CHAPTER XI.

A VENETIAN INTERLUDE.

NIGHT at Venice. Summer nightthe air transparent as ether, and sweet with the perfume of gardinias and jasmine, little bouquets of which, in basketfuls, are being hawked about by ragged, dark-eyed urchins among the crowd of idlers sipping coffee and ices in the gardens of the Royal Palace, and listening to the strains of Semiramide and Aida played by the band under the trees.

Nine o'clock, and the music ceases; the throng disperse. Venice, never more than half-asleep, is sinking into the nearest approach to rest she knows. The fisherboats have come into port on the Riva dei Schiavoni, and crowd there in dark masses, their red sails-that seem to have caught the tint of the campanili-furled, whilst along the landing long black rows of gondolas lie waiting for hire, the gondoliers dozing on the marble stairs.

Two young people stood looking down on this scene from the balconies of the Hôtel Danieli. The open windows behind showed a vista of the long lofty salon of the grandest but dulles'-looking suite in that grand but dull expalazzo of the Mocenigo.

It was very dull just then. July is a month when the English (wherein they err) do not frequent Venice, and the best rooms at the Hôtel Danieli, and the undivided obsequiousness of the landlord and his staff, are at the VOL. XXXVII. NO. CCXX.

disposal of the English milor and his lady, who have made it their halting-place on their way to the Tyrol. The milor is not a milor; it is a figure of speech which he cannot get these Italians to drop. There is that about him which secures an overplus of attention from discerning subordinates. Hundreds of rich consequential Britons came and went, without meeting with a tithe of the respectful oblations every where showered on this mild, unpretentious, middle-aged, bald-headed gentleman and his young wife.

Lady Brereton's face, as she stood on the balcony, was scarcely visible in the dusk; but the clinging folds of her ivory-coloured Indian-silk dress set off a figure that went as near the perfection of grace as imperfect human nature can go. The sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican has not more exquisite curves, a more consummately beautiful outline. Her companion was not Sir Adolphus, but a young man with penetrating gray eyes, and brown hair like her own; the two heads nearly match as he bends forward to speak. She smiles back with animation; and an impulsive Frenchman, passing underneath, looks up admiringly, and remarks to his fellow,C'est Romeo et Juliette !'

Romeo was telling Juliet an anecdote. Whether he had it on good authority, as he averred, or whether he had invented it, or improved it, or picked it up in the gossip columns of a newspaper, was immaterial.

'It seems,' he was saying, 'that just now all artistic society in Rome is talking about some new statue by some new man-a figure of Paris on Mount Ida. The other day an American millionaire-the present owner of that famous statue "Jerusalem" -walks in upon the artist, whose name, I think, is Romer.'

Lady Brereton looked up with a sudden curious gleam of interest.

'The millionaire announces himself he is ready to purchase the artist's work on the artist's own terms. The young man is delighted; the matter arranged; and the customer is leaving the studio, when he turns and explains himself thus: "These ten years, sir, I've been ransacking Europe for a companion-city to my 'Jerusalem,' and your fine personification of the French capital is the first I've turned up!"'

Lady Brereton seemed highly diverted.

'How amusing you are!' she said. 'You have made me laugh for the first time since we came to Venice.'

'It is a dull place,' said Gervase feelingly.

'It will always remind me,' she resumed, of our wedding journey, seven years ago now. It was the first place in Italy that Adolphus took me to.'

Gervase was silent, presumably sympathetic past the power of speech. Then he remarked suddenly,

'I should never bring my bride to Venice.'

But perhaps other men may not be so exacting, and some may have nothing to fear from any rival, even Venice.'

O, but I really enjoyed it then,' she said presently, and was never tired of going about to the sights and so on. But now I know them all so well, I confess Venice to me is like a sea-prison or a grave; and I am glad we are leaving the day after to-morrow.'

'It is my first visit,' said Gervase apologetically. The chimes of St. Mark sounded as he spoke, and he made a polite movement of surprise, as though to suggest that, under the charm of present society, he had forgotten all about time and the hour. 'Nine o'clock. Your husband has evidently been detained; I must take my chance of getting a word with him at the ball to-night.'

Must you go already?' said Diana, with a little prospective yawn. He is sure, you know, O, quite sure, to come in soon.'

Gervase half smiled, but shook his head, and excused himself.

'You are going to the opera, I daresay,' she said. 'Is it a Visconti night? I heard her last year at Milan; but they say her voice very much gone off. Is it true?' 'I see no difference,' said Gervase unconcernedly.

is

'Ah, but you are one of her special admirers, are you not?" she said, unconcernedly also.

'There's no opera at all this evening, I believe,' he replied. 'By the way, do you go to the concert at the Fenice to-morrow?

'Yes, yes; and remember we count upon you. Nothing in the world bores Adolphus so much as music. He victimises himself for my sake; but it always sends him to sleep-which is hard upon me, you know.'

No sooner had the door closed on the attaché than the light

and smile vanished from Diana's countenance, thrown off like a tiresome piece of armour. Crossing the room, she met her own likeness in an antique gilt mirror, and stopped to glance at it as sharply as if it were a rival's.

'Still so young-looking!' she thought, with surprise. At that moment she could have sworn that she felt a hundred. So much was certain, that in her image she found no cause for discontent. She turned away restlessly. Diana had not faith enough in happiness to wish anything keenly. All that the world had to offer in that way was empty as wind. Only she was speculating if the south wind might have been rather better than the north.

'Poor Gervase!

Even to herself she kept up the farce of pitying him, as it were in revenge. Her thoughts now flew back a hundred years-seven in the calendar. Gervase had made love to her, wanted to marry her presumably, and she-flint-hearted though she prided herself on being at seventeen-had come perilously near requiting an imaginary predilection. Accident had undeceived her. Sir Adolphus had carried off the proud piqued maiden, and her heart, from want of practice, had grown very nearly as stony as she would have had it. Gervase had never touched it since then, or come near it; and if just now she questions whether after all she took a false step in her choice, it is not from motives of sentiment. Gervase was clever, ambitious, bold, was likely to rise; whilst

The comparison was cut short, or rather completed, by the entrance of Sir Adolphus, who with all his virtues had just this much against him, that he was setting, indisputably setting.

He was a little surprised to find

his wife in a brown study, and not yet dressed for the bal de cérémonie to which he was to take her.

'There will always be time enough,' she said mechanically, as she left the room to put on her ball-dress and jewels.

Sir Adolphus was concerned at the faint depression he detected in her manner, but consoled himself by the reflection that social distraction never failed to restore her to spirits. So he settled down in an armchair with a political pamphlet, which in an unguarded moment he had promised the author to read, and fell asleep over the second page.

Gervase left the hotel with a more animated step than that with which he had entered it. At his approach the gondoliers roused themselves, and doffed their caps. He stepped into a boat he had left waiting there, involuntarily glancing upwards to see if Diana were regarding him from the balcony. No such thing; she was regarding herself in the glass.

At half a word and half a gesture from him, the rowers started off. How soothing, how grateful, both to the flesh and the spirit is the Venetian mode of locomotion! No straining horses, no stupid drivers and jolting, and no noise, except an occasional outbreak of swearing at the bridges, when Greek meets Greek; but the war is of words only-no fear of the faintest literal concussion, for gondoliers have made rowing one of the fine arts. You

are wafted on, as smoothly as if at a wish, to your destination, and however you may be in a hurry to get there, you are sorry to arrive.

Gervase was never in a hurry, or he would have been now. Presently he took out a small note, and tried to re-read a rather illegible scrawl by starlight.