her, and her father would certainly not try to
use force. There was therefore nothing to fear, and since her first
surprise was over, she felt sure of appearing quite indifferent. She
would put the thought out of her mind and begin the day with the perfect
certainty that the marriage was altogether impossible.

She looked out over her flowers. The door of the glass-house was open
now, and the burly porter was sweeping; she could hear the cypress broom
on the flagstones inside, and presently it appeared in sight while the
porter was still invisible, and it whisked out a mixture of black dust
and bread crumbs and bits of green salad leaves, and the old man came
out and swept everything across the footway into the canal. As he turned
to go back, the workmen came trooping across the bridge to the
furnaces--pale men with intent faces, very different from ordinary
working people. For each called himself an artist, and was one; and each
knew that so far as the law was concerned the proudest noble in Venice
could marry his daughter without the least derogation from patrician
dignity. The workmen differed from her own father not in station, but
only in the degree of their prosperity.

If Zorzi could ever have been one of them the rest would have been
simple enough. But he could not, any more than a black man could turn
white at will. There was no evasion of law by which a man not born a
Venetian could ever be a glass-blower, or could ever acquire the
privileges possessed from birth by one of those shabby, pale young men
who were crowding past the porter to go to their hard day's work. Yet
dexterous as they were, there was not one that had his skill, there was
not one that could compare with him as an artist, as a workman, as a
man. No Indian caste, no ancient nobility, no mystic priesthood ever set
up a barrier so impassable between itself and the outer world as that
which defended the glass-blowers of Murano for centuries against all who
wished to be initiated. Even the boys who fed the fires all night were
of the calling, and by and by would become workmen, and perhaps masters,
legally almost the equals of the splendid nobles who sat in the Grand
Council over there in Venice.

Zorzi's very existence was an anomaly. He had no social right to be what
he was, and he knew it when he called himself a servant, for the cruel
law would not allow him to be anything else so long as he helped Angelo
Beroviero.

Suddenly, while Mariet