Ferris turned away in cold disgust, like one who has witnessed a
cruelty done to some helpless thing. Don Ippolito's speech was not
fortunate at the best, but it might have come from a foreigner's
misapprehension, and at the worst it was good-natured and well-meant.
"The girl is a perfect brute, as I thought in the beginning," the
painter said to himself. "How could I have ever thought differently? I
shall have to tell Don Ippolito that I'm ashamed of her, and disclaim
all responsibility. Pah! I wish I was out of this."

The pleasure of the day was dead. It could not rally from that stroke.
They went on to Stra, as they had planned, but the glory of the Villa
Pisani was eclipsed for Don Ippolito. He plainly did not know what to
do. He did not address Florida again, whose savagery he would not
probably have known how to resent if he had wished to resent it. Mrs.
Vervain prattled away to him with unrelenting kindness; Ferris kept
near him, and with affectionate zeal tried to make him talk of the
villa, but neither the frescoes, nor the orangeries, nor the green-
houses, nor the stables, nor the gardens could rouse him from the
listless daze in which he moved, though Ferris found them all as
wonderful as he had said. Amidst this heavy embarrassment no one seemed
at ease but the author of it. She did not, to be sure, speak to Don
Ippolito, but she followed her mother as usual with her assiduous
cares, and she appeared tranquilly unconscious of the sarcastic
civility with which Ferris rendered her any service. It was late in the
afternoon when they got back to their boat and began to descend the
canal towards Venice, and long before they reached Fusina the day had
passed. A sunset of melancholy red, streaked with level lines of murky
cloud, stretched across the flats behind them, and faintly tinged with
its reflected light the eastern horizon which the towers and domes of
Venice had not yet begun to break. The twilight came, and then through