“No,” said Florida, “it was a peaceful end; but finally it was very sudden. She had not been well for many years, with that sort of decline; I used sometimes to feel troubled about her before we came to Venice; but I was very young. I never was really alarmed till that day I went to you.”
“I remember,” said Ferris contritely.
“She had fainted, and I thought we ought to see a doctor; but afterwards, because I thought that I ought not to do so without speaking to her, I did not go to the doctor; and that day we made up our minds to get home as soon as we could; and she seemed so much better, for a while; and then, everything seemed to happen at once. When we did start home, she could not go any farther than Switzerland, and in the fall we went back to Italy. We went to Sorrento, where the climate seemed to do her good. But she was growing frailer, the whole time. She died in March. I found some old friends of hers in Naples, and came home with them.”
The girl hesitated a little over the words, which she nevertheless uttered unbroken, while the tears fell quietly down her face. She seemed to have forgotten the angry words that had passed between her and Ferris, to remember him only as one who had known her mother, while she went on to relate some little facts in the history of her mother’s last days; and she rose into a higher, serener atmosphere, inaccessible to his resentment or his regret, as she spoke of her loss. The simple tale of sickness and death inexpressibly belittled his passionate woes, and made them look theatrical to him. He hung his head as they turned at her motion and walked away from the picture of Don Ippolito, and down the stairs toward the street-door; the people before the other Venetian picture had apparently yielded to their craving for lunch, and had vanished.
“I have very little to tell you of my own life,” Ferris began awkwardly. “I came home soon after you started, and I went to Providence to find you, but you had not got back.”
Florida stopped him and looked perplexedly into his face, and then moved on.
“Then I went into the army. I wrote once to you.”
“I never got your letter,” she said.
They were now in the lower hall, and near the door.
“Florida,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I’m poor and disabled; I’ve no more right than any sick beggar in the street to say it to you; but I loved you, I must always love you. I—Good-by!”