ame brokenly, yet with
dignity.

"Marco mio, not yet. Because I am of the people, and because the
others--your father and mother, who are of the nobles, and my father,
who is of the people--may not consent, we will make no vows until this
difficulty is conquered."

"They shall not keep us from it."

She shook her head sadly, but came no nearer. "Will Giustinian
Giustiniani ask a daughter of the people? But Girolamo Magagnati is not
less proud."

"I will return now with thee to Murano. Perhaps thy father will befriend
us."

"No, no; without their consent it would be useless. I think I shall not
tell him--it would be only a grief."

"Because it meaneth much to thee?" Marco questioned, luminous and
ungenerous.

She did not answer.

"Thou dost verily make too much of the nobles and the people, Marina; we
are all Venetians."

"Venice is of the sea and of the land--not like other cities; and the
Venetian people is not one, but twain; my father hath often said it.
Some other day, perhaps--I do not know--if it is needful for the
picture, I may come again. Will you tell the maestro? I think he is our
friend, and he will understand."

He would have followed her, but she waved him back.

The day had a melancholy cast in the narrow waterways of Murano, where
clouds of smoke, dense and constant, rose from hundreds of
glass-workers' chimneys, dimming the reflections in the lagoon and
obscuring that wonderful coloring of sky which is nowhere so radiant as
at Venice.

Beyond the bridge, which the ubiquitous Lion guards with menacing,
uplifted paw, beyond the Piazzetta of San Pietro where the acacia trees
are growing, down by the main canal, where the breath comes freer--for
it is broader than the one where the gondolas from the great houses of
Venice gather and float lazily; past the line of low, whitewashed
cottages bordering the narrow foot-path on either side, over the little
wooden bridge that spans the lagoon, fifty feet across from bank to bank
with its ugly traghetto at the farther end, a figure was often seen
wending, with a child held in tender mother fashion, to the campo of the
"Matrice," the mother church of San Donate.

To-day when Marina had returned from Venice she had caught the little
Zuane to her breast with such a passion of tenderness that he looked up
into her face with startled eyes; hers were brimming with smiles and
tears, and with that wise child-knowledge, which is not granted to
earth's le