»I've looked at furnished rooms all over the place, and it seems impossible to find any with a garden attached. Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare. It's absurd if you like, for a man, but I can't live without flowers.«

»There are none to speak of down there.« She came nearer, as if, though she mistrusted me, I had drawn her by an invisible thread. I went on again, and she continued as she followed me: »We've a few, but they're very common. It costs too much to cultivate them; one has to have a man.«

»Why should n't I be the man?« I asked. »I'll work without wages; or rather I'll put in a gardener. You shall have the sweetest flowers in Venice.«

She protested against this with a small quaver of sound that might have been at the same time a gush of rapture for my free sketch. Then she gasped: »We don't know you – we don't know you.«

»You know me as much as I know you; or rather much more, because you know my name. And if you're English I'm almost a countryman.«

»We're not English,« said my companion, watching me in practical submission while I threw open the shutters of one of the divisions of the wide high window.

»You speak the language so beautifully: might I ask what you are?« Seen from above the garden was in truth shabby, yet I felt at a glance that it had great capabilities. She made no rejoinder, she was so lost in her blankness and gentleness, and I exclaimed: »You don't mean to say you're also by chance American?«

»I don't know. We used to be.«

»Used to be? Surely you have n't changed?«

»It's so many years ago. We don't seem to be anything now.«

»So many years that you've been living here? Well, I don't wonder at that; it's a grand old house. I suppose you all use the garden,« I went on, »but I assure you I should n't be in your way. I'd be very quiet and stay quite in one corner.«

»We all use it?« she repeated after me vaguely, not coming close to the window but looking at my shoes. She appeared to think me capable of throwing her out.

»I mean all your family – as many as you are.«

»There's only one other than me. She's very old. She never goes down.«

I feel again my thrill at this close identification of Juliana; in spite of which, however, I kept my head. »Only one other in all this great house!« I feigned to be not only amazed but almost scandalised. »Dear lady, you must have space then to spare!«

»To spare?« she repeated – almost as for the rich unwonted joy to her of spoken words.

»Why you surely don't live (two quiet women – I see you are quiet, at any rate) in fifty rooms!« Then with a burst of hope and cheer I put the question straight. »Could n't you for a good rent let me two or three? That would set me up!«

I had now struck the note that translated my purpose, and I need n't reproduce the whole of the tune I played. I ended by making my entertainer believe me an undesigning person, though of course I did n't even attempt to persuade her I was not an eccentric one. I repeated that I had studies to pursue; that I wanted quiet; that I delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city: that I would undertake that before another month was over the dear old house should be smothered in flowers. I think it was the flowers that won my suit, for I afterwards found that Miss Tina – for such the name of this high tremulous spinster proved somewhat incongruously to be – had an insatiable appetite for them. When I speak of my suit as won I mean that before I left her she had promised me she would refer the question to her aunt. I invited information as to who her aunt might be and she answered »Why Miss Bordereau!« with an air of surprise, as if I might have been expected to know. There were contradictions like this in Miss Tina which, as I observed later, contributed to make her rather pleasingly incalculable and interesting. It was the study of the two ladies to live so that the world should n't talk of them or touch them, and yet they had never altogether accepted the idea that it did n't hear of them. In Miss Tina at any rate a grateful susceptibility to human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there would be if I should come to live in the house.

»We've never done anything of the sort; we've never had a lodger or any kind of inmate.« So much as this she made a point of saying to me. »We're very poor, we live very badly – almost on nothing. The rooms are very bare – those you might take; they've nothing at all in them.