Mr.Weatheral had some papers which Lessing had sent him to acknowledge there, and it was a piece of the morning's performance, when he had come back from that business, to find that the meeting had taken on--from some mutual discovery of the captain's and Mrs.Merrithew's of a cousin's wife's sister who had married one of the Applegates who was a Dunham on the mother's side--quite the aspect of a family party.

It came in the end to the four of them going off at Peter's invitation to have lunch together in a cafe overhanging the _calle_.

He told himself afterward that he would not have done it if he had recalled in time the friendly seaman's romantic appreciation of the situation between himself and Miss Dassonville.

He saw himself so intrigued by it that, by the time lunch was over, he felt himself in a position which to his own sensitiveness, demanded that he must immediately leave Venice or propose to Miss Dassonville.

To see the way he was going and to go on in it, had for him the fascination of the abyss.