“Well, I’m sure it’s a handsome room enough in point of size,” he said, “and in this hot weather it looks cool and restful. But it seems strange to have never a strip of carpet on the floor, and scarce a picture on the walls. Lord, my dear, don’t it make your teeth chatter to think of coming down to this of a winter’s morning, when even now it strikes so cool? But isn’t there some Tintoret now, my dear, that you could fancy, or if not that, half a dozen big photographs of the canal and the bridge you liked so much to hang on the walls? And as for the floor, to be sure, it’s a big job to cover it, but a proper carpet for that end of it where you’ve got your chairs and table, looking out over the canal, you shall have, if I have to telegraph to town for one, instead of those few rugs, or mats I should call them. Fancy advertising this as a house to be let furnished! I call it misrepresentation.”
“Oh, Dad, you are the kindest man that ever was,” she said. “But indeed I want neither pictures nor a carpet, though it is darling of you to offer me them. I like it empty: it’s the—the right style with these rooms. You found your dining room rather emptier than you liked, you know, but in a day or two you will get more than used to it, you will see how suitable it is. And I love this great empty room. Now we’ll just go into the other rooms, and then we must get back for lunch. Claude seems to be out: I expect we shall find him at the Dandoli.”
Lunch, as they found when they got back, had been laid, as Dora hoped, in the garden, in the centre of a gravelled space sheltered from the sun by the mellow brick wall and a clump of overarching delicate-fingered acacia trees, and made cool to the ear by the plash of the fountain into its marble basin. Down the sides and at the corners of this space were tubs of orange trees, and the heaviness of their drowsy fragrance mingling with the large dilution of this tide of warm sea-scented air was translated into something exquisitely light and vigorous. Claude had already arrived and was waiting with his mother for them, who was in excellent spirits.
“Why, dearest Dora,” she said, “here we are, and ready I’m sure for lunch, to speak for myself, though it’s not gone half-past twelve yet, and in England we shouldn’t be sitting down for another hour. And Claude’s been telling me that in England now it’s not gone half-past eleven, and here we are wanting our lunch at such an hour as that. Eh, what’s that? What did he say to me? ‘Pronto,’ it sounded like.”
Guiseppe, the smiling Italian butler, had approached Mr. Osborne, and said exactly that.
“Yes, pronto,” said Dora, “it means ‘ready.’”
Mrs. Osborne beamed back at Guiseppe.
“And I’m pronto, too,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
“Mrs. O. will be having the whole Italian language by heart before the week’s out,” said her husband. “And such a morning as I’ve had with Dora, mother. Bridges and canals and steamers and churches. Ah, and you’d never guess, so I’ll tell you without teasing you! They are rebuilding the fish market with arcades of iron pillars, very handsome, and who do you think supplies them? Osborne, Sheffield, and no other, my dear, and it’s Per’s No. 2, light arcade, same as is in the showroom, or I’m the more mistaken.”