so perfectly contented with his own thoughts that I rather hate to intrude on them," she told her husband. "He sits for hours looking out to sea without moving a muscle, and then suddenly turns around and looks right through me, and asks some extraordinary question."

She was often puzzled by her son, and because she had never learned to touch the responsive chords in him, she really understood him very little.

"He's such an un-get-at-able person, somehow," she complained to his father.

Then one evening, just at sunset, they entered the Porto di Lido, threaded among the outer islands, and came to anchor in the great lagoon. Far off, outlined against the saffron sky, lay Venice, with its tumbled silhouette of domes and