onstant danger of interruption. At night it would have been impossible
owing to the presence of the boys. If Pasquale appeared and saw a heap
of broken glass on the floor, he would surely suspect something. Zorzi
calculated that it would take two hours to remove the fragments with the
care necessary to avoid cutting his hands badly, and to put them back
again, for the shape of the jar would not admit of his employing even
one of the small iron shovels used for filling the crucibles.

With considerable difficulty he moved a large chest, that contained
sifted white sand, out of the dark corner in which it stood and placed
it diagonally so as to leave a triangular space behind it. To guard
against the sound of the broken glass being heard from without, he shut
the window, in spite of the heat, and having arranged in the corner one
of the sacks used for bringing the cakes of kelp-ashes from Egypt, he
began to fill it with the broken glass he brought from the jar in a
bucket. When he judged that he had taken out more than half the
contents, he took the iron box from the annealing oven. It was hard to
carry it under the arm by which he walked with a stick, the other hand
being necessary to move the crutch, and as he reached the jar he felt
that it was slipping. He bent forward and it fell with a crash, bedding
itself in the smashed glass. Zorzi drew a long breath of satisfaction,
for the hardest part of the work was done.

He tried to heave up the sack from the corner, but it was far too heavy,
and he was obliged to bring back more than half of what it held by
bucketfuls, before he was able to bring the rest, dragging it after him
across the floor. It was finished at last, he had shaken out the sack
carefully over the jar's mouth, and he had moved the sand-chest back to
its original position. No one would have imagined that the broken glass
had been removed and put back again. The box was safely hidden now.

He was utterly exhausted when he dropped into the big chair, after
washing the dust and blood from his hands--for it had been impossible to
do what he had done without getting a few scratches, though none of them
could have been called a cut. He sat quite still and closed his eyes.
The box was safe now. It was not to be imagined that any one should ever
suspect where it was, and on that point he was well satisfied. His only
possible cause of anxiety now might be that if anything should happen to
him, the master would be