hole life into it, he was stopped at the outset by the most impassable
barriers of impossibility. The furious desire to create, which is the
strength as well as the essence of genius, surged up and dashed itself
to futile spray upon the face of the solid rock.

He stood still before the hanging shelves on which he had placed the
objects he had occasionally made, and which his master allowed him to
keep there--light, air-thin vessels of graceful shapes: an ampulla of
exquisite outline with a long curved spout that bent upwards and then
outwards and over like the stalk of a lily of the valley; a large
drinking-glass set on a stem so slender that one would doubt its
strength to carry the weight of a full measure, yet so strong that the
cup might have been filled with lead without breaking it; a broad dish
that was nothing but a shadow against the light, but in the shadow was a
fair design of flowers, drawn free with a diamond point; there were a
dozen of such things on the shelves, not the best that Zorzi had made,
for those Beroviero took to his own house and used on great occasions,
while these were the results of experiments unheard of in those days,
and which not long afterwards made a school.

In his present frame of mind Zorzi felt a foolish impulse to take them
down and smash them one by one in the big jar into which the failures
were thrown, to be melted again in the main furnace, for in a
glass-house nothing is thrown away. He knew it was foolish, and he held
his hands behind him as he looked at the things, wishing that he had
never made them, that he had never learned the art he was forbidden by
law to practise, that he had never left Dalmatia as a little boy long
ago, that he had never been born.

The door opened suddenly and Giovanni entered. Zorzi turned and looked
at him in silence. He was surprised, but he supposed that the master's
son had a right to come if he chose, though he never showed himself in
the glass-house when his father was in Murano.

"Are you alone here?" asked Giovanni, looking about him. "Do none of the
workmen come here?"

"The master has left me in charge of his work," answered Zorzi. "I need
no help."

Giovanni seated himself in his father's chair and looked at the table
before the window.

"It is not very hard work, I fancy," he observed, crossing one leg over
the other and pulling up his black hose to make it fit his lean calf
better.

Zorzi suspected at once that he had come