"Pay the bill now, Derry," she said. "We must be off in five minutes, and I am sure you want to smoke at least one cigarette in peace. Perhaps Signor Pestalozzi will be good enough to order a cab?"
Signor Pestalozzi was charmed, and decidedly puzzled. He believed for many a year that those two had dined at his café for a wager. If any doubter scoffed, he would say, with appropriate gesture:
"Sango la Madonna! I tella you he no squeeze-a de gell, not-ta one time; so, if dey no make-a de bet, what-a for he give 'er dat pranzo superbo?"
Really, from Giovanni's point of view, there was no answer.
"Tell the man to drive us to the Easton's Beach end of the Cliff Walk," she said nonchalantly, when the cab was in evidence, and away they went.
"There is no moon; but these summer nights are never quite dark," she began, by way of polite conversation. "It ought to be restful tonight down there by the Atlantic. It is a horrid thing to confess, but the memories of Venice which are most vivid in my mind are not connected with St. Mark's or the Doge's Palace, but center round just such a night as this on the Lido. Coming back in the gondola, I almost wanted to slip over the side into the still waters, and drift away to the unknown."
It was a relief to hear his own voice in some such apparently light-hearted quip. The cab was narrow, and hung on indifferent springs, and its lurching across the roadway to avoid other vehicles often threw him against Nancy's supple body. He could never touch her without feeling the thrill of contact, and, fight as he would against it, the desire to clasp her in his arms and stifle her protests with hot kisses would come on him at such moments with an almost overwhelming ecstasy.
"If I led, would you follow, Derry?" she whispered.
Heaven help him, it seemed as though she was nestling close deliberately; yet he refused to believe, and strove to answer with a jest.
"I have a picture of you and me striking out across the bay for Narragansett, like a pair of dolphins," he said.
"I thought of you that night on the Lido," she went on, unheeding. "I imagined then that when you skipped off to Sacramento you had forgotten the little girl of the Dolores ranch. At any rate, such was my every-day common-sense sort of belief; but tucked away in some cute little nerve center of intuition was another notion, which told me that we had been driven apart by wicked and deceitful contriving. And now, thank my stars, I know that my subconscious feeling was right! Oh, Derry! How you must have despised me! What if we had not met for many a year, and you had schooled yourself into real forgetfulness, and some other girl had crept into a corner of your heart, thrusting out poor little me forever?"