said Miss Tita. "It is I who wouldn't come. I don't like
to leave her."

"Is she too weak, is she failing?" I demanded, with more emotion,
I think, than I intended to show. I judged this by the way
her eyes rested upon me in the darkness. It embarrassed me
a little, and to turn the matter off I continued genially:
"Do let us sit down together comfortably somewhere, and you
will tell me all about her."

Miss Tita made no resistance to this. We found a bench
less secluded, less confidential, as it were, than the one
in the arbor; and we were still sitting there when I heard
midnight ring out from those clear bells of Venice which
vibrate with a solemnity of their own over the lagoon and hold
the air so much more than the chimes of other places.
We were together more than an hour, and our interview gave,
as it struck me, a great lift to my undertaking.
Miss Tita accepted the situation without a protest;
she had avoided me for three months, yet now she treated me
almost as if these three months had made me an old friend.
If I had chosen I might have inferred from this that though
she had avoided me she had given a good deal of consideration
to doing so. She paid no attention to the flight of time--
never worried at my keeping her so long away from her aunt.
She talked freely, answering questions and asking them and not
even taking advantage of certain longish pauses with which they
inevitably alternated to say she thought she had better go in.
It was almost as if she were waiting for something--something I
might say to her--and intended to give me my opportunity.