“Quickly, quickly!” he cried, quite unconscious that he was speaking.

There was no need of hurrying Zorzi.  In two steps he had reached the table, and the white hot stuff spread out over the iron plate, instantly turning to a greenish yellow, then to a pale rose-colour, then to a deep and glowing red, as it felt the cool metal.  The two men stood watching it closely, for it was thin and would soon cool.  Zorzi was too wise to say anything.  Beroviero’s look of interest gradually turned into an expression of disappointment.

“Another failure,” he said, with a resignation which no one would have expected in such a man.

His practised eyes had guessed the exact hue of the glass, while it still lay on the iron, half cooled and far too hot to touch.  Zorzi took a short rod and pushed the round sheet till a part of it was over the edge of the table.

“It is the best we have had yet,” he observed, looking at it.

“Is it?” asked Beroviero with little interest, and without giving the glass another glance.  “It is not what I am trying to get.  It is the colour of wine, not of blood.  Make something, Zorzi, while I write down the result of the experiment.”

He took big pen and the sheet of rough paper on which he had already noted the proportions of the materials, and he began to write, sitting at the large table before the open window.  Zorzi took the long iron blow-pipe, cleaned it with a cloth and pushed the end through the orifice from which he had taken the specimen.  He drew it back with a little lump of melted glass sticking to it.

Holding the blow-pipe to his lips, he blew a little, and the lump swelled, and he swung the pipe sharply in a circle, so that the glass lengthened to the shape of a pear, and he blew again and it grew.  At the ‘bocca’ of the furnace he heated it, for it was cooling quickly; and he had his iron pontil ready, as there was no one to help him, and he easily performed the feat of taking a little hot glass on it from the pot and attaching it to the further end of the fast-cooling pear.  If Beroviero had been watching him he would have been astonished at the skill with which the young man accomplished what it requires two persons to do; but Zorzi had tricks of his own, and the pontil supported itself on a board while he cracked the pear from the blow-pipe with a wet iron, as well as if a boy had held it in place for him; and then heating and reheating the piece, he fashioned it and cut it with tongs and shears, rolling the pontil on the flat arms of his stool with his left hand, and modelling the glass with his right, till at last he let it cool to its natural colour, holding it straight downward, and then swinging it slowly, so that it should fan itself in the air.  It was a graceful calix now, of a deep wine red, clear and transparent as claret.

Zorzi turned to the window to show it to his master, not for the sake of the workmanship but of the colour.  The old man’s head was bent over his writing; Marietta was standing outside, and her eyes met Zorzi’s.  He did not blush as he had blushed yesterday, when he looked up from the fire and saw her; he merely inclined his head respectfully, to acknowledge her presence, and then he stood by the table waiting for the master to notice him, and not bestowing another glance on the young girl.