the Molo. Use, which is the second, is also very often the
stronger nature, and so these parted friends made a last show of union
and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in
this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in
the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions,--not mere
disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated
bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid
only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many
another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido,
striking far across the glittering lagoon, and everywhere winning the
flattered eye to the dark masses of shadow upon the water; to the trees
of the Gardens, to the trees and towers and domes of the cloistered and
templed isles. Scene of pensive and incomparable loveliness! giving even
to the stranger, in some faint and most unequal fashion, a sense of the
awful meaning of exile to the Venetian, who in all other lands in the
world is doubly an alien, from their unutterable unlikeness to his sole
and beautiful city. The prospect had that pathetic unreality to the
friends which natural things always assume to people playing a part, and
I imagine that they saw it not more substantial than it appears to the
exile in his dreams. In their promenade they met again and again the
unknown, wonted faces; they even encountered some acquaintances, whom
they greeted, and with whom they chatted for a while; and when at nine
the bronze giants beat the hour upon their bell,--with as remote effect
as if they were giants of the times before the flood,--they were aware
of Pennellini, promptly appearing like an exact and methodical spectre.

But to-night the Paronsina, who had made the scene no compliments, did
not insist as usual upon the ice at Florian's; and Pennellini took his
formal leave of the friends under the arch of the Clock Tower, and they
walked silently homeward through the echoing Merceria.

At the notary's gate Tonelli would have said good-night, but the signora
made him enter with them, and then abruptly left him standing with the
Paronsina in the gallery, while she was heard hurrying away to her own
apartment. She reappeared, extending toward Tonelli both hands, upon
which glittered and glittered manifold skeins of the delicate chain of
Venice.

She had a very stately and impressive bearing, as she stood