“Since thou wilt have me curious,” he said, “why hast thou come hither, and more than all, being here, why dost thou linger?”

“The season is advanced, Carlo,” she answered, speaking scarcely above her breath, “and we should look in vain among the cells.”

“I understand thee,” he said; “we will proceed.”

Gelsomina lingered to gaze wistfully into the face of her companion, but finding no visible sign of the agony he endured she went on.  Jacopo spoke hoarsely, but he was too long accustomed to disguise to permit the weakness to escape, when he knew how much it would pain the sensitive and faithful being who had yielded her affections to him with a singleness and devotion which arose nearly as much from her manner of life as from natural ingenuousness.

In order that the reader may be enabled to understand the allusions, which seem to be so plain to our lovers, it may be necessary to explain another odious feature in the policy of the Republic of Venice.

Whatever may be the pretension of a state, in its acknowledged theories, an unerring clue to its true character is ever to be found in the machinery of its practice.  In those governments which are created for the good of the people, force is applied with caution and reluctance, since the protection and not the injury of the weak is their object:  whereas the more selfish and exclusive the system becomes, the more severe and ruthless are the coercive means employed by those in power.  Thus in Venice, whose whole political fabric reposed on the narrow foundation of an oligarchy, the jealousy of the Senate brought the engines of despotism in absolute contact with even the pageantry of their titular prince, and the palace of the Doge himself was polluted by the presence of the dungeons.  The princely edifice had its summer and winter cells.  The reader may be ready to believe that mercy had dictated some slight solace for the miserable in this arrangement.  But this would be ascribing pity to a body which, to its latest moment, had no tie to subject it to the weakness of humanity.  So far from consulting the sufferings of the captive, his winter cell was below the level of the canals, while his summers were to be passed beneath the leads exposed to the action of the burning sun of that climate.  As the reader has probably anticipated already, that Jacopo was in the prison on an errand connected with some captive, this short explanation will enable him to understand the secret allusion of his companion.  He they sought had, in truth, been recently conveyed from the damp cells where he had passed the winter and spring, to the heated chambers beneath the roof.