PLAIN FRANCES MOWBRAY.
CHAPTER I.
A day of steady downpour at Venice is not one of the most cheerful things I know. It is worst, of course, in November and December, because of the bleakness then of everything; because of the bare trees in the sparsely scattered gardens, of the nakedness of the vine twigs, which in summer time make so delightful an awning at the traghetti and over the more fortunate of the balconies. Even in April and May, however, it is quite bad enough. From end to end of the Grand Canal a uniform soot colour, whitish in the houses, pure soot in the water, inclining to blackness in the archways and under the shadows of the bridges; blue, red, green, and orange only where the naming advertisements diversify the otherwise unalleviated gloom; funereal convoys of gondolas slipping by with a woeful air, propelled by gloomy figures in long black or white cloaks, despondent, like men weighed down with the consciousness of a destiny which it is heart-breaking to contemplate and hopeless to evade. Lady Frances Mowbray walked up and down the floor of her principal sitting-room at the Traghetto San Eustachio, now and "then stopping to look out of one of the windows. There were no fewer than six windows in the room, not to mention some smaller ones in the lunettes under the ceiling, which were perfectly useless, of course, for the purpose of observation. The light from these six windows fell upon walls enlivened with much gilding and white plaster work, happily toned down by time and indifferent usage to a mild and mellow radiance; upon large canvasses, not any of them, indeed, of any very transcendent or inestimable value, still irradiated with that glow which lights up even the least distinguished members of an illustrious period; upon bronzes and carved woodwork; upon marble columns; upon a great deal of delicately-scrolled and intertwined ironwork around the windows. It was such a room, in short, as one commonly associates with royal or semi-royal residences in other towns, but in Venice it merely formed part of a suite of furnished lodgings – very good furnished lodgings, but nothing at all so extraordinary or out of the way. Lady Frances and her brother had occupied it off and on now for the last six or seven years, paying a rent of a few, very few, thousand francs a-year, and putting in additional touches here and there from time to time as their taste or fancy suggested, but not materially altering or even modifying its aspect. They did not, of course, spend the whole year there, going away as a rule in early summer, and not returning until the fogs of November and December had given place to something like a semblance of spring. Even January, February, and March are cold enough, however, in Venice, and there were plenty of places where they would have been warmer and snugger than in that great gilded saloon of theirs, where such heat as was given out by the green earthenware stone seemed to make a duty of travelling straight upwards to the domed ceiling amongst the gods and goddesses sitting enthroned upon plump
