He did meet it there as she came back to him for the last look from the marble balustrade by which they had descended, covering her hand, there resting, lingeringly with his own. He was awakened only to the implication of this movement by the discovery that she had deeply and exquisitely blushed. It was a further singularity in view of the conviction with which Peter had come through the night, that the mood of protectingness which the girl provoked in him should have multiplied itself in pointing out to him how many ways, if he had not made up his mind not to marry her at all, such a marriage could be made to serve its primal uses. She had turned up her cuff to trail her hand overside as they slid through the lucent water, and the pretty feminine curve of it had brought to mind what the Princess had told him of the shirt-waists she made herself. He decided that she made them very well. But she was too thin for their severity--and if he married her he would have insisted on her wearing them now and then as a tender way to prevent her suspecting that it was on their account he had thought of not marrying her. The revealed whiteness of her wrist, the intimacy of her relaxed posture, for though her mind had played into his as freely as a child in a meadow, she had been always, as regards her person, a little prim with him, had lent to their errand of house visiting a personal note in which it was absurdly apt for them to have run across Captain Dunham of the _Merrythought_ at the door of the Consulate. Mr. Weatheral had some papers which Lessing had sent him to acknowledge there, and it was a piece of the morning's performance, when he had come back from that business, to find that the meeting had taken on--from some mutual discovery of the captain's and Mrs. Merrithew's of a cousin's wife's sister who had married one of the Applegates who was a Dunham on the mother's side--quite the aspect of a family party. It came in the end to the four of them going off at Peter's invitation to have lunch together in a cafe overhanging the _calle_. He told himself afterward that he would not have done it if he had recalled in time the friendly seaman's romantic appreciation of the situation between himself and Miss Dassonville. He saw himself so intrigued by it that, by the time lunch was over, he felt himself in a position which to his own sensitiveness, demanded that he must immediately leave Venice or propose to Miss Dassonville. To see the way he was going and to go on in it, had for him the fascination of the abyss. He caught himself in the act even of trying to fix Miss Dassonville's eye to include her by complicity in the beguilement of the captain, a business which she seemed to have undertaken on her own account on quite other grounds. He perceived with a kind of pride for her that she had the ways of elderly sea-going gentlemen by heart. It was something even if she had failed to charm Peter, that she shouldn't