er, nor seemeth to grieve for them? For the boy is
young."

"Nay," answered Fra Gianmaria, sternly; "it is no lack, but a grace that
hath been granted him."

"Knowledge is a wonderful mystery," Fra Giulio answered; but softly to
himself, as he crossed the cloister, he added, "but love is sweet, and
the boy is very young."

The boy was kneeling placidly before the crucifix in his cell when Fra
Giulio went to give him his nightly benediction; but the good friar's
heart was troubled with tenderness because of a vision, that would not
leave him, of a hungering mother's face.

II

Many years later one of the great artists of Venice, wandering about at
sunset with an elusive vision of some wonderful picture stirring
impatience within his soul, found a maiden sitting under the
vine-covered pergola of the Traghetto San Maurizio, where she was
waiting for her brother-in-law, who would presently touch at this ferry
on his homeward way to Murano. A little child lay asleep in her arms,
his blond head, which pitying Nature had kept beautiful, resting against
her breast; the meagre body was hidden beneath the folds of her mantle,
which, in the graceful fashion of those days, passed over her head and
fell below the knees; her face, very beautiful and tender, was bent over
the little sufferer, who had forgotten his pain in the weariness it had
brought him as a boon.

The delicate purple bells of the vine upon the trellis stirred in the
evening breeze, making a shimmer of perfume and color about her, like a
suggestion of an aureole; and in the arbor, as in one of those homely
shrines which everywhere make part of the Venetian life, she seemed
aloof as some ideal of an earlier Christian age from the restless,
voluble group upon the tiny quay.

There were _facchini_--those doers of nondescript smallest services,
quarreling amiably to pass the time, springing forward for custom as the
gondolas neared the steps; _gransieri_--the licensed traghetto beggars,
ragged and picturesque, pushing past with their long, crooked poles,
under pretence of drawing the gondolas to shore; one or two women from
the islands, filling the moments with swift, declamatory speech until
the gondola of Giambattista or of Jacopo should close the colloquy; an
older peasant, tranquilly kneeling to the Madonna of the traghetto, amid
the clatter, while steaming greasy odors from her housewifely basket of
Venetian dainties mount slowly, like some travesty of