"Yes, I know."
"And mamma—she was from the South but he married her in Paris. They called me the polyglot bébé at the convent." She confided this as lazily interesting, like the clouds, or the locusts, or the faint chatter of the Adriatic waves around the breakwater of the Lido.
"Nevertheless you are Venice, you are Italy, you are Pagan"—the young man iterated almost solemnly, as if a Puritan ancestry demanded this reproach. Then he rolled his body half over and straightened himself to look at her rigidly. "How did you come about? How could Council Bluffs make it?" His voice showed amusement at its own intensity. She shook her head.
"I don't know," she said, softly.
"It doesn't seem real. They tell me so, just as they say that the marble over there comes from that blue mountain. But why bother about it? I am here——"
They drifted on in personal chat until the sunlight came in parallel lines between the leaves.
"Where is Caspar?" he said at last, reluctantly. "It's too late to get back to the Britannia for dinner." He jumped up as if conscious of a fault.
"Oh, we'll dine here. Caspar has found some one at the stablimento and has gone off. Ask Bastian—there must be some place where we can get enough to eat."
Lawrence hesitated as if not quite sure of the outcome of such unpremeditation. But Miss Barton questioned the gondolier. "The Buon Pesche—that will be lovely; Bastian will paddle over and order the supper. We can walk around."
So Lawrence, as if yielding against his judgment, knelt down and picked up her wrap. "Bastian will take care of the rest," she said, gleefully, walking on ahead through the long grass of the abandoned fort. "Be a bit of detritus, too, and enjoy the few half-hours," she added, coaxingly, over her shoulder.