Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/22

 tall as Pietro, was walking back and forth along a garden path as if considering something and uncertain about it. Now and then she stopped and faced the Venetian with a question, which he answered volubly, his dark face energetic, alight, eloquent. Apparently he was attempting to impress something upon her and once he pointed with a graceful sweeping gesture that embraced the opposite shores that lay shrouded and peaceful in the late afternoon light. It was as if he were calling attention to the beauties of the “Queen of the Adriatic” that lay languidly on her hundred and a half islands out there in the blue seas. Pietro paused and looked at her as if in appeal. Her words came vaguely to the involuntary listener:

“I believe you are right, Pietro. And, anyway, I shall decide and give you an answer to-morrow morning when you come to the hotel. I can't feel as you do about” She paused and glanced in Ware's direction, flushed when she saw that his eyes were fixed upon her and then lowered her voice to conclude her sentence. Pietro shrugged his shoulders, glanced at Ware, and then with another typically Latin bow turned and made his way down to the launch. Ware felt a vague resentment that was immediately dissipated when she advanced toward him hurriedly, smiling and apologetic for keeping him in waiting so long.

“Now,” she said gayly, “all my serious business for to-day is done and I'm going to forget about it and have a good time with you.”

He could not doubt that she expressed her feelings. He was flattered and joyful, because of her impulsive surrender to the moment. He did not pause to note that it was the first time that they had ever been together alone with no intention of having anything but a “good time.”

When the launch returned it was in that quiet hour when twilight comes so fast over the great lagoon and its islands, and they boarded it and went over the placid reach between the Lido and the Punta della Motta, where they landed, dismissed the launch and strolled up the wide street to the broad and inviting entrance of the gardens. They paid their respects to Benventuni's statue of Garibaldi and stopped to stare at Tamburlini's bust of that unlucky and lost explorer Francesco Querini, after which they made their way to the quaint little open-air restaurant and chose a table beneath trees that were old when Napoleon Bonaparte made plans for enlarging this beauty spot of the Adriatic. They wondered if he might not have sat there himself, beneath those same trees, when the idea of that great extension germinated in his mind, and were as happy as children in their speculations. But it was not until night had fallen and the huge military band, playing with Italian fervor, had exercised its spell that they fell silent and somewhat absorbed. They strolled away, by mutual but unexpressed impulse, and sought the old sea wall at the extreme end of the island. From there they stared at the few moving lights that could be seen in that somewhat isolated view. The true city of Venice with its dense population lay far away on its myriad islands and it was as if they were alone and the sole occupants of an island of their own.

“Do you know,” she said, quite as if to herself, or speaking to one of whose sympathetic understanding she was confident, “this all seems familiar and old to me. It's—it's as if I had known it all my life.” She turned and looked at him in the starlight and said abruptly, “I suppose you wonder what I am doing here in Venice, all alone, don't you?”

“I couldn't be that impertinent,” he asserted gallantly. “That you are here is sufficient for me.”

For a time she regarded him and then said, with nearly a sigh, as if perplexed, “I suppose I ought to resent that as being too personal, but what's the use? I feel that—that you like being with me—and—and I like being with you. For some reason I don't understand you give me a tremendous feeling of support and confidence, quite as if, should it become necessary, I should find in you a very stalwart friend. You've got that air about you, you know, although you are most always rather a sobersides, aren't you?”

“I'm afraid I am,” he admitted with such an air of gloom that she laughed openly at him, much to his confusion. And this too was for him a strange experience, amounting to revelation, for it had been many years since any woman or girl had been able to provoke that form of perturbation. “Is it possible,” he asked, hesitant, “that I can help you in any way in whatever it is that keeps you here, as you say—alone?”