VII.


Ferris stood cleaning his palette, after Don Ippolito was gone,
scraping the colors together with his knife and neatly buttering them
on the palette's edge, while he wondered what the priest meant by
pumping him in that way. Nothing, he supposed, and yet it was odd. Of
course she had a bad temper....

He put on his hat and coat and strolled vaguely forth, and in an hour
or two came by a roundabout course to the gondola station nearest his
own house. There he stopped, and after an absent contemplation of the
boats, from which the gondoliers were clamoring for his custom, he
stepped into one and ordered the man to row him to a gate on a small
canal opposite. The gate opened, at his ringing, into the garden of the
Vervains.

Florida was sitting alone on a bench near the fountain. It was no
longer a ruined fountain; the broken-nosed naiad held a pipe above her
head, and from this rose a willowy spray high enough to catch some
colors of the sunset then striking into the garden, and fell again in a
mist around her, making her almost modest.

"What does this mean?" asked Ferris, carelessly taking the young girl's
hand. "I thought this lady's occupation was gone."

"Don Ippolito repaired the fountain for the landlord, and he agreed to
pay for filling the tank that feeds it," said Florida. "He seems to