lf seldom cared to go out, for the reason that it was
too cold in winter and too hot in summer. In the one season she clung
all day to her wadded arm-chair, with her _scaldino_ in her lap; and in
the other season she found it a sufficient diversion to sit in the great
hall of the palace, and be fanned by the salt breeze that came from the
Adriatic through the vine-garlanded gallery. But besides this habitual
inclemency of the weather, which forbade out-door exercise nearly the
whole year, it was a displeasure to walk in Venice on account of the
stairways of the bridges; and the signora much preferred to wait till
they went to the country in the autumn, when she always rode to take the
air. The exceptions to her custom were formed by those after-dinner
promenades which she sometimes made on holidays, in summer. Then she put
on her richest black, and the Paronsina dressed herself in her best, and
they both went to walk on the Molo, before the pillars of the lion and
the saint, under the escort of Tonelli.

It often happened that, at the hour of their arrival on the Molo, the
moon was coming up over the low bank of the Lido in the east, and all
that prospect of ship-bordered quay, island, and lagoon, which, at its
worst, is everything that heart can wish, was then at its best, and far
beyond words to paint. On the right stretched the long Giudecca, with
the domes and towers of its Palladian church, and the swelling foliage
of its gardens, and its line of warehouses--painted pink, as if even
Business, grateful to be tolerated amid such lovely scenes, had striven
to adorn herself. In front lay San Giorgio, picturesque with its church
and pathetic with its political prisons; and, farther away to the east
again, the gloomy mass of the madhouse at San Servolo, and then the
slender campanili of the Armenian convent rose over the gleaming and
tremulous water. Tonelli took in the beauty of the scene with no more
consciousness than a bird; but the Paronsina had learnt from her
romantic poets and novelists to be complimentary to prospects, and her
heart gurgled out in rapturous praises of this. The unwonted freedom
exhilarated her; there was intoxication in the encounter of faces on the
promenade, in the dazzle and glimmer of the lights, and even in the
music of the Austrian band playing in the Piazza, as it came purified to
her patriotic ear by the distance. There were none but Italians upon the
Molo, and one might walk there withou