The glass-house was guarded from outsiders as carefully as a nunnery, and somewhat resembled a convent in having no windows so situated that curious persons might see from without what went on inside.  The place was entered by a low door from the narrow paved path that ran along the canal.  In a little vestibule, ill-lighted by one small grated window, sat the porter, an uncouth old man who rarely answered questions, and never opened the door until he had assured himself by a deliberate inspection through the grating that the person who knocked had a right to come in.  Marietta remembered him in his den when she had been a little child, and she vaguely supposed that he had always been there.  He had been old then, he was not visibly older now, he would probably never die of old age, and if any mortal ill should carry him off, he would surely be replaced by some one exactly like him, who would sleep in the same box bed, sit all day in the same black chair, and eat bread, shellfish and garlic off the same worm-eaten table.  There was no other entrance to the glass-house, and there could be no other porter to guard it.

Beyond the vestibule a dark corridor led to a small garden that formed the court of the building, and on one side of which were the large windows that lighted the main furnace room, while the other side contained the laboratory of the master.  But the main furnace was entered from the corridor, so that the workmen never passed through the garden.  There were a few shrubs in it, two or three rose-bushes and a small plane-tree.  Zorzi, who had been born and brought up in the country, had made a couple of flower-beds, edged with refuse fragments of coloured and iridescent slag, and he had planted such common flowers as he could make grow in such a place, watering them from a disused rain-water cistern that was supposed to have been poisoned long ago.  Here Marietta often sat in the shade, when the laboratory was too close and hot, and when the time was at hand during which even the men would not be able to work on account of the heat, and the furnace would be put out and repaired, and every one would be set to making the delicate clay pots in which the glass was to be melted.  Marietta could sit silent and motionless in her seat under the plane-tree for a long time when she was thinking, and she never told any one her thoughts.

She was not unlike her father in looks, and that was doubtless the reason why he assumed that she must be like him in character.  No one would have said that she was handsome, but sometimes, when she smiled, those who saw that rare expression in her face thought she was beautiful.  When it was gone, they said she was cold.  Fortunately, her hair was not red, as her father’s had been or she might sometimes have seemed positively ugly; it was of that deep ruddy, golden brown that one may often see in Venice still, and there was an abundance of it, though it was drawn straight back from her white forehead and braided into