“Like an honest merchant captain as you are,” added Pasquale with a grin.  “We have been anxious for you,” he added, looking at Zorzi.  “The master is in Venice this morning, to see his friends on your behalf, I think.”

“If we go back openly,” said Zorzi, “we may both be taken at any moment.”

“If they catch me,” answered Pasquale, “they will heave me overboard.  I am not worth salting.  But they need not catch either of us.  Once in the laboratory at Murano, they will never find you.  That is the one place where they will not look for you.”

The mate put his head down through the small hatch overhead.

“I do not like the look of a boat that has just put off from Saint George’s,” he said.

Aristarchi sprang to his feet.

“Pick him up and drop him into the porter’s skiff,” he said.  “I am sick of dancing with the fellow in my arms.”

With incredible ease Aristarchi took Zorzi round the waist, mounted the cabin table and passed him up through the hatch to the mate, who had already brought him to the Jacob’s ladder at the stern before Pasquale could get there by the ordinary way.

“Quick, man!” said the mate, as the old sailor climbed over the rail.

At the same time he slipped the bight of short rope round Zorzi’s body under his arms and got a turn round the rail with both parts, so as to lower him easily.  Zorzi helped himself as well as he could, and in a few moments he was lying in the bottom of the skiff, covered with a piece of sacking which the mate threw down, the rope ladder was hauled up and disappeared, and when Pasquale glanced back as he rowed slowly away, the mate was leaning over the taffrail in an attitude of easy unconcern.

The old porter had smuggled more than one bale of rich goods ashore in his young days, for a captain who had a dislike of the customs, and he knew that his chance of safety lay not in speed, but in showing a cool indifference.  He might have dropped down the Giudecca at a good rate, for the tide was fair, but he preferred a direction that would take him right across the course of the boat which the mate had seen coming, as if he were on his way to the Lido.

The officer of the Ten, with four men in plain brown coats and leathern belts, sat in the stern of the eight-oared launch that swept swiftly past the skiff towards the vessels at anchor.  Pasquale rested on his oar a moment and turned to look, with an air of interest that would have disarmed any suspicions the officer might have entertained.  But he had none, and did not bestow a second glance on the little craft with its shabby oarsman.  Then Pasquale began to row again, with a long even stroke that had no air of haste about it, but which kept the skiff at a good speed.  When he saw that he was out of hearing of other boats, and heading for the Lido, he began to tell what he intended to do next, in a low monotonous tone, glancing down now and then at Zorzi’s face that cautiously peered at him out from the folds of the sackcloth.