"It is pie, there's no doubt about it, but we must pretend to be awfully surprised when the captain brings it out. But Peter, don't you like it?" "Pie, my dear?" "No, but like having everything so homey and--and--so genuine at our wedding?" "I hope," said Peter, "it's genuine pie, but I see what you mean, my dear." "It's an omen, almost, that we'll always have the good, comfortable, common things to fall back upon, if our marriage should not prove quite all we've dreamed it. It's been so perfect up to now; it must drop down out of the clouds some time." It seemed rather to have taken a sweep upward when, with sails swelling over them and the beat of the sea under the bows, they stood up to be married, and to exhibit capacities of sustaining itself at a level from which not the very soggy and sallow complexioned pie with the cook grinning behind it, could dislodge the two most concerned in it. It wore through the day to a contained and quiet gayety at a dinner which took place in the _ristoranta_ over the water where they had once lunched with the captain, and lasted until Peter had brought his wife home again to the refurnished palace. It had gone, as he told himself, remarkably well, with every intimation, as he had time to tell himself in his last hours in the garden with his cigar, of going much better, of becoming as the place gave him occasion to indulge the figure, an enclosed and fragrant garden, in which if no flaming angel of desire kept the gate for him, he had at least the promise of refreshment. That old passion for Eunice Goodward, all his feelings for all the women he had known, served to show him what Savilla had meant when she said he "gave her so much room"--the renewed sense of the spaciousness of life. It would be there for his wife at the completest, and if she had, as it seemed, turned him out of the Wonderful House in order to live in it herself, he at least kept the gates. And was not this the proper business for a man? He recalled what the Princess had said to him so long ago when he had first begun to think of himself as a bachelor. "It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass." Well, he had dreamed and he had slain some dragons. Later there would be children playing in the House, daughters perhaps ... Lovely Ladies. The world would be a better place for them to walk about in because of all that he had lost and been. When he went into the garden he had half expected that the Princess would speak to him; the place was full of hints of her, faint and persuasive as the scent of the flowers in the dark, little riffles of his pulse, flushed surfaces, the tingling of his palms which announced her, but she did not speak. He said to himself that he was now a well man and had seen the last of her. Never before had he felt so very well.