“I shall need no sitting,” the Veronese had said, when they were planning for the work.  “My picture is nearly completed, and it will suffice.  Nay, ask her not, my Marco; she is a devote—­she will not understand.”

Marcantonio flushed like a boy.  He knew it would be difficult to obtain her consent, and for that very reason he must win it, for he was a true knight.

“How shall I win my lady’s favor,” he cried hotly, “if I peril it by lack of chivalry!  There is no prouder maiden among the donne nobile on the Canal Grande.”

“Altro!  Altro!” said the master quietly.  “She also shall look down from the balconies in the palazzo Giustiniani.”

But when the young patrician told her glowingly of his wish to give his mother, on his great day, the most beautiful gift in all the world, it was hard to make her yield.

“It is not fitting,” she answered quite simply.

“Yes, yes, Marina—­since I love thee!”

“Ah, no; it is only sad.”  Her eyes filled with tears and she moved away, so that he could not touch her hand.

“Trust me, Marina!  The Veronese knows the world, and he says it is well.  It is this that shall win the consent of my mother, and she will conquer my father.  And in the Gran’ Consiglio——­”

He turned his eyes suddenly away from Marina lest she should trace the faintest flicker of a doubt within them, as the vision rose before him of that imperious body, so relentless in its decrees, so tenacious in its traditions, so positive in its autocracy; but the threatened invincibility of this force only nerved him to a resistance as invincible, and he turned back to her with a flashing face, almost before she had noticed the interruption.

“There also—­in the Consiglio—­it shall be arranged, and all will be well.”

And where two were ready for the end that should be gained the pleading was not over-long, though the thought was very strange for this simple maiden of Murano; so the precious painting was finished and in the hands of the decorators.  And meanwhile, during those days when Marina had been watching the flickering of the little Zuane’s pale flame of life and there had been no spare moments for Marcantonio, he had tried to absorb himself, as far as possible, in the preparation of this gift—­since she would not let him go to her—­and he had come to regard it as the symbol of success; for failure was never for an instant contemplated in his vision of the future.  There were pearls to be selected, one by one, in visits innumerable to the Fondaco dei Turchi, where the finest of such treasures were not secured at a first asking, and in these his mother was a connoisseur; but there were many more anxious visits to Murano, to be assured that no step in the fashioning of his gift was endangering its perfection.