without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial gossip.
But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the summer night;
it seemed such a direct testimony.

"Fancy, fancy!" I murmured. And then, "Tell me this, please--has she
got a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare."

"A portrait? I don't know," said Miss Tita; and now there
was discomfiture in her face. "Well, good night!" she added;
and she turned into the house.

I accompanied her into the wide, dusky, stone-paved passage
which on the ground floor corresponded with our grand sala.
It opened at one end into the garden, at the other upon the canal,
and was lighted now only by the small lamp that was always
left for me to take up as I went to bed. An extinguished
candle which Miss Tita apparently had brought down with her
stood on the same table with it. "Good night, good night!"
I replied, keeping beside her as she went to get her light.
"Surely you would know, shouldn't you, if she had one?"

"If she had what?" the poor lady asked, looking at me queerly
over the flame of her candle.

"A portrait of the god. I don't know what I wouldn't give to see it."

"I don't know what she has got. She keeps her things locked up."
And Miss Tita went away, toward the staircase, with the sense
evidently that she had said too much.