“Give me some water, please,” said Zorzi, instead of answering the question.

“Water!  Oh yes!” Pasquale went to the earthen jar.  “Water!  Every devil in hell, old and young, will jump and laugh for joy when that man asks for water and has to drink flames!”

Zorzi drank eagerly, though the water was tepid.

“Drink, my son,” said Pasquale, holding his head up very tenderly with one of his rough hands.  “I will put more within reach for you to drink, while I go and get help.”

“They have sent for a surgeon,” answered Zorzi.

“A surgeon?  No surgeon shall come here.  A surgeon will divide you into lengths, fore and aft, and kill you by inches, a length each day, and for every day he takes to kill you, he will ask a piece of silver of the master!  If a surgeon comes here I will throw him out into the canal.  This is a burn, and it needs an old woman to dress it.  Women are evil beings, a chastisement sent upon us for our sins.  But an old woman can dress a burn.  I go.  There is the water.”

Zorzi called him back when he was already at the door.

“The fire!  It must not go down.  Put a little wood in, Pasquale!”

The old porter grumbled.  It was unnatural that a man so badly hurt should think of his duties, but in his heart he admired Zorzi all the more for it.  He took some wood, and when Zorzi looked, he was trying to poke it through the ‘bocca.’

“Not there!” cried Zorzi desperately.  “The small opening on the side, near the floor.”

Pasquale uttered several maledictions.

“How should I know?” he asked when he had found the right place.  “Am I a night boy?  Have I ever tended fires for two pence a night and my supper?  There!  I go!”

Zorzi could hear his voice still, as he went out.

“A surgeon!” he grumbled.  “I should like to see the nose of that surgeon at the door!”

Zorzi cared little who came, so that he got some relief.  His head was hot now, and the blood beat in his temples like little fiery hammers, that made a sort of screaming noise in his brain.  He saw queer lights in circles, and the beams of the ceiling came down very near, and then suddenly went very far away, so that the room seemed a hundred feet high.  The pain filled all his right side, and he even thought he could feel it in his arm.

All at once he started, and as he lay on his back his hands tried to grip the flat wood of the bench, and his eyes were wide open and fixed in a sort of frightened stare.

What if he should go mad with pain?  Who would remember the fire in the master’s furnace?  Worse than that, what safety was there that in his delirium he should not speak of the book that was hidden under the stone, the third from the oven and the fourth from the corner?