that you were not too
lazy to save me from drowning when I fell into the Grand Canal in
carnival."

"I forgot that the water was so cold," said Venier. "If I had guessed
how chilly it was, I should certainly not have pulled you out. There is
old Hossein at his window. Let us go in and drink sherbet."

"We shall find Mocenigo and Loredan there," answered Foscari. "They
shall promise to help the glass-blower, too."

They nodded to the Persian merchant, who saluted them by extending his
hand towards the ground as if to take up dust, and then bringing it to
his forehead. He was very fat, and his pear-shaped face might have been
carved out of white cheese. The two young men went in by a small door at
the side of the window-counter and disappeared into the interior. At the
back of the shop there was a private room with a latticed window that
looked out upon a narrow canal. It was one of many places where the
young Venetians met in the afternoon to play at dice undisturbed, on
pretence of examining Hossein's splendid carpets and Oriental silks.
Moreover Hossein's wife, always invisible but ever near, had a
marvellous gift for making fruit sherbets, cooled with the snow that was
brought down daily from the mountains on the mainland in dripping bales
covered with straw matting.

Loredan and Mocenigo were already there, as Foscari had anticipated,
eating pistachio nuts and sipping sherbet through rice straws out of
tall glasses from Murano. It was a very safe place, for Hossein's
knowledge of the Italian language was of a purely commercial character,
embracing every numeral and fraction, common or uncommon, and the names
of all the hundreds of foreign coins that passed current in Venice,
together with half-a-dozen necessary phrases; and his invisible but
occasionally audible wife understood no Italian at all. Also, Hossein
was always willing to lend any young patrician money with which to pay
his losses, at the modest rate of seven ducats to be paid every week for
the use of each hundred; which one of the youths, who had a turn for
arithmetic, had discovered to be only about 364 per cent yearly, whereas
Casadio, the Hebrew, had a method of his own by which he managed to get
about 580. It was therefore a real economy to frequent Hossein's shop.

In spite of his pretended forgetfulness, Venier remembered every word
that Beroviero had told him, and indolently as he talked, his whole
nature was roused to defend Zorzi. In his hea