"Oh, how can I--how can I?" she asked, wondering and troubled.

She was half-surprised, half-frightened at my wishing to make
her play an active part.

"This is the main thing: to watch her carefully and warn me in time,
before she commits that horrible sacrilege."

"I can't watch her when she makes me go out."
"That's very true."

"And when you do, too."
"Mercy on us; do you think she will have done anything tonight?"

"I don't know; she is very cunning."
"Are you trying to frighten me?" I asked.

I felt this inquirysufficiently answered when my companion
murmured in a musing, almost envious way, "Oh, but she loves them--

she loves them!"
This reflection, repeated with such emphasis, gave me great comfort;

but to obtain more of that balm I said, "If she shouldn't intend
to destroy the objects we speak of before her death she will probably

have made some disposition by will."
"By will?"

"Hasn't she made a will for your benefit?"
"Why, she has so little to leave. That's why she likes money,"

said Miss Tita.
"Might I ask, since we are really talking things over,

what you and she live on?"
"On some money that comes from America, from a lawyer.

He sends it every quarter. It isn't much!"
"And won't she have disposed of that?"

My companion hesitated--I saw she was blushing.
"I believe it's mine," she said; and the look and tone which

accompanied these words betrayed so the absence of the habit
of thinking of herself that I almost thought her charming.

The next instant she added, "But she had a lawyer once,
ever so long ago. And some people came and signed something."

"They were probably witnesses. And you were not asked to sign?
Well then," I argued rapidly and hopefully, "it is because you

are the legatee; she has left all her documents to you!"
"If she has it's with very strict conditions," Miss Tita responded,

rising quickly, while the movement gave the words a little character
of decision. They seemed to imply that the bequest would be accompanied

with a command that the articles bequeathed should remain concealed
from every inquisitive eye and that I was very much mistaken if I thought

she was the person to depart from an injunction so solemn.
"Oh, of course you will have to abide by the terms," I said;

and she uttered nothing to mitigate the severity of this conclusion.
Nonetheless, later, just before we disembarked at her own door,

on our return, which had taken place almost in silence,
she said to me abruptly, "I will do what I can to help you."

I was grateful for this--it was very well so far as it went;
but it did not keep me from remembering that night in a worried

waking hour that I now had her word for it to reinforce my own
impression that the old woman was very cunning.

VII
The fear of what this side of her character might have led

her to do made me nervous for days afterward. I waited for an
intimation from Miss Tita; I almost figured to myself that it

was her duty to keep me informed, to let me know definitely
whether or no Miss Bordereau had sacrificed her treasures.

But as she gave no sign I lost patience and determined
to judge so far as was possible with my own senses.

I sent late one afternoon to ask if I might pay the ladies
a visit, and my servant came back with surprising news.

Miss Bordereau could be approached without the least difficulty;
she had been moved out into the sala and was

sitting by the window that overlooked the garden.
I descended and found this picture correct; the old lady

had been wheeled forth into the world and had a certain air,
which came mainly perhaps from some brighter element in

her dress, of being prepared again to have converse with it.
It had not yet, however, begun to flock about her;

she was perfectly alone and, though the door leading to her own
quarters stood open, I had at first no glimpse of Miss Tita.

The window at which she sat had the afternoon shade and,
one of the shutters having been pushed back, she could see

the pleasant garden, where the summer sun had by this time
dried up too many of the plants--she could see the yellow

light and the long shadows.
"Have you come to tell me that you will take the rooms

for six months more?" she asked as I approached her,
startling me by something coarse in her cupidity almost

as much as if she had not already given me a specimen of it.
Juliana's desire to make our acquaintance lucrative had been,

as I have sufficiently indicated, a false note in my image
of the woman who had inspired a great poet with immortal lines;

but I may say here definitely that I recognized after all
that it behooved me to make a large allowance for her.

It was I who had kindled the unholy flame; it was I who had
put into her head that she had the means of making money.

She appeared never to have thought of that; she had been
living wastefully for years, in a house five times too

big for her, on a footing that I could explain only by
the presumption that, excessive as it was, the space she

enjoyed cost her next to nothing and that small as were her
revenues they left her, for Venice, an appreciable margin.

I had descended on her one day and taught her to calculate,
and my almost extravagantcomedy on the subject of the garden

had presented me irresistibly in the light of a victim.
Like all persons who achieve the miracle of changing their point

of view when they are old she had been intensely converted;
she had seized my hint with a desperate, tremulous clutch.

I invited myself to go and get one of the chairs that stood, at a distance,
against the wall (she had given herself no concern as to whether I

should sit or stand); and while I placed it near her I began, gaily,
"Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an intellectual sweep!

I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives from day to day.
How can I take palaces by the year? My existence is precarious.

I don't know whether six months hence I shall have bread to put in my mouth.
I have treated myself for once; it has been an immense luxury.

But when it comes to going on--!"
"Are your rooms too dear? If they are you can have more for the same money,"

Juliana responded. "We can arrange, we can combinare, as they say here."
"Well yes, since you ask me, they are too dear," I said.

"Evidently you suppose me richer than I am."
She looked at me in her barricaded way. "If you write books

don't you sell them?"
"Do you mean don't people buy them? A little--not so much as I could wish.

Writing books, unless one be a great genius--and even then!--is the last road
to fortune. I think there is no more money to be made by literature."

"Perhaps you don't choose good subjects. What do you write about?"
Miss Bordereau inquired.

"About the books of other people. I'm a critic, an historian,
in a small way." I wondered what she was coming to.

"And what other people, now?"
"Oh, better ones than myself: the great writers mainly--

the great philosophers and poets of the past; those who are
dead and gone and can't speak for themselves."

"And what do you say about them?"
"I say they sometimes attached themselves to very clever women!"

I answered, laughing. I spoke with great deliberation,