In the violent reaction which this strange encounter produced, Odo was for the moment incapable of taking any clear note of his surroundings.  Uncertain if he were not once more the victim of some such mischance as seemed to attend all his efforts to succour Fulvia, he sat in silent apprehension as the gondola shot across the Grand Canal and entered the labyrinth of water-ways behind San Moise.  Sister Mary took his silence philosophically.

“You dare not speak to me, for fear of betraying yourself,” she said, “and I scarce wonder at your distrust; for your plans were so well laid that I had no notion of what was on foot, and must have remained in ignorance if Veronica had not been put in Sister Martha’s charge.  But you will both live to thank me, and I hope,” she added, laughing, “to own that you would have done better to take me into your confidence from the first.”

As she spoke the gondola touched at the head of a narrow passage which lost itself in the blackness of the overhanging houses.  Sister Mary sprang out and drew Odo after her.  A few yards down the alley she entered a plain low-storied house somewhat withdrawn behind its neighbours.  Followed by Odo she groped her way up a dark flight of stairs and knocked at a door on the upper landing.  A vague flutter within, indicative of whispers and uncertain movements, was followed by the slipping of the bolt, and a middle-aged woman looked out.  She drew back with an exclamation of welcome, and Sister Mary, seizing Odo by the shoulders, pushed him across the threshold of a small dimly-lit kitchen.

Fulvia, in her nun’s habit, cowered in the darkest corner; but at sight of Odo she sprang up, and ran toward him with a happy cry.

3.6.

An hour later the two were well on their way toward Mestre, where a travelling-chaise awaited them.  Odo, having learned that Andreoni was settled in Padua, had asked him to receive Fulvia in his house till the next night-fall; and the bookseller, whom he had taken into his confidence, was eager to welcome the daughter of the revered Vivaldi.

The extremes of hope and apprehension had left Fulvia too exhausted for many words, and Odo, after she had confirmed every particular of Sister Mary’s story, refrained from questioning her farther.  Thanks to her friend’s resources she had been able to exchange her nun’s dress for the plain gown and travelling-cloak of a young woman of the middle class; and this dress painfully recalled to Odo the day when he had found her standing beside the broken-down chaise on the road to Vercelli.

The recollection was not calculated to put him at his ease; and indeed it was only now that he began to feel the peculiar constraint of his position.  To Andreoni his explanation of Fulvia’s flight had seemed natural enough; but on the subsequent stages of their journey she must pass for his mistress or his wife, and he hardly knew in what spirit she would take the misapprehensions that must inevitably arise.