excitedly as her launch slipped away. “That ship is called the Adventure and she carries our flag. Isn't she beautiful? I should think you would take more interest in a ship from home,” she added when he merely gave a quick glance upward and again looked away.
“I am too much interested in the way you handle your boat,” he replied.
“Why? Don't I do it well?” she asked ingenuously. “I raced boats at Miami and Palm Beach and had got rather fond of myself as a sailor. Don't make me doubt myself, please. Besides, I don't suppose you are any better sailor than I am, are you?”
She laughed in his face, and he would have laughed in return had not his eyes at that moment encountered Pietro's in whose glance there was an odd expression of expectancy.
“Of course I'm not,” he asserted. “How can you expect a mere tourist to know anything about the sea?”
“What are you interested in, anyway?” she demanded. “You don't seem to care so very much about palaces, or historical things, or traditions, or”
“Well, get on with it,” he said laughingly when she paused in her arraignment. “You seem to think I'm a frightfully useless dawdler.”
“You haven't said anything to convince me otherwise,” she remarked severely. “For some reason that I can't explain you impress me as one of those who drift aimlessly. A man without a purpose. I don't like aimless people. They annoy me.”
“I suppose then, Miss Cardell, that you have an aim,” he suggested, lazily, and was astonished by the sudden change that came over her face, sobering it, slightly hardening it.
“Yes,” she declared, “I have. I am the last one of my family, I sometimes think, who has an aim or courage. I've got a brother who laughs at me and is too lazy to do anything worth while. I suppose he's at Palm Beach right now, fishing, sailing, dancing and doing all sorts of things that aren't worth a rap. I should have been the man of the family.”
“It's usually the women who have the refinement of brains, and the more steadfast courage,” he remarked.
“That's very nice of you to say that,” she said, mollified and smiling at him. “You tempt me—almost—to take you into my confidence.”
“I wish you would,” he declared, sitting suddenly erect and looking at her with unmistakable admiration in his handsome eyes. And he could have mentally anathematized Pietro, who at that moment interjected himself with a suggestion that it was time they return to the hotel unless they wished to be late for luncheon. They returned and again he felt as if an opportunity had been lost.
He was chafing at his helplessness throughout the afternoon, and stopped on a bench down in the public gardens to consider what the week had brought forth. It had resulted in nothing save that he had been accepted as a casual acquaintance when no other was convenient. Such status annoyed him. Other women he had known had been only too eager to accept and seek his friendship. Sometimes he had been driven to reserve by such attentions. And now when he had found a girl whom he ardently wished to impress he felt a failure. It but increased his determination to get on some other and more intimate footing with Tommie Cardell, to break through that reserve with which she surrounded herself whenever he tried to approach her.
Again, there was something mysterious in her movements. Twice in the week he had seen her in the hotel drawing-room, seated obscurely in the corner behind the palms, holding confidential conversation with the perfervid young guide Pietro Sordillo. He was still thinking of these little happenings that night when, after she had declined to accompany him to the opera, pleading a previous engagement, he loitered in front of the hotel for an hour or two, lonely, and saw the crowd diminish along the Riva degli Schiavoni until the great sea-front way appeared almost deserted. A vagrant impulse impelled him to walk up to the nearest gondola station and step into the first one at the landing.
“The signor wishes to go—where? He can trust me, old Tomaso, to take him,” politely boasted the gray-haired but sturdy old veteran at the oar. For a moment Captain Jimmy hesitated and then with a wave of his hand said, “Oh, anywhere! I don't care. You might cut down through the first canal and get to the Rialto.” And then suddenly he seemed to recall something and said, “No, I'll tell you what to do,
