"There might be things we wanted to buy in the shops," she said--"shops where you might not be allowed to come." So he could understand that it ought to be half an hour. But it must not be more. "And then--what then?" she asked. "Well, then, directly after lunch, we’d take a gondola once more and set off for Murano." "Directly after? Wouldn’t it be cruel to leave them so soon? If we only go for a month every year, wouldn’t it be cruel?" This is where a man is selfish. This is where a woman is kind. It was natural enough, but he had not thought so much of them. He consented that they should stay till tea-time was over--tea in those little, wee cups without any handles, which the little old white-haired lady could just manage to grasp in her twisted hands, and accordingly, loved so much because they did not jeer at her powerlessness as did the many things which she had once been able to hold. "You didn’t want not to come out with me--did you?" he asked when the tea-time picture had passed before his eyes. "Not--not want--but you’d get tired, perhaps, if you saw too much of me alone." "Get tired!" Three score years and ten were the utmost that a man might hope for in this life. Get tired! Well, then, tea was over at last. The light of a pearl was creeping into the sky. That was the most wonderful time of all to cross the Lagoon to Murano. "Then it was much better we stayed to tea," she whispered. Much better, since the shadows were deepening under the arches, and he could take her head in his hands and kiss her--as he kissed her then--without being seen. Oh--it was much better that they had stayed to tea. Now they had started, past the Chiesa San Giacomo into the Grand Canal, down the broad waterway, past the Ca’ d’Oro, which the Contarini built, to the narrow Rio di Felice; then out into the Sacca della Misericordia, and there, before them, the broad stretch of the silent Lagoon--a lake of opal water that never ended, but as silently became the sky, with no line of light or shade to mark the alchemy of change.