and with a cold sense of failure Odo heard the bolt slipping back and the stealthy fall of the oars as the gondola slid away under the shadow of the convent-wall.  Whither was he being carried and would that bolt ever be drawn for him again?  In the sultry dawn the convent loomed forbiddingly as a prison, and he could hardly believe that a few hours earlier the very doors now closed against him had stood open to all the world.  They would open again; but whether to him, who could conjecture?  He was resolved to see Fulvia again, but he shrank from the thought of forcing himself upon her.  She had promised to receive him; but what revulsion of feeling might not the morrow bring?

Unable to sleep, he bade the boatmen carry him to the Lido.  The sun was just rising above the Friulian Alps and the lagoon lay dull and smooth as a breathed-on mirror.  As he paced the lonely sands he tried to reconstruct Fulvia’s broken story, supplementing it with such details as his experience of Venetian life suggested.  It appeared that after her father’s death she had found herself possessed of a small sum of money which he had painfully accumulated for her during the two years they had spent in Pavia.  Her only thought was to employ this inheritance in publishing the great work on the origin of civilisation which Vivaldi had completed a few days before his last seizure.  Through one of the professors of the University, who had been her father’s friend, she negotiated with a printer of Amsterdam for the production of the book, and the terms being agreed on, despatched the money and the manuscript thither by a sure hand.  Both were duly delivered and the publisher had advanced so far in his work as to send Fulvia the proof-sheets of the first chapters, when he took alarm at the renewed activity of the Holy Office in France and Italy, declared there would be no market for the book in the present state of affairs, and refused either to continue printing it, or to restore the money, which he said had barely covered the setting-up of the type.  Fulvia then attempted to recover the manuscript; but the publisher refusing to surrender it, she found herself doubly beggared at a stroke.

In this extremity she turned to a sister of her father’s, who lived near Treviso; and this excellent woman, though persuaded that her brother’s heretical views had doomed him to everlasting torment, did not scruple to offer his child a home.  Here Fulvia had lived for two years when her aunt’s sudden death left her destitute; for the good lady, to atone for having given shelter to a niece of doubtful orthodoxy, had left the whole of her small property to the Church.