the wind, like a soul in
pain.

Marina grew faint and wide-eyed for terror, but they could not soothe
her by word or touch; she sat with clasped hands, gasping for breath,
listening to the low, long boom on the shores of the Lido, like muffled
thunder, ceaselessly recurring--the terrible noise of the great waves
beating against the sea-walls--beating and breaking in fury, tossing
their spray high in air and whirling it in clouds, like rain mists, far
across the lagoon. Would the barriers stand--or yield and leave them to
their doom? Were the great waters of the Adriatic uprising in vengeance
to overwhelm this city in her sin? Boom upon boom sounded through all
the voices of the storm. Santa Maria! was it this that the Tintoretto
had foretold!

A dazzling, frenzied flash of light,--a vast peal of thunder that was
like the wrath of a mighty, offended God,--then darkness, and a torrent
of rain--the waters in the shifting path of the wind leaping up to meet
the waters from the sky!

The vesper bells of Venice came sobbing through the storm, tossed and
broken by the tornado into a wraith of a dirge; and now, by some
fantastic freak of nature, as the winds rose higher, the iron tongues
from every campanile--for a brief moment of horror--came wrangling and
discordant, as if tortured by some demon of despair.

"_Ave Maria, Gratia plena_!"

the women cried together, falling on their knees, while the men toiled
and struggled to hold the invincible galley of the Ten outside the
whirling path of the storm--advancing and retreating at the will of the
elements, against which their own splendid, human strength was like the
feeble, untaught effort of a helpless infant.

"_Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis
nostrae_."

The words rose in a wail between the gusts.

For measureless moments, mighty as hours, they battled between San Marco
and San Giorgio, tossed to and fro--now nearer the haven of the great
white dome, now--as a lightning flash unveiled San Marco--near enough to
see a cloud of frightened doves go whirling over the flood which swept
the Piazza from end to end and poured out under the great gates of the
Ducal Palace into the lagoon.

"_Summa Parens clementia--nocte surgentes_----"

XXXII

A Day momentous for Venice--or was it Rome?--had come and passed; it
chronicled the right of the Crown to make its own laws within its own
realm, without reference to ecclesiastical claims whic