ns educated. He had waited patiently till
Clara's voice had been fully trained by a famous professor, and till she
was sixteen, before taking toll of the treasure so carefully cultivated.

La Tinti had made her debut the year before, and had enchanted the three
most fastidious capitals of Italy.

"I am perfectly certain that her great nobleman is not my husband," said
the Duchess.

The horses were ordered, and the Duchess set out at once for Venice, to
be present at the opening of the winter season.

So one fine evening in November, the new Prince of Varese was crossing
the lagoon from Mestre to Venice, between the lines of stakes painted
with Austrian colors, which mark out the channel for gondolas as
conceded by the custom-house. As he watched Massimilla's gondola,
navigated by men in livery, and cutting through the water a few yards in
front, poor Emilio, with only an old gondolier who had been his father's
servant in the days when Venice was still a living city, could not
repress the bitter reflections suggested to him by the assumption of his
title.

"What a mockery of fortune! A prince--with fifteen hundred francs a
year! Master of one of the finest palaces in the world, and unable to
sell the statues, stairs, paintings, sculpture, which an Austrian decree
had made inalienable! To live on a foundation of piles of campeachy
wood worth nearly a million of francs, and have no furniture! To own
sumptuous galleries, and live in an attic above the topmost arabesque
cornice constructed of marble brought from the Morea--the land which a
Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time of the Romans! To see
his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of precious marbles in one of the
most splendid churches in Venice, and in a chapel graced with pictures
by Titian and Tintoretto, by Palma, Bellini, Paul Veronese--and to be
prohibited from selling a marble Memmi to the English for bread for
the living Prince Varese! Genovese, the famous tenor, could get in one
season, by his warbling, the capital of an income on which this son of
the Memmi could live--this descendant of Roman senators as venerable as
Caesar and Sylla. Genovese may smoke an Eastern hookah, and the Prince
of Varese cannot even have enough cigars!"

He tossed the end he was smoking into the sea. The Prince of Varese
found cigars at the Duchess Cataneo's; how gladly would he have laid the
treasures of the world at her feet! She studied all his caprices, and
w