The Ferrises went to Europe some years after their marriage, revisiting Venice, but sojourning for the most part in Florence. Ferris had once imagined that the tragedy which had given him his wife would always invest her with the shadow of its sadness, but in this he was mistaken. There is nothing has really so strong a digestion as love, and this is very lucky, seeing what manifold experiences love has to swallow and assimilate; and when they got back to Venice, Ferris found that the customs of their joint life exorcised all the dark associations of the place. These simply formed a sombre background, against which their wedded happiness relieved itself. They talked much of the past, with free minds, unashamed and unafraid. If it is a little shocking, it is nevertheless true, and true to human nature, that they spoke of Don Ippolito as if he were a part of their love. Ferris had never ceased to wonder at what he called the unfathomable innocence of his wife, and he liked to go over all the points of their former life in Venice, and bring home to himself the utter simplicity of her girlish ideas, motives, and designs, which both confounded and delighted him. “It’s amazing, Florida,” he would say, “it’s perfectly amazing that you should have been willing to undertake the job of importing into America that poor fellow with his whole stock of helplessness, dreamery, and unpracticality. What _were_ you about?” “Why, I’ve often told you, Henry. I thought he oughtn’t to continue a priest.” “Yes, yes; I know.” Then he would remain lost in thought, softly whistling to himself. On one of these occasions he asked, “Do you think he was really very much troubled by his false position?” “I can’t tell, now. He seemed to be so.” “That story he told you of his childhood and of how he became a priest; didn’t it strike you at the time like rather a made-up, melodramatic history?” “No, no! How can you say such things, Henry? It was too simple not to be true.” “Well, well. Perhaps so. But he baffles me. He always did, for that matter.” Then came another pause, while Ferris lay back upon the gondola cushions, getting the level of the Lido just under his hat-brim. “Do you think he was very much of a skeptic, after all, Florida?” Mrs. Ferris turned her eyes reproachfully upon her husband. “Why, Henry, how strange you are! You said yourself, once, that you used to wonder if he were not a skeptic.” “Yes; I know. But for a man who had lived in doubt so many years, he certainly slipped back into the bosom of mother church pretty suddenly. Don’t you think he was a person of rather light feelings?” “I can’t talk with you, my dear, if you go on in that way.”