e said to herself, feverishly--"only a question of money!"

* * * * *

All the rest of the day, Kitty was at once so restless and so languid
that to amuse her was difficult. Ashe was quite grateful to his amazing
mother-in-law for the plan of the evening.

As night fell, Kitty started at every sound in the old Palazzo. Once or
twice she went half-way to the door--eagerly--with hand
out-stretched--as though she expected a letter.

"No other English post to-night, Kitty!" said Ashe, at last, raising his
head from the finely printed <i>Poetae Minores</i> he had just purchased at
Ongania's. "You don't mean to say you're not thankful!"

* * * * *

The evening arrived--clear and mild, but moonless. Ashe went off to dine
with his prince, in the ordinary gondola of commerce, hired at the
Traghetto; while Margaret and Kitty followed a little later in one which
had already drawn the attention of Venice, owing to the two handsome
gondoliers, habited in black from head to foot, who were attached to it.
They turned towards the Piazzetta, where they were to meet with Madame
d'Estrees' party.

Kitty, in her deep mourning, sank listlessly into the black cushions of
the gondola. Yet almost as they started, as the first strokes carried
them past the famous palace which is now the Prefecture, the spell of
Venice began to work.

City of rest!--as it seems to our modern senses--how is it possible that
so busy, so pitiless, and covetous a life as history shows us should
have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice! The easy passage
of the gondola through the soft, imprisoned wave; the silence of wheel
and hoof, of all that hurries and clatters; the tide that comes and
goes, noiseless, indispensable, bringing in the freshness of the sea,
carrying away the defilements of the land; the narrow winding ways, now
firm earth, now shifting sea, that bind the city into one social whole,
where the industrial and the noble alike are housed in palaces, equal
often in beauty as in decay; the marvellous quiet of the nights, save
when the northeast wind, Hadria's stormy leader, drives the furious
waves against the palace fronts in the darkness, with the clamor of an
attacking host; the languor of the hot afternoons, when life is a dream
of light and green water, when the play of mirage drowns the foundations
of the <i>lidi</i> in the lagoon, so that trees and buildings rise out o