“Isn't there some walk?”
“I wonder,” I answered. “We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along
the Lido.” And we tried that, but the long stretch of beach fatigued
Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got beyond
Malamocco....
A day or so after we went out to those pleasant black-robed, bearded
Armenians in their monastery at Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards
sundown. We fell into silence. “PIU LENTO,” said Margaret to the
gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution.
“Let us go back to London,” I said abruptly.
Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes.
“This is beautiful beyond measure, you know,” I said, sticking to my
point, “but I have work to do.”
She was silent for some seconds. “I had forgotten,” she said.
“So had I,” I sympathised, and took her hand. “Suddenly I have
remembered.”
She remained quite still. “There is so much to be done,” I said, almost
apologetically.
She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, like
one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
“I suppose one ought not to be so happy,” she said. “Everything has been
so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has been just
With You--the time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. But
the world is calling you, dear.... I ought not to have forgotten it. I
thought you were resting--and thinking. But if you are rested.--Would
you like us to start to-morrow?”
She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the
moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.