atever happens to you or to me, whatever my father demands of
me, and wherever you may have to go, you will never withdraw from what
you have undertaken."

He met the earnest, pleading look of those beautiful eyes without
flinching. His heart was light enough, so far as such a promise was
concerned. Heavier oaths than that lay on him.

"That is simple enough, Natalie," said he. "I promise you distinctly
that nothing shall cause me to swerve from my allegiance to the Society;
I will give absolute and implicit obedience, and the best of such work
as I can do. But they must not ask me to forget my Natalie."

She rose, still holding his hand, and stood by him, so that he could not
quite see her face. Then she said, in a very low voice indeed,

"Dearest, may I give you a ring?--you do not wear one at all--"

"But surely, Natalie, it is for me to choose a ring for you?"

"Ah, it is not that I mean," she said, quickly, and with her face
flushing. "It is a ring that will remind you of the promise you have
given me to-day--when we may not be able to see each other."

CHAPTER XXVII.

KIRSKI.

To this pale student from the Reading-room of the British Museum, as he
stands on a bridge crossing one of the smaller canals, surely the scene
around him must seem one fitted to gladden the heart; for it is Venice
at mid-day, in glowing sunlight: the warm cream-white fronts of the
marble palaces and casemented houses, the tall campanili with their
golden tips, the vast and glittering domes of the churches, all rising
fair and dream-like into the intense dark-blue of a cloudless sky. How
the hot sunlight brings out all the beautiful color of the place--the
richly laden fruit-stalls in the Riva dei Schiavoni; the russet and
saffron sails of the vessels; the canal-boats coming in to the steps
with huge open tuns of purple wine to be ladled out with copper buckets;
and then all around the shining, twinkling plain of the green-hued sea,
catching here and there a reflection from the softly red walls of San
Giorgio and the steel-gray gleaming domes of Santa Maria della Salute.

Then the passers-by: these are not like the dusky ghosts that wander
through the pale-blue mists of Bloomsbury. Here comes a buxom
water-carrier, in her orange petticoat and sage-green shawl, who has the
two copper cans at the end of the long piece of wood poised on her
shoulders, pretty nearly filled to the brim. Then a couple of the gayer
gondoliers in