"Oh, Peter!"
"We can't keep Mrs. Merrithew on forever, you know," he suggested, "and we've such a lot to do—there's Greece and Egypt and the Holy Land——"
"But can we—be married in Venice, I mean?"
"That," said Peter, "is what I'm waiting your permission to find out."
He spent the greater part of the afternoon at that business without, however, getting satisfaction. "Marriage in Italy," the consul told him, "is a sort of world-without-end affair. Even if you cable for the necessary papers it will be a matter of a month or six weeks before the ceremony could be accomplished. You'll do better to go to Switzerland with the young lady."
For the present he went back to her with a list of the required certificates, and another item which he brought out later as a corrective for the disappointment for the first.
"My birth and baptismal certificates? I haven't any," said Miss Dassonville, "and I don't believe you have either; and I don't want to go to Switzerland."
"No," said Peter, "even that takes three weeks."
"Why can't he marry us himself—the consul, I mean? I thought wherever the flag went up was territory of the United States."
"If you will come along with me in the morning we can ask him," Peter suggested, and on the way there he loosed for her benefit the second item of his yesterday's discovery. They slid past the façade of a certain palace and she kissed the tip of her finger to it lightly. "It's as if we had a secret between us," she explained, "the secret of the garden. Besides, I shall always love it because it was there I first suspected that you—cared. When did you begin to care, Peter?"