e Cataneo and Capraja were
absorbed in a long musical discussion, stole to the door of the bedroom,
lifted the curtain, and slipped in, like an eel into the mud.

"But you see, Cataneo," said Capraja, "you have exacted the last drop
of physical enjoyment, and there you are, hanging on a wire like a
cardboard harlequin, patterned with scars, and never moving unless the
string is pulled of a perfect unison."

"And you, Capraja, who have squeezed ideas dry, are not you in the same
predicament? Do you not live riding the hobby of a _cadenza_?"

"I? I possess the whole world!" cried Capraja, with a sovereign gesture
of his hand.

"And I have devoured it!" replied the Duke.

They observed that the physician and Vendramin were gone, and that they
were alone.

Next morning, after a night of perfect happiness, the Prince's sleep
was disturbed by a dream. He felt on his heart the trickle of pearls,
dropped there by an angel; he woke, and found himself bathed in the
tears of Massimilla Doni. He was lying in her arms, and she gazed at him
as he slept.

That evening, at the _Fenice_,--though la Tinti had not allowed him to
rise till two in the afternoon, which is said to be very bad for a
tenor voice,--Genovese sang divinely in his part in _Semiramide_. He was
recalled with la Tinti, fresh crowns were given, the pit was wild with
delight; the tenor no longer attempted to charm the prima donna by
angelic methods.

Vendramin was the only person whom the doctor could not cure. Love for
a country that has ceased to be is a love beyond curing. The young
Venetian, by dint of living in his thirteenth century republic, and
in the arms of that pernicious courtesan called opium, when he
found himself in the work-a-day world to which reaction brought him,
succumbed, pitied and regretted by his friends.

No, how shall the end of this adventure be told--for it is too
disastrously domestic. A word will be enough for the worshipers of the
ideal.

The Duchess was expecting an infant.

The Peris, the naiads, the fairies, the sylphs of ancient legend, the
Muses of Greece, the Marble Virgins of the Certosa at Pavia, the Day and
Night of Michael Angelo, the little Angels which Bellini was the first
to put at the foot of his Church pictures, and which Raphael painted so
divinely in his Virgin with the Donor, and the Madonna who shivers at
Dresden, the lovely Maidens by Orcagna in the Church of San-Michele,
at Florence, the celestial c