Mrs. Vervain sentimentalized their departure a little, but her daughter made no comment on the scene they were leaving.
The gondolier rang at Ferris's door and returned with the answer that he was not at home.
Mrs. Vervain gave way to despair. "Oh dear, oh dear! This is too bad! What shall we do?"
"We'll lose the train, mother, if we loiter in this way," said Florida.
"Well, wait. I _must_ leave a message at least." "_How could you be away_," she wrote on her card, "_when we called to say good-by? We've changed our plans and we're going to-day. I shall write you a nice scolding letter from Verona--we're going over the Brenner--for your behavior last night. Who will keep you straight when I'm gone? You've been very, very kind. Florida joins me in a thousand thanks, regrets, and good-byes._"
"There, I haven't said anything, after all," she fretted, with tears in her eyes.
The gondolier carried the card again to the door, where Ferris's servant let down a basket by a string and fished it up.
"If Don Ippolito shouldn't be in," said Mrs. Vervain, as the boat moved on again, "I don't know what I _shall_ do with this money. It will be awkward beyond anything."
The gondola slipped from the Canalazzo into the network of the smaller canals, where the dense shadows were as old as the palaces that cast them and stopped at the landing of a narrow quay. The gondolier dismounted and rang at Don Ippolito's door. There was no response; he rang again and again. At last from a window of the uppermost story the head of the priest himself peered out. The gondolier touched his hat and said, "It is the ladies who ask for you, Don Ippolito."
It was a minute before the door opened, and the priest, bare-headed and blinking in the strong light, came with a stupefied air across the quay to the landing-steps.
"Well, Don Ippolito!" cried Mrs. Vervain, rising and giving him her hand, which she first waved at the trunks and bags piled up in the vacant space in the front of the boat, "what do you think of this? We are really going, immediately; _we_ can change our minds too; and I don't think it would have been too much," she added with a friendly smile, "if we had gone without saying good-by to you. What in the world does it all mean, your giving up that grand project of yours so suddenly?"
