med to crush a breath of
benediction.

Coming out of the sunlight into this still, beautiful, holy place--the
chant sweet and sacred accompanying her steps, with the Cross repeated
again and again in the heights of the domes, with the dear familiar form
of the Mother Mary on every side lifting adoring eyes to the crowning
figure of the Christ, while the saints who graciously leaned to her from
their golden backgrounds in the great vaulted spaces above recalled the
legends inseparably linked with their intimate friendly faces and
brought back the atmosphere of her own Matrice--her mother church--this
maiden of Murano felt suddenly at home.

The Patriarch with his pomp, the Signoria and Senate in their robes of
state, the nobles and the pageant were all forgotten. In the sacramental
lights of the ceremonial candles of the great altar, flashing back from
the marvelous _Pala d'Oro_, she saw only Marco waiting for her--to whom
her father, beloved and trusted, was leading her with her heart's
consent.

How should she falter on the path from love to love!

XIV

But even in Venice--the magic city--there were days of mists, silvery
and gray, when life took on the indistinctness and indecision of a
dream; as there were days less lucent, when sea and sky melted in an
indistinguishable line and the chameleon tints of the marshes mellowed
into a monotonous gray surface--when the wonted brilliancy of the sunset
clouds, and the glittering domes and campaniles were only faint gray
shadows on the gray whiteness of the waters. And gondoliers came
suddenly into vision, parting the mists with thin, black, swaying
outlines, as quickly fading in the near, gray distance when they passed,
while the shipping loomed like phantoms on an immediate horizon,
vanishing, vision-like; and even the sounds of life came muffled over
the still lagoon, like ghostly echoes from a city wrapped in dreams.

These were days of dim forebodings, too, for the anxious men of action
who ruled the Republic. In the Broglio there was more often silence than
speech, as the older senators gathered in knots, with faces the more
expressive because of much reticence in words; the sense of approaching
contest increased their mental restlessness and made them outwardly more
stern. Each looked into another's stormy, resolute face, so passing many
a counsel whose echoes he feared to start under the rambling porticoes
of the Piazza, where friars of every order mingled