“Thou dost verily make too much of the nobles and the people, Marina; we are all Venetians.”

“Venice is of the sea and of the land—­not like other cities; and the Venetian people is not one, but twain; my father hath often said it.  Some other day, perhaps—­I do not know—­if it is needful for the picture, I may come again.  Will you tell the maestro?  I think he is our friend, and he will understand.”

He would have followed her, but she waved him back.

The day had a melancholy cast in the narrow waterways of Murano, where clouds of smoke, dense and constant, rose from hundreds of glass-workers’ chimneys, dimming the reflections in the lagoon and obscuring that wonderful coloring of sky which is nowhere so radiant as at Venice.

Beyond the bridge, which the ubiquitous Lion guards with menacing, uplifted paw, beyond the Piazzetta of San Pietro where the acacia trees are growing, down by the main canal, where the breath comes freer—­for it is broader than the one where the gondolas from the great houses of Venice gather and float lazily; past the line of low, whitewashed cottages bordering the narrow foot-path on either side, over the little wooden bridge that spans the lagoon, fifty feet across from bank to bank with its ugly traghetto at the farther end, a figure was often seen wending, with a child held in tender mother fashion, to the campo of the “Matrice,” the mother church of San Donate.

To-day when Marina had returned from Venice she had caught the little Zuane to her breast with such a passion of tenderness that he looked up into her face with startled eyes; hers were brimming with smiles and tears, and with that wise child-knowledge, which is not granted to earth’s learned ones, he put up his tiny hand with a wan smile and stroked her cheek.

“We will go to San Donato, Zuanino mio,” she said caressingly, as he nestled closer, “and I have thee, my bimbo!”

She put the little one gently down as they entered the triangular field where the grass grew green and long—­whiteness of sand gleaming in irregular patches between the clumps of coarse blades; but to her this poor turf was something precious associated with that island sanctuary, restful and strange, and she drew a long breath with a sense of suppressed pleasure; for sometimes the water, with its shimmering, uncertain surfaces, wearied her, and unconsciously she craved something more positive.

The child, with uncertain steps, tottered toward the standard of San Marco, which floated proudly from the staff that rose from the rude stone pillar in the center of the campo, where other little ones were playing; in the corner by the well groups of women, from the cottages that bounded the campo on one side, were waiting to draw water for the evening meal, putting down their jugs and going first into the Duomo to say an ave, that the good Madonna might bless the cup.

A few feet only from the Duomo the campanile drew her vision skyward; the film of smoke was lighter here, and the sky seemed nearer—­bluer.  She turned to her little charge with a beaming face—­her moods were so easily wrought upon by phases of nature, but slowly moved by personal influences.  “See’st thou, bimbo, how it is beautiful here by the Duomo?”