“But for your gastaldo, your great man, for him it is much honor—­”

“Eccellenza, believe it not.  If the taxes are not there for the provveditori, it is the gastaldo who pays.  When the money is little it is the gastaldo who pays much.  And the toso—­all his faults blamed on the traghetti!  Ah, signore, for the gondolier it is a life—­Santa Maria!” He threw up his hands with a feint of being at a loss to convey its hardships.

“Come non c’e altro!” said the Veronese, laughing; “there is none like it.”

“Ebbene—­va bene!” the gondolier confessed, joining heartily in the merriment, his grievance, which was nevertheless a real one, infinitely lessened by confession.

Suddenly the old man rose and bowed his head, and both gondoliers crossed themselves.  The Veronese also bared his head and made the sign of reverence, for they were passing the island of San Michele, toward which a mournful procession of boats, each with its torch and its banner of black, was slowly gliding, while back over the water echoed the dirge from those sobbing cellos.  Here, where only the dead were sleeping, the sky was as blue and the sea as calm as if sorrow had never been born in the world.

Before them Murano, low-lying, scattered, was close at hand, the smoke of its daily activities tremulous over it, dimming the beauty of sky and sea.

“His Excellency knows Murano?  The Duomo, with its mosaics?  Wonderful! there are none like them; and it is old—­’ma antica’!  And the stabilimenti?—­it is glory enough for one island!  Ah, the padrone wishes to visit the stabilimento Magagnati?”

Paolo Cagliari had not known what he would do until the old man’s suggestion seemed to make his vision less vaguely inaccessible, and before they reached the landing he had learned, by a judicious indifference which sharpened his companion’s loquacity, that Messer Girolamo lived there alone with his daughter, who went about always with a bambino in her arms—­the child of a dead sister.

There could be no doubt; yet, to keep the old man talking, he put the question, “She is very beautiful, the donzella?”

“Eccellenza”—­with a pause and deprecatory movement of the shoulders—­“cosi—­so-so—­a little pale—­like a saint—­devote.  For the poor?  Good, gentile, the donzel of Messer Girolamo. Bella, with rosy colors? Non!”

With the Venetians there could be no sharp distinction between the decorative and the fine arts, as the fine arts were employed by them without limit in their sumptuous decorations; and that which elsewhere would have been merely decorative they raised, by exquisite quality and finish, to a point which deserved to be termed art, without qualifications.

The Veronese, who had been knighted by the Doge, could scarcely go unrecognized to any art establishment in any quarter of Venice, and with unconcealed pleasure Girolamo bowed low before this master who had come to do him honor; displaying all that the initiated would hold most precious among his treasures—­that design, faded and dim, almost unrecognizable, of those early mosaics of the Master Pietro—­he held nothing back.  It was a day of honor for his house, and the two were alone in his cabinet.