VI
The long June day, Lawrence sat with the yellow cablegram before his eyes. The message had come, indeed, and the way had been cleared. Eleven—the train for Paris! passed; then, two, and now it was dusk again.
Had she meant those words for him? So carelessly flung back. That he would prove.
* * * * *
"The signorina awaits you." The man pointed to the garden, and turned back with his smoking lamp up the broad staircase that clung to one side of the court. Across the strip of garden lay a bar of moonlight on the grass.
She was standing over the open well-head at the farther end where the grass grew in rank tufts. The gloomy wall of the palace cast a shadow that reached to the well. Just as he entered, a church-clock across the rio struck the hour on a cracked bell.
"My friend has gone in—she is afraid of the night air," Miss Barton explained. "Perhaps she is afraid of ghosts," she added, as the young man stood silent by her side. "An old doge killed his wife and her children here, some centuries ago. They say the woman walks. Are you afraid?"
"Of only one ghost——"
"Not yet a ghost!" Indeed, her warm, breathing self threw a spirit of life into the moonlight and gainsaid his idle words.
"I have come for you," he said, a little peremptorily. "To do it I have lost my engagement with life."