e is full of the most monstrous convictions.
And he has the courage of them, too--you saw last year that his love
for you never made him waver. He believes in his work; he adores it--it
is a kind of hideous idol to which he would make human sacrifices! He
loves you still--I've been honest with you--but his love wouldn't
change him. It is you who would have to change--to die gradually, as I
have died, till there is only one live point left in me. Ah, if one
died completely--that's simple enough! But something persists--remember
that--a single point, an aching nerve of truth. Now and then you may
drug it--but a touch wakes it again, as your face has waked it in me.
There's always enough of one's old self left to suffer with...."

She stood up and faced the girl abruptly. "What shall I tell Alan?" she
said.

Miss Fenno sat motionless, her eyes on the ground. Twilight was falling
on the gallery--a twilight which seemed to emanate not so much from the
glass dome overhead as from the crepuscular depths into which the faces
of the pictures were receding. The custodian's step sounded warningly
down the corridor. When the girl looked up she was alone.

A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT

I

THIS is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street
house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous
East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn
to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of
sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the
year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.

I

"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony
Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East Indiaman,
the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of
towers and domes dissolved in golden air.

It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly of
age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old
Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled
into shape. _Venice!_ The name, since childhood, had been a magician's
wand to him. In the hall of the old Bracknell house at Salem there hung
a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought
home from one of his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and
palaces, of the Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St. Peter's Church in Rome;
and, in a corner--the corner nearest the rack