pproaching, with soft dip of oar,
and gleaming tiny lights.

The singer was a woman. She was standing in the middle of the boat, one
hand clinging, as if for support, to the shoulder of a violinist. The
voice was high and strained; painfully strained, it seemed, to Pauline's
quick perception.

"How tired that woman's voice is!" she exclaimed. "Do let us give them
something!"

Vittorio brought the gondola close alongside the barge, but before
Pauline could make her offering, the strained voice broke, the figure
swayed heavily to one side, and the woman sank to the floor, supported
in the arms of one of the men. The big boat instantly moved away, and in
another moment, the swinging paper lanterns, illumining but faintly the
anxious group of musicians, had disappeared down a side canal.

The other gondolas had not yet come up, and Vittorio, without waiting
for orders, rowed after the retreating barge, which he overtook with a
few vigorous strokes of the oar. The men had stopped rowing, and someone
was calling for a gondola. The Colonel's boat was promptly placed at
their service.

The woman had already recovered consciousness, and was murmuring
pitifully: "_A casa, a casa!_" Her husband helped her aboard the
gondola, where Pauline took compassionate possession of her, ministering
to her in gentle, discerning wise. May, usually so fertile in resource,
found nothing to offer but her _vinaigrette_, which the patient did not
take kindly to; while Uncle Dan, with misguided zeal, administered a
severe rebuke to the unhappy husband, for allowing his wife to sing,
when she was so manifestly unequal to the effort.

"Ah, Signore," the man replied, in a tone of dull discouragement, "you
do not know poverty!" Whereupon the Colonel admitted that it was
_vero_, and, becoming very penitent indeed, began grubbing about his
person in search of paper money, and calling himself names for having
left his wallet in the pocket of his other coat.

Meanwhile, Vittorio was rowing them swiftly down narrow canals with many
windings, where the water flowed black in the shadow, and gleamed
weirdly in the light of a chance gas-lamp. The moon was not yet high
enough to look down between those close-ranged walls, but, above them,
the sky stretched, a luminous, deep blue ribbon, upon which only the
brighter stars could hold their own.

News of the mishap had outstripped the gondola. Two turns of an
alley-way, a couple of bridges, a dash across a