Piero had no suspicion that Marina always touched the best that was in him; he thought she made him weaker, and it was not easy to yield the point that had become a habit.  No one else had ever moved him from any purpose, but now he perceived that there would be no reversal of that sentence—­that he should continue to come to see his child, and that he must continue to submit to Marina’s influence.  It was she who had, in some unaccountable way, persuaded him out of his unlawful trade of barcariol toso, and had forced his reluctant acceptance of the overtures that were made to him from the Guild of Santa Maria Zobenigo, where he had risen to be one of the bancali or governors, his qualities of force and daring making him useful in this age when lawlessness was on the increase.  He was beginning to feel a sense of satisfaction, not all barbaric, in the position he had won among men who had some views of order, and to perceive that there might be a lawful use, almost as pleasant, for those very attributes which had rendered him so formidable a foe outside the pale of traghetto civilization.

“Ecco!” he announced, with a slow, sullen emphasis which declared his unwilling surrender, while he plied his oar with quick, wrathful strokes.  “It will take more than aves to make a saint of thee!  And thou mayst hold thy head too high, looking for better than wheaten bread!  But I’m not the man to wear a curb, nor to put up with thorns where I looked for roses!  Thou hast no right to mind what chances to me—­yet thou hast made me give up the old life.”

“Because I knew thou couldst do better.  See where thou standest to-day!  It is not a little thing to be a governor of the Nicolotti!”

“It is a truth,” Piero confessed, “upside down, and not to boast of, for whoever tries it would wish it less.  The bancali are ’like asses who carry wine and drink water,’ for the good of the clouts, in days like these.”

“I heard them talking to-day, Piero.  The barcarioli tosi are worse than Turks; one must pay, to suit their whim, in the middle of the Canal Grande, or one may wait long for the landing!  And there was a scandal about a friar of San Zanipolo, of whom they had asked a fare for the crossing; I know not the truth of it!  And at Santa Sofia the great cross with the beautiful golden lustre is gone, and one says it is the ‘tosi.’”

Piero winced, for, to an ancient “toso,” or even to a “bancalo” of to-day, such enormities had not the exciting novelty that might have been expected, and Marina had a curious habit of seeming entirely to forget his past when she wished to exact his best of him.

“And Gabriele—­”

“Fash not thyself for a man of his measure, that is fitter to ’beat the fishes’ like a galley-slave than to serve an honest gondola!” Piero interrupted scornfully.

“But Piero, Gabriele hath sold his license to one worse than he, and there was great talk of quarrels along the Riva, and how that yesterday they sent for Padre Gervasio from San Gregorio to bring the Host to quiet them.”