looking for the reasons of the deep moral and physical degradation out
of which the lately revived sparks of greatness and nobility shone so
much the more brightly. My ideas, no doubt, were passing through his
mind, for all processes of thought-communications are far more swift,
I think, in blind people, because their blindness compels them to
concentrate their attention. I had not long to wait for proof that we
were in sympathy in this way. Facino Cane left off playing, and came up
to me. "Let us go out!" he said; his tones thrilled through me like an
electric shock. I gave him my arm, and we went.

Outside in the street he said, "Will you take me back to Venice? Will
you be my guide? Will you put faith in me? You shall be richer than ten
of the richest houses in Amsterdam or London, richer than Rothschild; in
short, you shall have the fabulous wealth of the _Arabian Nights_."

The man was mad, I thought; but in his voice there was a potent
something which I obeyed. I allowed him to lead, and he went in the
direction of the Fosses de la Bastille, as if he could see; walking till
he reached a lonely spot down by the river, just where the bridge has
since been built at the junction of the Canal Saint-Martin and the
Seine. Here he sat down on a stone, and I, sitting opposite to him, saw
the old man's hair gleaming like threads of silver in the moonlight. The
stillness was scarcely troubled by the sound of the far-off thunder of
traffic along the boulevards; the clear night air and everything about
us combined to make a strangely unreal scene.

"You talk of millions to a young man," I began, "and do you think that
he will shrink from enduring any number of hardships to gain them? Are
you not laughing at me?"

"May I die unshriven," he cried vehemently, "if all that I am about to
tell you is not true. I was one-and-twenty years old, like you at this
moment. I was rich, I was handsome, and a noble by birth. I began
with the first madness of all--with Love. I loved as no one can love
nowadays. I have hidden myself in a chest, at the risk of a dagger
thrust, for nothing more than the promise of a kiss. To die for Her--it
seemed to me to be a whole life in itself. In 1760 I fell in love with a
lady of the Vendramin family; she was eighteen years old, and married to
a Sagredo, one of the richest senators, a man of thirty, madly in love
with his wife. My mistress and I were guiltless as cherubs when the
_sposo_ caught us tog