however, she was in the same position. I walked slowly towards her, and as I approached her attracted her attention. She immediately recognized me and smiled and bowed, without moving from her place.
"I saw you five minutes ago," I said, "but I was afraid of interrupting your prayers."
"O, they were only half-prayers," she said.
"Half-prayers are pretty well for one who only the other day was thanking Heaven that she was not a Catholic."
"Half-prayers are no prayers. I'm not a Catholic yet."
Her father, she told me, had brought her to the church, but had returned on foot to the hotel for his pocket-book. They were to dine at one of the restaurants in the Piazza. Mr. Evans was vastly contented with Venice, and spent his days and nights in gondolas. Awaiting his return, we wandered over the church. Yes, incontestably, Miss Evans resembled my little Vicenza picture. She looked a little pale with the heat and the constant nervous tension of sight-seeing; but she pleased me now as effectually as she had pleased me before. There was an even deeper sweetness in the freedom and breadth of her utterance and carriage. I felt more even than before that she was an example of woman active, not of woman passive. We strolled through the great Basilica in serious, charmed silence. Miss Evans told me that she had been there much: she seemed to know it well. We went into the dark Baptistery and sat down on a bench against the wall, trying to discriminate in the vaulted dimness the harsh mediæval reliefs behind the altar and the mosaic Crucifixion above it.
"Well," said I, "what has Venice done for you?"
"Many things. Tired me a little, saddened me, charmed me."
"How have you spent your time?"
"As people spend it. After breakfast we get into our gondola and remain in it pretty well till bedtime. I believe I know every canal, every canaletto, in Venice. You must have learned already how sweet it is to lean back under the awning to feel beneath you that steady, liquid lapse, to look out at all this bright, sad elegance of ruin. I
