“Oh, no!” she answered. He wondered if she had been vaguely hoping that he might go directly on with her to Venice. They were together all day, now, and the long talks went on from early morning, when they met before breakfast on deck, until late at night, when they parted there, with blushed and laughed good-nights. Sometimes the trust she put upon his unspoken promises was terrible; it seemed to condemn his reticence as fantastic and hazardous. With her, at least, it was clear that this love was the first; her living and loving were one. He longed to testify the devotion which he felt, to leave it unmistakable and safe past accident; he thought of making his will, in which he should give her everything, and declare her supremely dear; he could only rid himself of this by drawing up the paper in writing, and then he easily tore it in pieces. They drew nearer together, not only in their talk about each other, but in what they said of different people in their relation to themselves. But Staniford's pleasure in the metaphysics of reciprocal appreciation, his wonder at the quickness with which she divined characters he painfully analyzed, was not greater than his joy in the pretty hitch of the shoulder with which she tucked her handkerchief into the back pocket of her sack, or the picturesqueness with, which she sat facing him, and leant upon the rail, with her elbow wrapped in her shawl, and the fringe gathered in the hand which propped her cheek. He scribbled his sketch-book full of her contours and poses, which sometimes he caught unawares, and which sometimes she sat for him to draw. One day, as they sat occupied in this, “I wonder,” he said, “if you have anything of my feeling, nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure excursion, without taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very much at home.” “Why, yes,” she said, joyously; “do you have that feeling, too?” “I wonder what it is makes us feel so,” he ventured. “Perhaps,” she returned, “the long voyage.” “I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe,” he said, reverting to the original figure. “Shall you?” “You know I don't know much about it,” she answered, in lithe evasion, for which she more than atoned with a conscious look and one of her dark blushes. Yet he chose, with a curious cruelty, to try how far she was his. “How odd it would be,” he said, “if we never should have a chance to talk up this voyage of ours when it is over!” She started, in a way that made his heart smite him. “Why, you said you--” And then she caught herself, and struggled pitifully for the self-possession she had lost. She turned her head away; his pulse bounded. “Did you think I wouldn't? I am living for that.” He took the hand that lay in her lap; she seemed to try to free it, but she had not the strength or will; she could only keep her face turned from him. XXI.