there burn two eyes that would make a holy man clutch his rosary; and
if the flower sways on its stalk with the movement of a sapling
caressed by a summer breeze;--then the black tulip is precisely the
kind of flower that Loretta bloomed into.

And here the real trouble began,--just as it begins for every other
pretty Venetian, and here, too, must I place the second pin in my chart.

It all came through Francesco. The older sister had died with the first
child, and this crab catcher had begun to stretch out his claws for
Loretta. She and her mother still lived with Francesco's father, who
was a widower. The mother kept the house for all,--had done so for
Francesco and her daughter during their brief married life.

In her persecution Loretta would pour out her heart to Luigi, telling
how they bothered her,--her mother the most of all. She hated
Francesco,--hated his father,--hated everybody who wanted her to marry
the fisherman. (Luigi, poor fellow, had lost his only daughter when she
was five years of age, which accounted, I always thought, for his
interest in the girl.)

One morning she called to him and waited on the quay until he could
hail a passing barca and step from the gondola to its deck and so
ashore. Then the two disappeared through the gate of the garden.

"She is too pretty to go alone," he explained on his return. "Every day
she must pay a boy two soldi, Signore, to escort her to the lace
factory--the boy is sick today and so I went with her. But their
foolishness will stop after this;--these rats know Luigi."

From this day on Loretta had the Riva to herself.

II

So far there has been introduced into this story the bad man,
Francesco, with crab-like tendencies, who has just lost his wife; the
ravishingly beautiful Loretta; the girl's mother, of whom all sorts of
stories were told--none to her credit; big tender-hearted Luigi
Zanaletto, prince of gondoliers, and last, and this time least, a staid
old painter who works in a gondola up a crooked canal which is
smothered in trees, choked by patched-up boats and flanked by tattered
rookeries so shaky that the slightest earth quiver would tumble them
into kindling wood.

There enters now another and much more important character,--one
infinitely more interesting to my beautiful Lady of the Shipyards than
any grandfather gondolier or staid old painter who ever lived. This
young gentleman is twenty-one; has a head like the Hermes, a body like
the