full of the sweetest music they had ever heard, and they
listened together.

"Zorzi!"

The master was at the window, calling him. He started a little as if
awaking and obeyed the summons as quickly as his lameness would allow.
Marietta looked after him, watching his halting gait, and the little
effort he made with his stick at each step. For some secret reason the
injury had made him more dear to her, and she liked to remember how
brave he had been.

He found Beroviero busy with his papers, and the results of the year's
experiments, and the old man at once spoke to him as if nothing unusual
had happened, telling him what to do from time to time, so that all
might be put in order against the time when the fires should be lighted
again in September. By and by two men came carrying a new earthen jar
for broken glass, and all fragments in which the box had lain were
shovelled into it, and the pieces of the old one were taken away. The
furnace was not quite cool even yet, and the crucibles might remain
where they were for a few days; but there was much to be done, and Zorzi
was kept at work all the morning, while Marietta sat in the shade with
her work, often looking towards the window and sometimes catching sight
of Zorzi as he moved about within.

Meanwhile the story of Contarini's mishap had spread in Venice like
wildfire, and before noon there was hardly one of all his many relations
and friends who had not heard it. The tale ran through the town, told by
high and low, by Jacopo's own trusted servant, and the old woman who had
waited on Arisa, and it had reached the market-place at an early hour,
so that the ballad-makers were busy with it. For many had known of the
existence of the beautiful Georgian slave and the subject was a good one
for a song--how she had caressed him to sleep and fostered his foolish
security while he loved her blindly, and how she and her mysterious
lover had bound him and shaved his head and face and made him a
laughing-stock, so that he must hide himself from the world for months,
and moreover how they had carried away by night all the precious gifts
he had heaped upon the woman since he had bought her in the
slave-market.

Last of all, his father heard it when he came home about an hour before
noon from the sitting of the Council of Ten, of which he was a member
for that year. He found Zuan Venier waiting in the hall of his house,
and the two remained closeted together for some time. Fo