He quitted the painter’s and walked swiftly homeward with a triumphant buoyancy of step. A subtle content diffused itself over his face, and a joyful light burnt in his deep eyes. He sat down before the piano and organ as he had arranged them, and began to strike their keys in unison; this seemed to him for the first time childish. Then he played some lively bars on the piano alone; they sounded too light and trivial, and he turned to the other instrument. As the plaint of the reeds arose, it filled his sense like a solemn organ-music, and transfigured the place; the notes swelled to the ample vault of a church, and at the high altar he was celebrating the mass in his sacerdotal robes. He suddenly caught his fingers away from the keys; his breast heaved, he hid his face in his hands. VII. Ferris stood cleaning his palette, after Don Ippolito was gone, scraping the colors together with his knife and neatly buttering them on the palette’s edge, while he wondered what the priest meant by pumping him in that way. Nothing, he supposed, and yet it was odd. Of course she had a bad temper.... He put on his hat and coat and strolled vaguely forth, and in an hour or two came by a roundabout course to the gondola station nearest his own house. There he stopped, and after an absent contemplation of the boats, from which the gondoliers were clamoring for his custom, he stepped into one and ordered the man to row him to a gate on a small canal opposite. The gate opened, at his ringing, into the garden of the Vervains. Florida was sitting alone on a bench near the fountain. It was no longer a ruined fountain; the broken-nosed naiad held a pipe above her head, and from this rose a willowy spray high enough to catch some colors of the sunset then striking into the garden, and fell again in a mist around her, making her almost modest. “What does this mean?” asked Ferris, carelessly taking the young girl’s hand. “I thought this lady’s occupation was gone.” “Don Ippolito repaired the fountain for the landlord, and he agreed to pay for filling the tank that feeds it,” said Florida. “He seems to think it a hard bargain, for he only lets it play about half an hour a day. But he says it’s very ingeniously mended. He didn’t believe it could be done. It _is_ pretty. “It is, indeed,” said the painter, with a singular desire, going through him like a pang, likewise to do something for Miss Vervain. “Did you go to Don Ippolito’s house the other day, to see his traps?” “Yes; we were very much interested. I was sorry that I knew so little about inventions. Do you think there are many practical ideas amongst his things? I hope there are--he seemed so proud and pleased to show them. Shouldn’t you think he had some real inventive talent?”