“Yes,” said Castelrovinato with his melancholy smile, “the test of success is to have had one’s money’s worth; but experience, which is dried pleasure, is at best a dusty diet, as we know.  Yonder, in a fold of those hills,” he added, pointing to the cluster of Euganean mountains just faintly pencilled above the plain, “lies the little fief from which I take my name.  Acre by acre, tree by tree, it has gone to pay for my experiments, not in agriculture but in pleasure; and whenever I look over at it from Venice and reflect on what each rood of ground or trunk of tree has purchased, I wonder to see my life as bare as ever for all that I have spent on it.”

The young Marquess shrugged his shoulders.  “And would your life,” he exclaimed, “have been a whit less bare had you passed it in your ancestral keep among those windy hills, in the company of swineherds and charcoal-burners, with a milk-maid for your mistress and the village priest for your partner at picquet?”

“Perhaps not,” the other agreed.  “There is a tale of a man who spent his life in wishing he had lived differently; and when he died he was surrounded by a throng of spectral shapes, each one exactly like the other, who, on his asking what they were, replied:  ’We are all the different lives you might have lived.’”

“If you are going to tell ghost-stories,” cried Coeur-Volant, “I will call for a bottle of Canary!”

“And I,” rejoined the Count good-humouredly, “will try to coax the ladies forth with a song;” and picking up his lute, which always lay within reach, he began to sing in the Venetian dialect:—­

    There’s a villa on the Brenta
    Where the statues, white as snow,
    All along the water-terrace
    Perch like sea-gulls in a row.

    There’s a garden on the Brenta
    Where the fairest ladies meet,
    Picking roses from the trellis
    For the gallants at their feet.

    There’s an arbour on the Brenta
    Made of yews that screen the light,
    Where I kiss my girl at midday
    Close as lovers kiss at night.

The players soon emerged at this call and presently the deck resounded with song and laughter.  All the company were familiar with the Venetian bacaroles, and Castelrovinato’s lute was passed from hand to hand, as one after another, incited by the Marquess’s Canary, tried to recall some favourite measure—­“La biondina in gondoleta” or “Guarda, che bella luna.”

Meanwhile life was stirring in the villages and gardens, and groups of people appearing on the terraces overhanging the water.  Never had Odo beheld a livelier scene.  The pillared houses with their rows of statues and vases, the flights of marble steps descending to the gilded river-gates, where boats bobbed against the landings and boatmen gasped in the shade of their awnings; the marble trellises hung with grapes, the gardens where parterres of flowers and parti-coloured