urning to gold; at the
sea blushing in the first glance of the day-king; at the waving trees
and swelling meadows, and gray, old ivy-grown front, and then he passed
down the avenue, out through the massive entrance-gates, and was gone.

CHAPTER XV.

AFTER FIVE YEARS.

Moonlight falling like a silvery veil over Venice--a crystal clear
crescent in a purple sky shimmering on palace and prison, churches,
squares and canals, on the gilded gondolas, and the flitting forms
passing like noiseless shadows to and fro.

A young lady leaned from a window of a vast Venetian hotel, gazing
thoughtfully at the silver-lighted landscape, so strange, so unreal, so
dream-like, to her unaccustomed eyes. A young lady, stately and tall,
with a pale, proud face, deep, dark eyes, solemn, shining, fathomless,
like mountain tarns; floating dark ringlets and a statuesque sort of
beauty that was perfect in its way. She was dressed in trailing robes of
crape and bombazine, and the face, turned to the moonlight, was cold and
still.

She turned her eyes from the moonlit canal, down which dark gondolas
floated to the music of the gay gondolier's song; once, as an English
voice in the piazza below, sung a stave of a jingling barcarole,

"Oh, gay we row where full tides flow
And bear our bounding pinnace;
And leap along where song meets song,
Across the waves of Venice."

The singer, a tall young man, with a florid face, and yellow side
whiskers, an unmistakable son of the "right little, tight little"
island, paused in his song, as another man, stepping through an open
window, struck him an airy sledge-hammer slap on the back.

"I ought to know that voice," said the last comer.

"Mortimer, my lad, how goes it?"

"Stafford!" cried the singer, seizing the outstretched hand in a genuine
English grip, "happy to meet you, old boy, in the land of romance! La
Fabre told me you were coming--but who would look for you so soon? I
thought you were doing Sorrento?"

"Got tired of Sorrento," said Stafford, taking his arm for a walk up
and down the piazza; "there's a fever there, too--quite an
epidemic--malignant typhus. Discretion is the better part of valor,
where Sorrento fevers are concerned. I left."

"When did you reach Venice?" asked Mortimer, lighting a cigar.

"An hour ago; and now who's here? Any one I know?"

"Lots. The Cholmonadeys, the Lythons, the Howards, of Leighwood; and,
by-the-by, they have with them th