change him.  It is you who would have to change—­to die gradually, as I have died, till there is only one live point left in me.  Ah, if one died completely—­that’s simple enough!  But something persists—­remember that—­a single point, an aching nerve of truth.  Now and then you may drug it—­but a touch wakes it again, as your face has waked it in me.  There’s always enough of one’s old self left to suffer with....”

She stood up and faced the girl abruptly.  “What shall I tell Alan?” she said.

Miss Fenno sat motionless, her eyes on the ground.  Twilight was falling on the gallery—­a twilight which seemed to emanate not so much from the glass dome overhead as from the crepuscular depths into which the faces of the pictures were receding.  The custodian’s step sounded warningly down the corridor.  When the girl looked up she was alone.

A VENETIAN NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT

I

THIS is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria’s harp was throwing its gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.

I

“Him Venice!” said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father’s East Indiaman, the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in golden air.

It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old Bracknell’s fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled into shape. Venice! The name, since childhood, had been a magician’s wand to him.  In the hall of the old Bracknell house at Salem there hung a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought home from one of his long voyages:  views of heathen mosques and palaces, of the Grand Turk’s Seraglio, of St. Peter’s Church in Rome; and, in a corner—­the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks hung—­a busy merry populous scene, entitled:  St. Mark’s Square in Venice.  This picture, from the first, had singularly taken little Tony’s fancy.  His unformulated criticism on the others was that they lacked action.  True, in the view of St. Peter’s an experienced-looking gentleman in a full-bottomed wig was pointing out the fairly obvious monument to a bashful companion, who had presumably not ventured to raise his eyes to it; while, at the doors of the Seraglio, a group of turbaned infidels observed with less hesitancy the approach of a veiled lady on a camel.  But in Venice so many things