"What are you thinking of?"
"This city, for one thing. I've been, reading that book you lent me. Hasn't there been confusion enough, though, up and down these canals, and in and out of those palaces! and the rest of the world is pretty much in the same way. Only in America it ain't quite so bad. I suppose because we haven't had time enough."
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WINE-SHOP.
It was past twelve by the clock tower when the two left the gondola and entered the Place of St. Mark. The old church with its cupolas, the open Place, the pillars with St. Theodore and the dragon, the palace of the Doges with its open stone work, showed like a scene out of another world; so unearthly beautiful, so weird and so stately. There had been that day some festival or public occasion which had called the multitude together, and lingerers were still to be seen here and there, and the windows of cafés and trattorie were lighted, and the buzz of voices came from them. Dolly and Rupert crossed the square, however, without more than a moment's lingering, and plunged presently into what seemed to her a labyrinth of confused ways. Such ways! an alley in New York would be broad in comparison; two women in hoops would have been obliged to use some skill to pass each other; they threaded the old city in the strangest manner. Rupert went steadily and without hesitation, Dolly wondered how he could, through one into another, up and down, over bridge after bridge, clearly knowing his way; yet it was a nervous walk to her, for more than one reason. Sometimes the whole line of one of these narrow streets, if they could be called so, would be perfectly dark; the moonlight not getting into it, and only glittering on a palace cornice or a street corner in view; others, lying right for the moonbeams, were flooded with them from one turning to another. Most of the shops were closed; but the sellers of fruit had not shut up their windows yet, and now and then a cook-shop made a most peculiar picture, with its blazing fire at the back, and its dishes of cooked and uncooked viands temptingly displayed at the street front. Steadily and swiftly Rupert and Dolly passed on; saw these things without stopping to look at them, but yet saw them so that in all after-life those peculiar effects of light and shade, fireshine and moonlight, Italian fruits and vegetables, and fish coloured by the one or the other illumination, were never lost from memory. Here there would be a red Vulcanic glow in the interior of a shop where the furnace fire was flaming up about the pots and pans of cookery; and at the street front, at the window, the moonlight glinting white from the edge of a dish, or glancing from a pane of glass; and then again reflected from the still waters of a canal. The two saw these things, and never forgot; but Dolly was silent and Rupert did not know what to say. Yet he thought he felt her arm tremble sometimes, and would have given a great deal to be able to speak to the purpose. Perhaps Dolly at length found the need of distraction to her thoughts, for she it was that first said anything.
"I hope mother will not wake up!"
"Why?"
"She would not understand my being away."
"Then she does not know?"