It was bare, save for the bed, table and chair and directly above the café, but clean and cool. Cynthia nodded, did not ask the price and letting her suitcase slide to the floor, ordered water with which to wash. That was easy, one always asked for water. Supper also should be simple, since a traveler was expected to desire food. Cynthia thought of her first night in Paris and felt a little proud of how much more confident she had become since then. What would Chick think of this adventure of hers, she wondered and was glad he needn’t know about it for weeks yet. He’d be sure to scold her for taking such a risk.
It proved however to be no risk at all. At supper, a simple meal of spaghetti, a salad and grapes, she was examined shyly by several children, hopefully by several dogs, curiously by the adults of the family. But the spaghetti was delicious and Cynthia was hungry. After dinner she was far too sleepy to do more than take a short walk down the quiet dusty road. Back in her room she wedged a chair under the latch of the lockless door and fell asleep almost before she could think again what an adventure this was.
The express from the north, to which Cynthia transferred a half hour beyond the little village, arrived in Venice about nine o’clock. It looked, she thought as she waited in the train corridor, just a little disappointing, only a long, tunnel-like train shed. No canals, no gondolas, no palaces in sight.
The burly Italian in front of her swung off with his bags, Cynthia prepared to follow, and stopped stock still, midway of the top step.
“Chick!”
“Cynthia,” came the excited reply, “Where on earth? ...”
“I ... I thought you were in New York, Chick!” And stood gaping with open mouth until a large bag prodded her, not too gently, in the middle of her back. Then she swung down the steps and dropped suitcase and paint box to fling herself into the arms of the surprised young man. Almost, it seemed, as surprised as she was.
“I thought you were due last night, on the rapide from Genoa,” exclaimed the disgusted Chick. “You wrote that to Nancy you know. And I’ve been meeting trains almost all night. ... It was only by luck I stopped here. I was meeting the express from Genoa on track six ten minutes ago.”
He signaled a porter. “This your stuff? All of it?” A hand beneath her elbow, impersonally, kindly, almost as though he were the favorite nephew of a maiden aunt, all concern for her baggage, that she pass the dogana, the local custom house, that she give her ticket to the proper uniformed official. They came out of the stone doorway onto a half dozen steep stone steps. Before them shimmered the canal. So the popular report was true and Venice did have them?