Then John took her down to her gondola. In the archway, before they stepped on to the fondamenta, he took her arm and held her near him.
"You're sure it's too late?" he said hoarsely, below his breath. "You're sure that there is nothing I could do to make things different--to make them possible?"
She clung to him quietly. In the darkness, her eyes searched impenetrable depths; stared to the furthest horizons of chance, yet saw nothing beyond the track of many another woman's life before her.
"It is too late," she whispered--"Oh, I should never have come! I should never have seen these two wonderful old people of yours. Now I know all that the City of Beautiful Nonsense meant. You very nearly made them real to me that day in Fetter Lane; but now I know them. Oh, I don't wonder that you love them! I don't wonder that you would come every year--year after year to see them! If only my mother and father were like that, how different all of it would be then."
"You haven't the courage to break away from it all?" asked John quietly--"to make these old people of mine--to make them yours. If I couldn't support you over in London, you could live with them here, and I would do as much of my work here as possible."
Jill looked steadily into his eyes.
"Do you think I should be happy?" she asked. "Would you be happy if, to marry me, you had to give up them? Wouldn't their faces haunt you in the most perfect moments of your happiness? Wouldn't his eyes follow you in everything you did? Wouldn't those poor withered hands of hers be always pulling feebly at your heart? And if you thought that they were poor----?"
"They are," said John. He thought of the Treasure Shop; of that pathetic figure, hiding in the shadows of it, who would not sell his goods, because he loved them too well.
"Could you leave them to poverty then?" said Jill.
"So it's too late?" he repeated.