But she, too earnest in her faith to take any note of a less serious mood, answered simply: 

“It was the very Madonna herself, as thou knowest her in San Donato, who came to me in the palazzo one night when I slept not, and gave me the mission to save Venice,—­scarce able to speak for her great sadness, and the tears dropping, as thou knowest her in San Donato,—­commanding me to go before the Holy Father and pray for mercy to Venice.  She it was who told me that our prayers pass not up beyond the clouds which hang above a city under doom of interdict.  Oh, Piero, hasten; for my strength is little, and Rome is far!”

When the Lady of the Giustiniani had sent for Piero to meet her in Santa Maria dell’ Orto, to ask him to manage her escape to Rome, it had not been possible to refuse her; all his attempts at reasoning were in vain.  “I must go,” she said, with that invincible persistence which he never could combat.  “If thou wilt not help me, I go alone.”  She was kneeling before the terrible “Judgment” of the Tintoret, and the face she had lifted to him in appeal was white with agonized comprehension.

The journey had been long and wearisome; all day they had been slowly toiling against the tide; and long since Piero had summoned to his aid a trusted gondolier who had been ordered to follow them at a little distance, and who, at a sign from the gastaldo, had silently left his bark to drift and taken his place at the other end of the gondola in which the fugitives were making their way to Padua.

They had passed the domain of the Laguna Morta, weird and half-forbidding, with tangles of sea-plants and upspringing wild fowl calling to each other with hoarse cries across the marshes—­with armies of water beetles zigzagging in the shallows, and crabs and lizards crawling upon the scattered sand heaps among the coarse sea-grasses, while small fish brought unexpected dimples to the deeper pools that lay between.  And the mingled odor of waters fresh and salt was broken into a breath now pungent and pleasant, now almost noisome, as the light breeze stirred the shallows of this strange domain which was neither land nor sea.  Yet even here the pale sea-holly and the evening primrose made redeeming spots of beauty, with their faint hues of violet and yellow; and a distant water-meadow shimmered like the sea, with the tender blue of the spreading lavender.

They had passed Fusina, and the lagoon lay silvery, like a trail of moonlight behind them—­Venice in the distance, opalesque, radiant, a city of dreams.  The clouds above them, beautiful with changing sunset lights, were no longer mirrored on a still lagoon, but mottled the broken surfaces of the river with hues of bronze and purple, between the leaves of the creeping water-plants which clogged the movement of the oars; for they had exchanged the liquid azure pavement of their “Citta Nobilissima” for the brown tide of the Brenta.  On the river’s brink the rushes were starred with lilies and iris and ranunculus, and the fragrance of sheeted flowers from the water-meadows came to them fresh and delicious, mingled with the salt breath of the sea, while swallows—­dusky, violet-winged—­circled about their bows, teasing their progress with mystic eliptical flight—­like persistent problems perpetually recurring, yet to be solved by fate alone.