"Well--I _had_ kept him, at any rate. That was the feeling that survived. He was my boy, my son, my very own--till some other woman took him. Meanwhile the old life must go on as it could. I gave up the struggle. If at that point he was inaccessible, at others he was close to me. He has always been a perfect son. Our tastes grew together--we enjoyed the same books, the same pictures, the same people. All I had to do was to look at him in profile to see the side of him that was really mine. At first I kept thinking of the dreadful other side--but gradually the impression faded, and I kept my mind turned from it, as one does from a deformity in a face one loves. I thought I had made my last compromise with life--had hit on a _modus vivendi_ that would last my time. "And then he met you. I had always been prepared for his marrying, but not a girl like you. I thought he would choose a sweet thing who would never pry into his closets--he hated women with ideas! But as soon as I saw you I knew the struggle would have to begin again. He is so much stronger than his father--he is full of the most monstrous convictions. And he has the courage of them, too--you saw last year that his love for you never made him waver. He believes in his work; he adores it--it is a kind of hideous idol to which he would make human sacrifices! He loves you still--I've been honest with you--but his love wouldn't change him. It is you who would have to change--to die gradually, as I have died, till there is only one live point left in me. Ah, if one died completely--that's simple enough! But something persists--remember that--a single point, an aching nerve of truth. Now and then you may drug it--but a touch wakes it again, as your face has waked it in me. There's always enough of one's old self left to suffer with...." She stood up and faced the girl abruptly. "What shall I tell Alan?" she said. Miss Fenno sat motionless, her eyes on the ground. Twilight was falling on the gallery--a twilight which seemed to emanate not so much from the glass dome overhead as from the crepuscular depths into which the faces of the pictures were receding. The custodian's step sounded warningly down the corridor. When the girl looked up she was alone. A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT I THIS is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow. I "Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East Indiaman, the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in golden air.