glass, between which the delicious green of a vine enters in springtime at all the open apertures. Upon a Sunday morning it is a sufficiently varied admixture of two or three nationalities, and more than one "ism;" the senators overhead in their red and green velvets, looking down with all the tolerance of indifference at the heretic rites carried on under their noses, not so very heretic nowadays, perhaps, either. At ten o'clock, precisely as the clock struck, Lady Frances's gondola was always at the door upon a Sunday morning, and she herself was seated in it. It was not very often that she succeeded in inducing the Colonel to accompany her, but that had nothing to do with the matter: it is upon the women of a family, as is well known, that the duty of supporting the religious institutions of their country rightfully and naturally devolves.
All the incongruities of incongruous Venice might have seemed, to an ingenious and slightly satirical looker-on, typified and embodied in that long angular figure of hers, sitting so bolt upright upon cushions specially designed for luxurious reclining; her big prayer-book and well-worn brown Bible upon her knees; her grey hair smoothed in two impartial bands upon either side of her two thin cheeks; her long nose, her sad, kind eyes, looking thoughtfully out at the scene, so familiar yet so fresh. The water slipped and slid in green delicious transparent wrinkles under the shallow prow of the boat; the ferro lifted its hooked and gleaming curves of steel above the surface; the gondoliers had donned their fresh suits of summer white, with the broad red sashes fringed with gold, which Colonel Hal had himself devised for their adornment. Swallows swooped and swooped, pursuing the reluctant mosquito to the very brink of the water; vaporetti, crowded with Sunday pleasurers bound for the Lido, passed and repassed, sending a disturbing wave across the whole level breadth of water, washing the bases of the houses up to heights never formerly attained to, save at some exceptional flood-time.
An hour and a half later Lady Frances was coming back from her devotions amongst a crowd of gondolas also freighted with churchgoers, when her attention was attracted by a collision – that rarest of incidents in Venice – which had taken place between one of the advancing boats and another which had suddenly shot out of one of the side canals. It was only a momentary touch; the next instant both had separated again – rowers and rowed, offenders and offended alike, looking back at one another with that indomitable good-humour which reduces all mishaps into a mere succession of entertaining incidents. In that moment Lady Frances recognised her brother as one of the two occupants of the offending vessel, and with him a lady who, as she turned to speak to him, she perceived to be young, strikingly handsome, and moreover a stranger to herself.
Now Venetian etiquette, which is not as a rule by any means unendurably stringent, is nevertheless a stickler upon some few points, and one of those few is, that a lady shall not go alone in a gondola with a gentleman – that gentleman being neither father, brother, husband, or other near relative. Who could this lady, who was thus honouring her brother, be? Lady Frances wondered. Whoever she was, there was no question about her beauty. She was blonde to the point of in-
