Florida, who had regarded her mother’s efforts to summon Ferris to them with passive coldness, turned a look of agony upon her. But in a moment she bade the gondolier stop at the consulate, and dropping her veil over her face, fell back in the shadow of the tenda-curtains.
Mrs. Vervain sentimentalized their departure a little, but her daughter made no comment on the scene they were leaving.
The gondolier rang at Ferris’s door and returned with the answer that he was not at home.
Mrs. Vervain gave way to despair. “Oh dear, oh dear! This is too bad! What shall we do?”
“We’ll lose the train, mother, if we loiter in this way,” said Florida.
“Well, wait. I must leave a message at least.” “How could you be away,” she wrote on her card, “when we called to say good-by? We’ve changed our plans and we’re going to-day. I shall write you a nice scolding letter from Verona—we’re going over the Brenner—for your behavior last night. Who will keep you straight when I’m gone? You’ve been very, very kind. Florida joins me in a thousand thanks, regrets, and good-byes.”
“There, I haven’t said anything, after all,” she fretted, with tears in her eyes.
The gondolier carried the card again to the door, where Ferris’s servant let down a basket by a string and fished it up.
“If Don Ippolito shouldn’t be in,” said Mrs. Vervain, as the boat moved on again, “I don’t know what I shall do with this money. It will be awkward beyond anything.”
The gondola slipped from the Canalazzo into the network of the smaller canals, where the dense shadows were as old as the palaces that cast them and stopped at the landing of a narrow quay. The gondolier dismounted and rang at Don Ippolito’s door. There was no response; he rang again and again. At last from a window of the uppermost story the head of the priest himself peered out. The gondolier touched his hat and said, “It is the ladies who ask for you, Don Ippolito.”