"No--it’s the hope of her life to see me happy--to see me married. They think I make more money than I do, because I won’t take anything from them. They believe I’m in a position to marry and, in nearly every letter she writes, she makes some quaint sort of allusion to it. I believe already her mind is set on you. She’s so awfully cute. She reads every single word between the lines, and sometimes sees more what has been in my mind when I wrote to her, than I even did myself." Jill’s interest wakened. Suddenly this old lady, far away in Venice, began to live for her. "What is she like?" she asked--"Describe her. You’ve never told me what she’s like." Diffidently, John began. At first it seemed wasting their last moments together to be talking of someone else; but, word by word, he became more interested, more absorbed. It was entering Jill into his life, making her a greater part of it than she would have been had she gone away knowing nothing more of him than these rooms in Fetter Lane. At last the little old white-haired lady, with those pathetically powerless hands of hers, was there, alive, in the room with them. Jill looked up at him with such eyes as concealed their tears. "She means a lot to you," she said gently. "Yes--she means a great deal." "And yet, do you know, from your description of her, I seemed more to gather how much you meant to her. She lives in you." "I know she does." "And your father? Thomas Grey--of the port of Venice?" She tried to smile at the remembrance which that brought. "Yes--he lives in me, too. They both of them do. He, for the work I shall do, carrying on where he left off; she, for the woman I shall love and the children I know she prays I may have before she dies. That is the essence of true fatherhood and true motherhood. They are perfectly content to die when they are once assured that their work and their love is going on living in their child." She thought of it all. She tried in one grasp of her mind to hold all that that meant, but could only find herself wondering if the little old white-haired lady would be disappointed in her, would disapprove of the duty she was about to fulfil, if she knew. After a long pause, she asked to be told where they lived; to be told all--everything about them; and in a mood of inspiration, John wove her a romance.