Her words taunted him. The vines on the villino swayed in the sun.
"Come, we will go out to the water, and I will master your doubt."
They stood silent, looking at each other, half curiously. At length she uttered what was common to their minds.
"Marry the world; it woos you. Love me and leave me; love another and leave her. The world, that is your mistress."
"And the world incarnate, that is you. The world, breathing, living, loving, the world a passion of delight."
Their hands touched for a moment. Then she said, hastily:
"Too late! There is Caspar. I forgot we were to go to Burano. Will you join us?"
A figure in white ducks was coming toward them. His cordial smile seemed to include a comment--a mental note of some hint he must give. "In stalks the world of time and place," the young man muttered. "No, I will not go with you."
He helped her into the waiting gondola. She settled back upon the cushions, stretched one languid arm in farewell. He could feel the smile with which she swept Caspar Severance, the women at work in the rio over their kettles, the sun-bright stretch of waters--all impartially.
He lay down in the shade of the Redentore wall. Eight weeks ago there had been a dizzy hour, a fainting scene in a crowded court-room, a consultation with a doctor, the conventional prescription, a fortnight of movement--then _this_. He had cursed that combination of nerve and tissue; equally he cursed this. One word to his gondolier and in two hours he could be on the train for Milan, Paris, London--then indefinite years of turning about in the crowd, of jostling and being jostled. But he lay still while the sun crept over him.
She was so unreal, once apart from her presence, like an evanescent mirage on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen her, heard her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had touched him; that there had been moments when she stood with the flowers of the garden.
He shook the drowsy sun from his limbs and went away, closing the door softly on the empty garden. Venice, too, was a shadow made between water and sun. The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of cool water alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens, until he came to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace façades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down of men.
