"Didn't you expect me!" he asked, clumsily, revealing one potent reason for his appearance.
"Last night," he began again, explanatorily. Her eyes followed his lips and interrupted him.
"What do you think of our place?" She had turned away as if to direct his speech into indifferent channels.
"I can't think anything; I _feel_ it; it's one mass of sense."
"Exactly. We found it, papa and I, one day two years ago when we were paddling around the Giudecca. One is so much at home here. At night you can see the lights along the Lido, and all the campaniles over there in Venice. Then the Redentore sweeps up so grandly--"
"And you are afraid to lose sight of it," she turned on him swiftly. And she added, before he could find defence, "You have come to redeem your words, to tell me that you love me desperately; that you want to make an engagement; and some day marry me and go over there to live?"
"And Severance has something to offer," Lawrence remarked, bluntly.
She began to walk slowly across the little grass-plot over to the Lido side. Here the oily swell was gurgling in the stone embankment.
She was like a plant flowering in the garden--a plant, part lily, part hyacinth.
"And you do not want me," she began, softly, less to him than to herself. "I don't fit in. You cannot take me up and put me aside, at your will. You would be _mine_."
"It should have been different. We should never have met. They should have made you a saint, or a priest, or a pastor for the bleeding world. You are a trifle late; half a century ago, you could have given your soul to God, quite easily, and not bothered about one woman."
"Yes, I agree, but that was settled by the way the world has ground," the young man sighed. "Why should it bother you, my fooling with the forlorn and wretched--the others? Any more than I mind your dealings with men?"
They turned about and crossed the dozen paces to the Redentore wall where lay a blade of dark shade.
"You could flirt with the multitude? Yes, I should object," she looked at him slowly, "I couldn't understand it."
He threw his head back as if to look beyond Venice.
"The maimed in body and spirit," he muttered.
"I was starved," he pleaded, "I love flesh and glory, too."
"Oh, no. I think not. You are trying to very hard. You think you are enjoying your wine and your figs and the sun; but you say a prayer."