The men did not stop working, but they glanced at each other and nodded, when Zorzi could not see them.  Giovanni uttered a low exclamation of surprise.  The foreman alone now watched Zorzi with genuine admiration; there was no mistaking the jealous attitude of the others.  It was not the mean envy of the inferior artist, either, for they were men who, in their way, loved art as Beroviero himself did, and if Zorzi had been a new companion recently promoted from the state of apprenticeship in the guild, they would have looked on in wonder and delight, even if, at the very beginning, he outdid them all.  What they felt was quite different.  It was the deep, fierce hatred of the mediaeval guildsman for the stranger who had stolen knowledge without apprenticeship and without citizenship, and it was made more intense because the glass-blowers were the only guild that excluded every foreign-born man, without any exception.  It was a shame to them to be outdone by one who had not their blood, nor their teaching, nor their high acknowledged rights.

They were peaceable men in their way, not given to quarrelling, nor vicious; yet, excepting the mild old foreman, there was not one of them who would not gladly have brought his iron blow-pipe down on Zorzi’s head with a two-handed swing, to strike the life out of the intruder.

Zorzi’s deft hands made the large piece he was forming spin on itself and take new shape at every turn, until it had the perfect curve of those slim-necked Eastern vessels for pouring water upon the hands, which have not even now quite degenerated from their early grace of form.  While it was still very hot, he took a sharp pointed knife from his belt and with a turn of his hand cut a small round hole, low down on one side.  The mouth was widened and then turned in and out like the leaf of a carnation.  He left the cooling piece on the pontil, lying across the arms of the stool, and took his blow-pipe again.

“Has the fellow not finished his tricks yet?” asked Piero discontentedly.

It would have given him pleasure to smash the beautiful thing to atoms where it lay, almost within his reach.  Zorzi began to make the spout, for it was a large ampulla that he was fashioning.  He drew the glass out, widened it, narrowed it, cut it, bent it and finished off the nozzle before he touched it with wet iron and made it drop into the ashes.  A moment later he had heated the thick end of it again and was welding it over the hole he had made in the body of the vessel.

“The man has three hands!” exclaimed the foreman.

“And two of them are for stealing,” added Piero.

“Or all three,” put in the beetle-browed man who was working next to Zorzi.