e, some mysterious hope brightened his features and slid like a blue
flame over his wrinkles. He smiled and wiped his brow, that fearless,
terrible brow of his, and at length grew gay like a man mounted on his
hobby.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Eighty-two."

"How long have you been blind?"

"For very nearly fifty years," he said, and there was that in his tone
which told me that his regret was for something more than his lost
sight, for great power of which he had been robbed.

"Then why do they call you 'the Doge'?" I asked.

"Oh, it is a joke. I am a Venetian noble, and I might have been a doge
like any one else."

"What is your name?"

"Here, in Paris, I am Pere Canet," he said. "It was the only way of
spelling my name on the register. But in Italy I am Marco Facino Cane,
Prince of Varese."

"What, are you descended from the great _condottiere_ Facino Cane, whose
lands won by the sword were taken by the Dukes of Milan?"

"_E vero_," returned he. "His son's life was not safe under the
Visconti; he fled to Venice, and his name was inscribed on the Golden
Book. And now neither Cane or Golden Book are in existence." His gesture
startled me; it told of patriotism extinguished and weariness of life.

"But if you were once a Venetian senator, you must have been a wealthy
man. How did you lose your fortune?"

"In evil days."

He waved away the glass of wine handed to him by the flageolet, and
bowed his head. He had no heart to drink. These details were not
calculated to extinguish my curiosity.

As the three ground out the music of the square dance, I gazed at the
old Venetian noble, thinking thoughts that set a young man's mind afire
at the age of twenty. I saw Venice and the Adriatic; I saw her ruin in
the ruin of the face before me. I walked to and fro in that city, so
beloved of her citizens; I went from the Rialto Bridge, along the Grand
Canal, and from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Lido, returning to St.
Mark's, that cathedral so unlike all others in its sublimity. I looked
up at the windows of the Casa Doro, each with its different sculptured
ornaments; I saw old palaces rich in marbles, saw all the wonders which
a student beholds with the more sympathetic eyes because visible things
take their color of his fancy, and the sight of realities cannot rob him
of the glory of his dreams. Then I traced back a course of life for this
latest scion of a race of condottieri, tracking down his misfortunes,