Zorzi looked from the glass to her face, close by his, and their eyes met for a moment in the strange glow and it was as if they knew each other in another world.

“Do not let the red light fall on your faces,” said Nella, crossing herself.  “It is too much like blood—­good health to you,” she added quickly for fear of evil.

Marietta lowered her hand and turned the piece of glass sideways, to see how it would look.

“What shall we do with it?” she asked.  “It must not be left any longer in the crucible.”

“No.  It ought to be taken out at once.  Such a colour must be kept for church windows.  If I were able to stand, I would make most of it into cylinders and cut them while hot.  There are men who can do it, in the glass-house.  But the master does not want them here.”

“We had better let the fires go out,” said Marietta.  “It will cool in the crucible as it is.”

“I would give anything to have that crucible empty, or an empty one in the place,” answered Zorzi.  “This is a great discovery, but it is not exactly what the master expected.  I have an idea of my own, which I should like to try.”

“Then we must empty the crucible.  There is no other way.  The glass will keep its colour, whatever shape we give it.  Is there much of it?”

“There may be twenty or thirty pounds’ weight,” answered Zorzi.  “No one can tell.”

Nell listened in mute surprise.  She had never seen Marietta with old Beroviero, and she was amazed to hear her young mistress talking about the processes of glass-making, about crucibles and cylinders and ingredients as familiarly as of domestic things.  She suddenly began to imagine that old Beroviero, who was probably a magician and an alchemist, had taught his daughter the same dangerous knowledge, and she felt a sort of awe before the two young people who knew such a vast deal which she herself could never know.

She asked herself what was to become of this wonderful girl, half woman and half enchantress, who brought the colour of the saints’ blood out of the white flames, and understood as much as men did of the art which was almost all made up of secrets.  What would happen when she was the wife of Jacopo Contarini, shut up in a splendid Venetian palace where there were no glass furnaces to amuse her?  At first she would grow pale, thought Nella, but by and by would weave spells in her chamber which would bring all Venice to her will, and turn it all to gold and precious stones and red glass, and the people to fairies subject to her will, her husband, the Council of Ten, even the Doge himself.

Nella roused herself, and passed her hand over her eyes, as if she were waking from a dream.  And indeed she had been dreaming, for she had looked too long into the wonderful depths of the new colour, and it had dazed her wits.

CHAPTER XII