“Oh,” cried the painter, “how you leap to conclusions! I never intimated that Don Ippolito was a spy. On the contrary, it was his difference from other priests that made me think of him for a moment. He seems to be as much cut off from the church as from the world. And yet he is a priest, with a priest’s education. What if I should have been altogether mistaken? He is either one of the openest souls in the world, as you have insisted, or he is one of the closest.”
“I should not be afraid of him in any case,” said Florida; “but I can’t believe any wrong of him.”
Ferris frowned in annoyance. “I don’t want you to; I don’t, myself. I’ve bungled the matter as I might have known I would. I was trying to put into words an undefined uneasiness of mine, a quite formless desire to have you possessed of the whole case as it had come up in my mind. I’ve made a mess of it,” said Ferris rising, with a rueful air. “Besides, I ought to have spoken to Mrs. Vervain.”
“Oh no,” cried Florida, eagerly, springing to her feet beside him. “Don’t! Little things wear upon my mother, so. I’m glad you didn’t speak to her. I don’t misunderstand you, I think; I expressed myself badly,” she added with an anxious face. “I thank you very much. What do you want me to do?”
By Ferris’s impulse they both began to move down the garden path toward the water-gate. The sunset had faded out of the fountain, but it still lit the whole heaven, in whose vast blue depths hung light whiffs of pinkish cloud, as ethereal as the draperies that floated after Miss Vervain as she walked with a splendid grace beside him, no awkwardness, now, or self-constraint in her. As she turned to Ferris, and asked in her deep tones, to which some latent feeling imparted a slight tremor, “What do you want me to do?” the sense of her willingness to be bidden by him gave him a delicious thrill. He looked at the superb creature, so proud, so helpless; so much a woman, so much a child; and he caught his breath before he answered. Her gauzes blew about his feet in the light breeze that lifted the foliage; she was a little near-sighted, and in her eagerness she drew closer to him, fixing her eyes full upon his with a bold innocence. “Good heavens! Miss Vervain,” he cried, with a sudden blush, “it isn’t a serious matter. I’m a fool to have spoken to you. Don’t do anything. Let things go on as before. It isn’t for me to instruct you.”
“I should have been very glad of your advice,” she said with a disappointed, almost wounded manner, keeping her eyes upon him. “It seems to me we are always going wrong”—
She stopped short, with a flush and then a pallor.
Ferris returned her look with one of comical dismay. This apparent readiness of Miss Vervain’s to be taken command of, daunted him, on second thoughts. “I wish you’d dismiss all my stupid talk from your mind,” he said. “I feel as if I’d been guiltily trying to set you against a man whom I like very much and have no reason not to trust, and who thinks me so much his friend that he couldn’t dream of my making any sort of trouble for him. It would break his heart, I’m afraid, if you treated him in a different way from that in which you’ve treated him till now. It’s really touching to listen to his gratitude to you and your mother. It’s only conceivable on the ground that he has never had friends before in the world. He seems like another man, or the same man come to life. And it isn’t his fault that he’s a priest. I suppose,” he added, with a sort of final throe, “that a Venetian family wouldn’t use him with the frank hospitality you’ve shown, not because they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because they would be afraid of other Venetian tongues.”
This ultimate drop of venom, helplessly distilled, did not seem to rankle in Miss Vervain’s mind. She walked now with her face turned from his, and she answered coldly, “We shall not be troubled. We don’t care for Venetian tongues.”
They were at the gate. “Good-by,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I’m going.”