e of
death, and afraid of her answer; for Marina was failing before his eyes,
and doubtless, in her vision, there had been some apparition of a cross;
and even the less devout among the gondoliers were still dominated by
some of the superstitions which gave a picturesque color to the habits
of the people.

But she, too earnest in her faith to take any note of a less serious
mood, answered simply:

"It was the very Madonna herself, as thou knowest her in San Donato, who
came to me in the palazzo one night when I slept not, and gave me the
mission to save Venice,--scarce able to speak for her great sadness,
and the tears dropping, as thou knowest her in San Donato,--commanding
me to go before the Holy Father and pray for mercy to Venice. She it was
who told me that our prayers pass not up beyond the clouds which hang
above a city under doom of interdict. Oh, Piero, hasten; for my strength
is little, and Rome is far!"

When the Lady of the Giustiniani had sent for Piero to meet her in Santa
Maria dell' Orto, to ask him to manage her escape to Rome, it had not
been possible to refuse her; all his attempts at reasoning were in vain.
"I must go," she said, with that invincible persistence which he never
could combat. "If thou wilt not help me, I go alone." She was kneeling
before the terrible "Judgment" of the Tintoret, and the face she had
lifted to him in appeal was white with agonized comprehension.

The journey had been long and wearisome; all day they had been slowly
toiling against the tide; and long since Piero had summoned to his aid a
trusted gondolier who had been ordered to follow them at a little
distance, and who, at a sign from the gastaldo, had silently left his
bark to drift and taken his place at the other end of the gondola in
which the fugitives were making their way to Padua.

They had passed the domain of the Laguna Morta, weird and
half-forbidding, with tangles of sea-plants and upspringing wild fowl
calling to each other with hoarse cries across the marshes--with armies
of water beetles zigzagging in the shallows, and crabs and lizards
crawling upon the scattered sand heaps among the coarse sea-grasses,
while small fish brought unexpected dimples to the deeper pools that lay
between. And the mingled odor of waters fresh and salt was broken into a
breath now pungent and pleasant, now almost noisome, as the light breeze
stirred the shallows of this strange domain which was neither land nor
sea. Yet