ert ruminated, without finding anything to
say.

"You have comforted me," Dolly went on presently. "Thank you, Rupert.
You have made me remember what I had forgotten. Just look at that
palace front in the moonlight!"

"The world's a queer place, though," said Rupert, not heeding the
palace front.

"What are you thinking of?"

"This city, for one thing. I've been, reading that book you lent me.
Hasn't there been confusion enough, though, up and down these canals,
and in and out of those palaces! and the rest of the world is pretty
much in the same way. Only in America it ain't quite so bad. I suppose
because we haven't had time enough."

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE WINE-SHOP.

It was past twelve by the clock tower when the two left the gondola and
entered the Place of St. Mark. The old church with its cupolas, the
open Place, the pillars with St. Theodore and the dragon, the palace of
the Doges with its open stone work, showed like a scene out of another
world; so unearthly beautiful, so weird and so stately. There had been
that day some festival or public occasion which had called the
multitude together, and lingerers were still to be seen here and there,
and the windows of cafes and trattorie were lighted, and the buzz of
voices came from them. Dolly and Rupert crossed the square, however,
without more than a moment's lingering, and plunged presently into what
seemed to her a labyrinth of confused ways. Such ways! an alley in New
York would be broad in comparison; two women in hoops would have been
obliged to use some skill to pass each other; they threaded the old
city in the strangest manner. Rupert went steadily and without
hesitation, Dolly wondered how he could, through one into another, up
and down, over bridge after bridge, clearly knowing his way; yet it was
a nervous walk to her, for more than one reason. Sometimes the whole
line of one of these narrow streets, if they could be called so, would
be perfectly dark; the moonlight not getting into it, and only
glittering on a palace cornice or a street corner in view; others,
lying right for the moonbeams, were flooded with them from one turning
to another. Most of the shops were closed; but the sellers of fruit had
not shut up their windows yet, and now and then a cook-shop made a most
peculiar picture, with its blazing fire at the back, and its dishes of
cooked and uncooked viands temptingly displayed at the street front.
Steadily and swiftly Rupert and Do