She followed me down the stairs. My senses were reeling with the maddening fragrance of her presence. We walked through the Piazzetta and Piazza di San Marco, through the narrow streets and across the bridges till we arrived at the garden beside the canal. Arbors were illumined with faery-lamps. It seemed a scene staged for a theatre rather than a living actuality. Gondolas stole past the garden through the dusk. Mysterious people alighted. Guitars tinkled. In tall mediaeval houses rising opposite, lamps flashed and women looked down. As specters in a dream, people leant above the bridge, gazed into the water, and vanished. Venice walked with slippered feet and finger to lips that night. The silence shivered; a clear peal of laughter rippled on the air. We turned. The girl with the young sea-god was entering the garden. They seated themselves at a table near us--so near that we could watch their expressions and overhear much that was said. It seemed they were fated to goad us on and make us ambitious of attaining their happiness. Fiesole stretched out her hands. I smiled and took them, holding them palms up. “They’re like petals of pink roses,” I said. Her face was laughing. “Do you think I’m pretty?” “I’ve always thought that, and you know it--ever since you wouldn’t kiss me in Sneard’s garden.” “It was you who wouldn’t ask to be kissed,” she pouted. “What you could have, you didn’t value. It’s the same now.” Her hands quivered; her lips became piteous. All the wild commotion of her heart seemed to travel through them to myself. My throat became suddenly parched. “You know how it is, Fiesole. It isn’t that I haven’t affection for you; but to do that kind of thing, if I don’t intend to make you more to me, wouldn’t be fair.” “But if I want it? What if I were to tell you, Dante, that you’re the only man I’ve ever cared for? What if I were to tell you that you’ve always been first in my heart, ever since we first met?” I looked away from her to the street of water. I had nothing with which to answer. She tried to drag her hands from me, but still I held them. “Dante,” she whispered, “look at me.” Her voice grew fainter. “I’m not speaking of marriage. Two people can be kind to one another without that.” “And have I been unkind?” She turned from my question. “You can never marry her,” she said. “You know that.” A long silence elapsed, which was broken by voices of the girl and her lover at the neighboring table. Fiesole spoke again. “They’re not married. They never will be married. And yet they can share with one another one little corner of their lives.” “For me it’s all or nothing,” I said. “If it wasn’t all, I should be forever thinking of the end. That’s how I’m made--it’s my training. If I did anything to you, Fiesole, that wounded you ever so little, I should hate myself. Wherever you were, I should be thinking of you--wanting to leave everything to come to you. I can’t forget. My conscience would give me no rest.”