“Oh thou, clothed round with raiment of white waves,
Thy brave brows lightening through the gray wet air,
Thou, lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves,
And lit with sea-shine to thy inland lair,
Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves
And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare,
Oh, by the centuries of thy glorious graves,
By the live light of the earth that was thy care,
Live, thou must not be dead,
Live; let thy armed head
Lift itself up to sunward and the fair
Daylight of time and man,
Thine head republican,
With the same splendor on thine helmless hair
That in his eyes kept up a light
Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight.”

The cry there was in this voice!  Surely his heart answered,

“Oh Milton’s land, what ails thee to be dead!”

Was it in this very room, he wondered, that the old Polish refugee was used to lift up his trembling hand and bid his compatriots drink to “the white chalk-line beyond the sea?” How could he forget, as he and she sat together that morning, and gazed across the blue waters to the far and sunlit line of coast, the light that shone on her face as she said, “If I were English, how proud I should be of England!” And this England of her veneration and her love—­did it not contain some, at least, who would answer to her appeal?

Presently Natalie Lind shut the book and gently laid it down, and stole out of the room.  She was gone only for a few seconds.  When she returned, she had in her hand a volume of sketches, of which she had been speaking during dinner.

He did not open this volume at once.  On the contrary, he was silent for a little while; and then he looked up, and addressed Natalie, with a strange grave smile on his face.

“I was about to tell your father, Miss Lind, when you came in, that if I could not translate for you, or carry a message across the Atlantic for him, he might at least find something else that I can do.  At all events, may I say that I am willing to join you, if I can be of any help at all?”

Ferdinand Lind regarded him for a second, and said, quite calmly,

“It is unnecessary.  You have already joined us.”

CHAPTER IX.

A NIGHT IN VENICE.

The solitary occupant of this railway-carriage was apparently reading; but all the same he looked oftener at his watch than at his book.  At length he definitely shut the volume and placed it in his travelling-bag.  Then he let down the carriage-window, and looked out into the night.

The heavens were clear and calm; the newly-risen moon was but a thin crescent of silver; in the south a large planet was shining.  All around him, as it seemed, stretched a vast plain of water, as dark and silent and serene as the overarching sky.  Then, far ahead, he could catch a glimpse of a pale line stretching across the watery plain—­a curve of the many-arched viaduct along which the train was thundering; and beyond that again, and low down at the horizon, two or three minute and dusky points of orange.  These lights were the lights of Venice.