The young men did not come back to the ship at night, but went to a hotel, for the greater convenience of seeing the city. They had talked of offering to show Lydia about, but their talk had not ended in anything. Vexed¹ with himself to be vexed at such a thing, Staniford at the bottom of his heart still had a soreness which the constant sight of her irritated. It was in vain that he said there was no occasion, perhaps no opportunity, for her to speak, yet he was hurt that she seemed to have seen nothing uncommon² in his risking his own life for that of a man like Hicks. He had set the action low enough in his own speech; but he knew that it was not ignoble³, and it puzzled him that it should be so passed over. She had not even said a word of congratulation upon his own escape. It might be that she did not know how, or did not think it was her place to speak. She was curiously⁴ estranged⁵. He felt as if he had been away, and she had grown from a young girl into womanhood during his absence. This fantastic conceit⁶ was strongest when he met her with Captain Jenness one day. He had found friends at the hotel, as one always does in Italy, if one's world is at all wide,—some young ladies, and a lady, now married, with whom he had once violently flirted⁷. She was willing that he should envy her husband; that amused him in his embittered⁸ mood; he let her drive him about; and they met Lydia and the captain, walking together. Staniford started up from his lounging ease, as if her limpid⁹ gaze had searched his conscience, and bowed with an air which did not escape his companion.  
“Ah! Who's that?” she asked, with the boldness which she made pass for eccentricity¹⁰.
 
“A lady of my acquaintance,” said Staniford, at his laziest again.
 
“A lady?” said the other, with an inflection that she saw hurt. “Why the marine¹¹ animal, then? She bowed very prettily¹²; she blushed prettily, too.”
 
“She's a very pretty girl,” replied Staniford.
 
“Charming! But why blush?”
 
“I've heard that there are ladies who blush for nothing.”
 
“Is she Italian?”
 
“Yes,—in voice.”
 
“Oh, an American prima donna!” Staniford did not answer. “Who is she? Where is she from?”
 
“South Bradfield, Mass.” Staniford's eyes twinkled at her pursuit, which he did not trouble himself to turn aside, but baffled by mere¹³ impenetrability.
 
The party at the hotel suggested that the young men should leave their ship and go on with them to Naples; Dunham was tempted¹⁴, for he could have reached Dresden sooner by land; but Staniford overruled him, and at the end of four days they went back to the Aroostook. They said it was like getting home, but in fact they felt the change from the airy heights and breadths of the hotel to the small cabin and the closets in which they slept; it was not so great alleviation¹⁵ as Captain Jenness seemed to think that one of them could now have Hicks's stateroom. But Dunham took everything sweetly, as his habit was; and, after all, they were meeting their hardships voluntarily. Some of the ladies came with them in the boat which rowed them to the Aroostook; the name made them laugh; that lady who wished Staniford to regret her waved him her hand kerchief as the boat rowed away again. She had with difficulty been kept from coming on board by the refusal of the others to come with her. She had contrived¹⁶ to associate herself with him again in the minds of the others, and this, perhaps, was all that she desired. But the sense of her frivolity—her not so much vacant-mindedness as vacant-heartedness—was like a stain, and he painted in Lydia's face when they first met the reproach which was in his own breast.
 
Her greeting, however, was frank and cordial; it was a real welcome. Staniford wondered if it were not more frank and cordial than he quite liked, and whether she was merely relieved by Hicks's absence, or had freed herself from that certain subjection in which she had hitherto been to himself.
 
Yet it was charming to see her again as she had been in the happiest moments of the past, and to feel that, Hicks being out of her world, her trust of everybody in it was perfect once more. She treated that interval¹⁷ of coldness and diffidence as all women know how to treat a thing which they wish not to have been; and Staniford, a man on whom no pleasing art of her sex was ever lost, admired and gratefully accepted the effect of this. He fell luxuriously¹⁸ into the old habits again. They had still almost the time of a steamer's voyage to Europe before them; it was as if they were newly setting sail from America. The first night after they left Messina Staniford found her in her place in the waist of the ship, and sat down beside her there, and talked; the next night she did not come; the third she came, and he asked her to walk with him. The elastic¹⁹ touch of her hand on his arm, the rhythmic²⁰ movement of her steps beside him, were things that seemed always to have been. She told him of what she had seen and done in Messina. This glimpse of Italy had vividly²¹ animated²² her; she had apparently²³ found a world within herself as well as without.
 
