The plants and shrubs looked so strange in the dark, and there were all sorts of queer sounds – she could n't tell what they were – like the noises of animals. She stood close to me, looking about her with an air of greater security but without any demonstration of interest in me as an individual. Then I felt how little nocturnal prowlings could have been her habit, and I was also reminded – I had been afflicted by the same in talking with her before I took possession – that it was impossible to allow too much for her simplicity.

»You speak as if you were lost in the backwoods,« I cheeringly laughed. »How you manage to keep out of this charming place when you've only three steps to take to get into it is more than I've yet been able to discover. You hide away amazingly so long as I'm on the premises, I know; but I had a hope you peeped out a little at other times. You and your poor aunt are worse off than Carmelite nuns in their cells. Should you mind telling me how you exist without air, without exercise, without any sort of human contact? I don't see how you carry on the common business of life.«

She looked at me as if I had spoken a strange tongue, and her answer was so little of one that I felt it make for irritation. »We go to bed very early – earlier than you'd believe.« I was on the point of saying that this only deepened the mystery, but she gave me some relief by adding: »Before you came we were n't so private. But I've never been out at night.«

»Never in these fragrant alleys, blooming here under your nose?«

»Ah,« said Miss Tina, »they were never nice till now!« There was a finer sense in this and a flattering comparison, so that it seemed to me I had gained some advantage. As I might follow that further by establishing a good grievance I asked her why, since she thought my garden nice, she had never thanked me in any way for the flowers I had been sending up in such quantities for the previous three weeks. I had not been discouraged – there had been, as she would have observed, a daily armful; but I had been brought up in the common forms and a word of recognition now and then would have touched me in the right place.

»Why I did n't know they were for me!«

»They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference?«

Miss Tina reflected as if she might be thinking of a reason for that, but she failed to produce one. Instead of this she asked abruptly: »Why in the world do you want so much to know us?«

»I ought after all to make a difference,« I replied. »That question 's your aunt's; it is n't yours. You would n't ask it if you had n't been put up to it.«

»She did n't tell me to ask you,« Miss Tina replied without confusion. She was indeed the oddest mixture of shyness and straightness.

»Well, she has often wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has put the idea into your head that I'm insufferably pushing. Upon my word I think I've been very discreet. And how completely your aunt must have lost every tradition of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea that respectable intelligent people, living as we do under the same roof, should occasionally exchange a remark! What could be more natural? We're of the same country and have at least some of the same tastes, since, like you, I'm intensely fond of Venice.«

My friend seemed incapable of grasping more than one clause in any proposition, and she now spoke quickly, eagerly, as if she were answering my whole speech. »I'm not in the least fond of Venice. I should like to go far away!«

»Has she always kept you back so?« I went on, to show her I could be as irrelevant as herself.

»She told me to come out to-night; she has told me very often,« said Miss Tina. »It is I who would n't come. I don't like to leave her.«

»Is she too weak, is she really failing?« I demanded, with more emotion, I think, than I meant to betray. I measured this by the way her eyes rested on me in the darkness. It embarrassed me a little, and to turn the matter off I continued genially: »Do let us sit down together comfortably somewhere – while you tell me all about her.«

Miss Tina made no resistance to this. We found a bench less secluded, less confidential, as it were, than the one in the arbour; and we were still sitting there when I heard midnight ring out from those clear bells of Venice which vibrate with a solemnity of their own over the lagoon and hold the air so much more than the chimes of other places. We were together more than an hour, and our interview gave, as it struck me, a great lift to my undertaking. Miss Tina accepted the situation without a protest; she had avoided me for three months, yet now she treated me almost as if these three months had made me an old friend. If I had chosen I might have gathered from this that though she had avoided me she had given a good deal of consideration to doing so. She paid no attention to the flight of time – never worried at my keeping her so long away from her aunt.