Quivering with emotion, Balzatore sprang up, and in another second would have bounded to her side.
“Sit down, sir; where are you going?” sternly interposed Bertram. Placed with his back towards the ladies, he was very likely unaware of their existence.
Balzatore sat down, but he gave his head a toss that clearly signified his opinion of the restraint put upon him: senselessly conventional, monstrously annoying. And he gave Lucilla Dor a look. Disappointment spoke in it, homage, dogged—'tis a case for saying so—dogged tenacity of purpose. “Never fear,” it promised, “I'll find an opportunity yet.”
He found it, sure enough, some twenty minutes later.
II
Ruth and Lucilla had been dining at the Lido, at the new hotel there, I forget its name, the only decent hotel, in a sandy garden near the Stabilimento. They had dined in the air, of course, on the terrace, whence they could watch the sunset burn and die over Venice, and the moon come up out of the Adriatic. Balzatore had been dining with Bertram at a neighbouring table.
But now, her eyes intently lifted, as in prayer, Lucilla began to adjust her veil.
“We can't stop here nibbling figs forever,” she premised, with the drawl, whimsically plaintive, that she is apt to assume in her regretful moods. “I think it's time to return to our mosquitoes.”
So they paid their bill, and set off, through the warm night and the moonlight and the silence, down the wide avenue of plane-trees that leads from the sea to the lagoon. In the moonlight and the silence, they were themselves silent at first, walking slowly, feeling the pleasant solemnity of things. Then, all at once, Lucilla softly sighed.
“Poor Byron,” she said, as from the depths of a pious reverie.