With a suddenly depressing sense of loss, Staniford had a prevision of splendor²⁴ in her, when she should have wholly blossomed out in that fervid²⁵ air of art and beauty; he would fain have kept her still a wilding rosebud²⁶ of the New England wayside. He hated the officers who should wonder at her when she first came into the Square of St. Mark with her aunt and uncle.
 
Her talk about Messina went on; he was thinking of her, and not of her talk; but he saw that she was not going to refer to their encounter. “You make me jealous of the objects of interest in Messina,” he said. “You seem to remember seeing everything but me, there.”
 
She stopped abruptly²⁷. “Yes,” she said, after a deep breath, “I saw you there;” and she did not offer to go on again.
 
“Where were you going, that morning?”
 
“Oh, to the cathedral. Captain Jenness left me there, and I looked all through it till he came back from the consulate²⁸.”
 
“Left you there alone!” cried Staniford.
 
“Yes; I told him I should not feel lonely, and I should not stir out of it till he came back. I took one of those little pine chairs and sat down, when I got tired, and looked at the people coming to worship, and the strangers with their guide-books.”
 
“Did any of them look at you?”
 
“They stared a good deal. It seems to be the custom in Europe; but I told Captain Jenness I should probably have to go about by myself in Venice, as my aunt's an invalid²⁹, and I had better get used to it.”
 
She paused, and seemed to be referring the point to Staniford.
 
“Yes,—oh, yes,” he said.
 
“Captain Jenness said it was their way, over here,” she resumed; “but he guessed I had as much right in a church as anybody.”
 
“The captain's common sense is infallible,” answered Staniford. He was ashamed to know that the beautiful young girl was as improperly³⁰ alone in church as she would have been in a café, and he began to hate the European world for the fact. It seemed better to him that the Aroostook should put about and sail back to Boston with her, as she was,—better that she should be going to her aunt in South Bradfield than to her aunt in Venice. “We shall soon be at our journey's end, now,” he said, after a while.
 
“Yes; the captain thinks in about eight days, if we have good weather.”
 
“Shall you be sorry?”
 
“Oh, I like the sea very well.”
 
“But the new life you are coming to,—doesn't that alarm you sometimes?”
 
“Yes, it does,” she admitted, with a kind of reluctance³¹.
 
“So much that you would like to turn back from it?”
 
“Oh, no!” she answered quickly. Of course not, Staniford thought; nothing could be worse than going back to South Bradfield. “I keep thinking about it,” she added. “You say Venice is such a very strange place. Is it any use my having seen Messina?”
 
“Oh, all Italian cities have something in common.”
 
“I presume,” she went on, “that after I get there everything will become natural. But I don't like to look forward. It—scares me. I can't form any idea of it.”
 
“You needn't be afraid,” said Staniford. “It's only more beautiful than anything you can imagine.”
 
“Yes—yes; I know,” Lydia answered.
 
“And do you really dread³² getting there?”
 
“Yes, I dread it,” she said.
 
“Why,” returned Staniford lightly, “so do I; but it's for a different reason, I'm afraid. I should like such a voyage as this to go on forever. Now and then I think it will; it seems always to have gone on. Can you remember when it began?”
 
“A great while ago,” she answered, humoring his fantasy, “but I can remember.” She paused a long while. “I don't know,” she said at last, “whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me as if I had died, and this long voyage was a kind of dream that I was going to wake up from in another world. I often used to think, when I was a little girl, that when I got to heaven it would be lonesome—I don't know whether I can express it. You say that Italy—that Venice—is so beautiful; but if I don't know any one there—” She stopped, as if she had gone too far.
 
“But you do know somebody there,” said Staniford. “Your aunt—”
 
“Yes,” said the girl, and looked away.
 
“But the people in this long dream,—you're going to let some of them appear to you there,” he suggested.
 
“Oh, yes,&rd............