“One may know a song well, and yet long to hear it again and again.”

“But one cannot be always singing it oneself,” she said.

“I could never make it ring as sweetly as you,” Zorzi answered.

“Try it!  I am tired of hearing my voice—­”

“But I am not!  There is no voice like it in the world.  I shall never care to hear another, as long as I live, nor any other song, nor any other words.  And when you are weary of saying them, I shall just say them over in my heart, ’She loves me, she loves me,’—­all day long.”

“Which is better,” Marietta asked, “to love, or to know that you are loved?”

“The two thoughts are like soul and body,” Zorzi answered.  “You must not part them.”

“I never have, since I have known the truth, and never shall again.”

Then they were silent for a while, but they hardly knew it, for the world was full of the sweetest music they had ever heard, and they listened together.

“Zorzi!”

The master was at the window, calling him.  He started a little as if awaking and obeyed the summons as quickly as his lameness would allow.  Marietta looked after him, watching his halting gait, and the little effort he made with his stick at each step.  For some secret reason the injury had made him more dear to her, and she liked to remember how brave he had been.

He found Beroviero busy with his papers, and the results of the year’s experiments, and the old man at once spoke to him as if nothing unusual had happened, telling him what to do from time to time, so that all might be put in order against the time when the fires should be lighted again in September.  By and by two men came carrying a new earthen jar for broken glass, and all fragments in which the box had lain were shovelled into it, and the pieces of the old one were taken away.  The furnace was not quite cool even yet, and the crucibles might remain where they were for a few days; but there was much to be done, and Zorzi was kept at work all the morning, while Marietta sat in the shade with her work, often looking towards the window and sometimes catching sight of Zorzi as he moved about within.

Meanwhile the story of Contarini’s mishap had spread in Venice like wildfire, and before noon there was hardly one of all his many relations and friends who had not heard it.  The tale ran through the town, told by high and low, by Jacopo’s own trusted servant, and the old woman who had waited on Arisa, and it had reached the market-place at an early hour, so that the ballad-makers were busy with it.  For many had known of the existence of the beautiful Georgian slave and the subject was a good one for a song—­how she had caressed him to sleep and fostered his foolish security while he loved her blindly, and how she and her mysterious lover had bound him and shaved his head and face and made him a laughing-stock, so that he must hide himself from the world for months, and moreover how they had carried away by night all the precious gifts he had heaped upon the woman since he had bought her in the slave-market.