As the boats passed one another, Vittorio said a few words in dialect, which were quite unintelligible to the foreigners. Yet May felt sure that Nanni was being sent to the house they had just left.
"Do you and Nanni know the singer?" she asked, as they came out into the full moonlight, above the Rialto bridge.
"Si, Signorina," the gondolier replied, with prompt exactitude; "her sister's brother-in-law was the nephew of our grandmother's niece by marriage."
"Oh!" May gasped, rendered, for once, inarticulate, by this surprising exhibition of genealogic lore.
They were late in coming in that evening, and, as the girls opened their chamber door, the perfume of the roses wafted to them conveyed a delicate hint of unmerited neglect.
"Poor things!" said Pauline; "it was a shame to leave them to themselves all day long, doing nobody any good!"
"I know it," May admitted; "it was a shame; but I didn't want to wear them, in all this heat, and I couldn't very well sit and tend them, all day! I know what we will do," she added, with quick decision; "we will take them round to the poor singer in the morning. Perhaps they may give her pleasure."
"I wonder how Mr. Kenwick would like that," queried Pauline, who, in spite of an inborn loyalty to the absent, was not ill-pleased with the suggestion.
"I don't believe he would mind," said May, as she plunged the beautiful things up to their necks in the water-pitcher; "he has probably forgotten, by this time, that he ever sent them."
And Kenwick, stretched upon the deck of the Urania in the moonlight, after the others had gone below, was, at that very moment, murmuring softly to himself: