He dreamed and in his dream he was still looking for someone, but it wasn’t here, it was in the bright sunshine among the bathing-huts and cabins of the Lido. The search was most embarrassing, for all the cabins had their blinds drawn down, and every time he knocked an angry voice said, ‘Who’s that? You can’t come in.’ ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Annette,’ he explained. ‘She’s a tall girl, dark, and rather pretty. I want to take her home. Have you seen her?’ ‘We have seen her,’ the voice replied, ‘but she doesn’t want to go home, and she’ll be angry if you try to find her. Nino and Nini and Gigio and Gigi are looking after her. She has her own life to live, you know.’ ‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘but her mother is anxious about her. She doesn’t want her to go home alone—it wouldn’t do. People would talk about her. Please tell me where she is.’ ‘She’s somewhere here,’ the voice said grudgingly, ‘but you won’t be able to get in because the door’s locked. This is a temple d’amour, so please leave us in peace.’

Oddly enough Henry knew at once which door the speaker meant and went straight to it. But now he was carrying some flowers, flowers he had bought in the Campo San Stefano that morning, and he was glad of this because they gave him an excuse. He knocked and said very humbly, ‘Please let me in, Annette, and don’t be angry with me: I’ve only come to give you these flowers—you can wear them in your hair or anywhere you like, but you needn’t wear them at all if you don’t want to. Not everyone likes flowers.’ But though he knew she was inside she didn’t answer, and he saw that the flowers were withering in his hands.

He wasn’t really asleep, he was only dozing, and the dream kept repeating itself in other sets of circumstances which were much less clear than they had been in the first one, until at last the visual aspects of the dream grew indistinct and only the sense of frustrated search remained.

When he awoke he thought he was in bed, his own bed with die mosquito-curtains round him. Gradually he remembered, and his first sensation was one of relief: he had outwitted Time and all those boring hours of waiting, they had slipped past his tired consciousness and now Annette would be ready and perhaps waiting to be taken home—and not best pleased at being kept waiting. He must go to her at once. For a moment that seemed as easy as it would have in a dream: then full awareness of his situation dawned on him. He was here in the Palazzo Bembo and it was quite dark: too dark to see his wrist-watch. He struck a match: it showed a quarter to five. He let himself out into the open, and as his eyes got used to the darkness saw around him the ghostly forms of the encampment, looking strangely large and solid. No sound came from any part of the building. He had been forgotten, that was it. The ball was over and in the general concourse of good-byes his absence had been overlooked. Someone would have taken Annette back; it only remained for him to go back too.

All this was something to be thankful for. But when he began to think about his situation, it didn’t seem so simple. To begin with, how was he to get out of the house? And how, if discovered, would he explain himself? Would he be mistaken for a burglar? And how would he get home? Annette would have taken the gondola. He would have to walk, and he wasn’t sure he knew the way.

He went to the window and leaned out. It looked on to a garden, a square garden, quite large, one of the few gardens in Venice. Dawn was not far away: he could see the Renaissance pavilion at the end, the shadows of night still dark between its columns. Nothing stirred, though he could hear the plash of the fountain in the centre. Would he have to go through the garden to get out? He had never approached the Palazzo Bembo on foot. Somewhere, he supposed, there must be a narrow calle, an alleyway that led to the main street. But where?’

Baffled, he turned away from the window and, treading cautiously between the tents—afraid of catching his foot in one and tearing it down—he made his way to the other end of the great sala. Light met him as he went, the accumulated radiance of the lamps of the Grand Canal. He leaned out of the window, and drank in the familiar scene. How beautiful it was—Venice asleep! Perhaps this was the only hour out of the twenty-four when no one was abroad.

His roving, loving eye at last looked downwards. Moored to the blue pali, which looked curiously foreshortened from above, was a gondola. The gondoliers, in their white ducks and blue sashes, were asleep: one curled up on the poop, the other stretched out in the hold: each was using his curved arm as a pillow. Whose gondola could it be? Why, it was his—his gondola, with Luigi and Emilio in it. But why were they there, why hadn’t they gone home to bed?

A solution occurred to rum. If they had taken Annette to the hotel, as they must have, probably accompanied by some cavalier—Annette’s young men always accepted a lift—she might have sent them back to fetch her father. She would have looked for him, no doubt, before she left. But would she? Assuming she had remembered him at all, would she not have concluded that he had left the party earlier, with her mother, and dismissed the gondola when she reached the hotel? Or could it be that the party wasn’t really over and she was still somewhere about?

He stole downstairs into the lower sala. All was in darkness there, but he sensed its disarray—the debris of the party without the party spirit. His flesh creeping as if from contact with something dirty, he returned to the upper sala, and on an impulse shouted down the palace wall, as loudly as any Venetian could have:

‘Luigi!’

When he had repeated it a few times there was a movement in the boat, and with sighs of escaping sleep, almost as loud as steam, the gondoliers rose to their feet and looked incredulously upwards.

‘Have you seen the signorina?’ he shouted in Italian.

‘Nossignore.’

‘Didn’t you take her home?’

‘Nossignore.’

‘How did she go home then?’

‘She must have gone on foot.’

She might have done, but was it likely? Telling the gondoliers to wait—for waiting, even more than rowing, was their métier—he tried to work it out. She might have thought it fun to walk, but would she have forgotten the gondola? Except where her boy-friends were concerned, Annette wasn’t inconsiderate. It would have been very inconsiderate to leave Emilio and Luigi out all night.

His musing steps had brought him back to the encampment. Unwillingly he re-entered its precincts. How alien it was. Like something conjured up by an enchanter—purposeless, yet with a potent personality of its own, and not a pleasant one: a personality that recalled the lawless deeds of desert warfare. He was careful not to brush against the muslin fabrics. Each tent had its flap ajar—all the birds had flown. But no, one tent was shut. As though by compulsion he approached it. It was shut, and there were two other odd things about it. The tent was laced as tightly as a shoe, but the scarlet bows were tied on the outside, not the inside; and its pennon had been torn off, torn roughly off, for where the join had been a dark rent showed, and if he peeped through it——

He didn’t peep but stood at gaze obsessed more deeply every moment, by a sense of momentousness that was totally devoid of meaning. If, as he felt it might, the secret, the solution, lay inside the tent——

It did lie inside, sprawled over the two chairs, but he would not let himself believe, and here the darkness helped him; for it wasn’t growing lighter with the opening day, it was going back to night. Needing air and a moment to confirm his unbelief he staggered to the window, the one that overlooked the garden, and there he saw the massy thundercloud piled high against the light and heard without heeding it the rumble of the storm that was to end the heat-wave. The lightning flashed and flashed again; the mirrors on the walls reflected it; a sudden gust blew in—a solid wall of wind that struck the tents and bent them all one way, like spectres fleeing. A flash lit up the whole length of the sala. He could not shirk his duty any longer, his duty as a man and as a father. Something might still be done to help, to reanimate, to bring back—— But nothing could be done; around the darkening neck the scarlet fork-tailed pennon had been tied too tight. Another flash told him no more than he knew already: but the next lit up the legend on the noose. Two words were missing, hidden by the strangler’s knot, but the operative word was there, the last one, and his memory supplied the rest: Per far l’amore, to make love.