“Well, that's right! It all worked together for good, as you say. Now you come!” “What do you say, my dear?” asked Staniford, on whom the poetic fitness of the captain's proposal had wrought. Women are never blinded by romance, however much they like it in the abstract. “It's coming winter. Do you think you wouldn't be seasick?” returned the bride of an hour, with the practical wisdom of a matron. Staniford laughed. “She's right, captain. I'm no sailor. I'll get home by the all-rail route as far as I can.” Captain Jenness threw back his head, and laughed too. “Good! That's about it.” And he released their hands, so as to place one hairy paw on a shoulder of each. “You'll get along together, I guess.” “But we're just as much obliged to you as if we went, Captain Jenness. And tell all the crew that I'm homesick for the Aroostook, and thank all for being so kind to me; and I thank _you_, Captain Jenness!” Lydia looked at her husband, and then startled the captain with a kiss. He blushed all over, but carried it off as boldly as he could. “Well, well,” he said, “that's right! If you change your minds before the Aroostook sails, you let me know.” This affair made a great deal of talk in Venice, where the common stock of leisure is so great that each person may without self-reproach devote a much larger share of attention to the interests of the others than could be given elsewhere. The decorous fictions in which Mrs. Erwin draped the singular facts of the acquaintance and courtship of Lydia and Staniford were what unfailingly astonished and amused him, and he abetted them without scruple. He found her worldliness as innocent as the unworldliness of Lydia, and he gave Mrs. Erwin his hearty sympathy when she ingenuously owned that the effort to throw dust in the eyes of her European acquaintance was simply killing her. He found endless refreshment in the contemplation of her attitude towards her burdensome little world, and in her reasons for enslaving herself to it. He was very good friends with both of the Erwins. When he could spare the time from Lydia, he went about with her uncle in his boat, and respected his skill in rowing it without falling overboard. He could not see why any one should be so much interested in the American character and dialect as Mr. Erwin was; but he did not object, and he reflected that after all they were not what their admirer supposed them.