Life had begun to move again, with slow, clogged wheels, in the Ca’ Giustiniani since that sudden favorable change had come to the Lady Marina.  Her husband was no longer excused from attendance in the Council Halls of the Republic, and whether to quicken his interest in the affairs of the government or because, in due course, the time had come when a young noble so full of promise should take a prominent place in her councils, he was now constantly called upon to fill important offices in transient committees.  Certainly there was some strange, ubiquitous power in that watchful governmental eye; and in the Broglio it had been whispered that if the young Senator were not held constant by multiplied honors and responsibilities the home influence might be fateful to the house of Giustiniani—­a house too princely and too important to Venice to be suffered to tolerate any sympathy with Rome.  Giustinian the elder, being pronounced in his patriotic partizanship, had replaced the ambassador to his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, whose attempts at conciliation were so ludicrously inadequate that a court of less astute diplomacy than Venice might have been tempted to withdraw its embassy.  Spain and Venice had been stepping through a stately dance, as it were, decorous and princely,—­though scarcely misleading,—­an interminable round of bows and dignified advances leading no whither, since for a forward step there was a corresponding backward motion to complete the chasse, and all in that gracious circle which flatters the actor and the onlooker with a pleasurable sense of progress; but the suspense as to the issue of this minuet was all on the side of Spain, and Venice had patience to spare for these pretty time-filling paces which presented such semblance of careless ease to the watching embassies.  England, with an understanding quickened by her own experience, took a serious interest in the quarrel.  But his Most Christian Majesty of France was foremost among the princes in efforts to hasten the conciliation of the disputants, and when Henry of France offered to mediate between the powers, Venice said him not nay.  For if she would take no personal step toward conciliation, she yet held no code by which the intercession of a monarch might seem to lessen her dignity; and the coming of so princely an envoy as the Cardinal di Gioiosa was celebrated with fetes meet to grace the reception of so high a dignitary of the Church of Rome.

Hence Venice, under the ban, suggested rather a lively tourney in some field of cloth of gold, than an excommunicated nation in its time of mourning; there were frequent interchanges of diplomatic courtesies—­receptions to special embassies which had lost nothing of their punctilious splendor.  There had always been time in Venice for absolute decorum, and now there was not less than usual, since her conduct had been denounced—­though Venice and her prestige were untarnished and the world was looking on!