again for dinner in the big red
and gold, brightly frescoed dining-room; and it was he who suggested
that we should have coffee in the garden, at a table on a balcony built
over the water, and then go out in gondolas.

We hired three; and as there are only two absolutely delightful seats in
a gondola, I was trembling lest the Prince should fall to my unlucky
lot, when Aunt Kathryn called to him, "Oh, do sit with me, please. I
want to ask about your friends who are coming to see us." So of course
he went to her, and Sir Ralph jumped in with Beechy; therefore the
Chauffeulier was obliged to be nice to me, whether he liked or not. We
all kept close together, and soon the three gondolas, following many
others, grouped round a lighted music-barge like a pyramid of
illuminated fruit floating on the canal.

Either the voices were sweet, or they had the effect of being sweet in
the moonlight on the water; but the airs they sang got strangely tangled
with the songs in other barges, so that I longed to unwind one skein of
tunes from another, and wasn't sorry to steal away into the silence at
last.

We were not the only ones who flitted. The black forms of gondolas moved
soundlessly hither and thither on the surface of the dark lagoon, their
single lights like stars in the blue darkness.

Far away twinkled the lamps of the Lido, where Byron and Shelley used to
ride on the lonely sands. Near-by, on the Piazzetta where the twin
columns towered against the silver sky, white bunches of lights
glimmered like magic night-blooming flowers, with bright roots trailing
deep down into the river.

We talked of the countless great ones of the world who had lived and
died in Venice, and loved it well; of Byron, who slept in Marino
Faliero's dreadful cell before he wrote his tragedy; of Browning, whose
funeral had passed in solemn state of gondolas down the Grand Canal; of
Wagner, who found inspiration in this sea and sky, and died looking upon
them from his window in the Palazzo Vendramin. But through our talk I
could hear Aunt Kathryn in her gondola close by, saying how like the
Doge's palace was to a big bird-cage she once had; and the Prince was
continually turning his head to see if we were near, which was
disturbing. We had nothing to say that all the world might not have
heard, yet instinctively we spoke almost in whispers, the Chauffeulier
and I, not to miss a gurgle of the water nor the dip of an oar, which in
the soft darkness ma