une, the buildings, with which the pictures at
Cherbury had already made her familiar, gradually rose up before her:
the mosque-like Church of St. Marc, the tall Campanile red in the sun,
the Moresco Palace of the Doges, the deadly Bridge of Sighs, and the
dark structure to which it leads.

Venice had not then fallen. The gorgeous standards of the sovereign
republic, and its tributary kingdoms, still waved in the Place of St.
Marc; the Bucentaur was not rotting in the Arsenal, and the warlike
galleys of the state cruised without the Lagune; a busy and
picturesque population swarmed in all directions; and the Venetian
noble, the haughtiest of men, might still be seen proudly moving from
the council of state, or stepping into a gondola amid a bowing crowd.
All was stirring life, yet all was silent; the fantastic architecture,
the glowing sky, the flitting gondolas, and the brilliant crowd
gliding about with noiseless step, this city without sound, it seemed
a dream!

CHAPTER VIII

The ambassador had engaged for Lady Annabel a palace on the Grand
Canal, belonging to Count Manfrini. It was a structure of great size
and magnificence, and rose out of the water with a flight of marble
steps. Within was a vast gallery, lined with statues and busts on tall
pedestals; suites of spacious apartments, with marble floors and
hung with satin; ceilings painted by Tintoretto and full of Turkish
trophies; furniture alike sumptuous and massy; the gilding, although
of two hundred years' duration, as bright and burnished as if it
had but yesterday been touched with the brush; sequin gold, as
the Venetians tell you to this day with pride. But even their old
furniture will soon not be left to them, as palaces are now daily
broken up like old ships, and their colossal spoils consigned to
Hanway Yard and Bond Street, whence, re-burnished and vamped up, their
Titantic proportions in time appropriately figure in the boudoirs of
May Fair and the miniature saloons of St. James'. Many a fine lady now
sits in a doge's chair, and many a dandy listens to his doom from a
couch that has already witnessed the less inexorable decrees of the
Council of Ten.

Amid all this splendour, however, one mournful idea alone pervaded the
tortured consciousness of Lady Annabel Herbert. Daily the dark truth
stole upon her with increased conviction, that Venetia had come hither
only to die. There seemed to the agitated ear of this distracted
mother a terribl