that,” she exclaimed with some heat in her quiet voice. “My great-grandfather was not a thief. He was a great soldier of liberty. He took the Crusader's Casket to keep it from falling into the profane hands of those unspeakable Austrians! Can't you see that? It wasn't theft. It was protection.”
“Let's call it confiscation in a worthy cause under war conditions,” he said, turning toward her with a disarming smile, and after studying his face for a moment as if to reassure herself that he was not ridiculing her sophistry she said:
“That's a much nicer way to put it. Besides, I hadn't thought so much about that part of it as I have about getting it away from that impossible—that horrid old swine—that old villain who is the head of the Harnways!”
“He does sound like rather an old ruffian,” Jim remarked, and could see that he was regaining her approval. “But it strikes me that before I can give any advice or assistance I should look the ground over, discover the location of his palace, how the waterways run, and all that. I understand that a good general always studies his field of battle before making a plan.”
“Good!” she exclaimed, clapping her slender white hands together. “Good! That is just what I have been doing! I have made a map of all the rios and main canals of that locality. If you wish I can give them to you to study.”
“No,” he said, still regarding her with whimsical but wholly admiring eyes, “I think it best that I myself go and explore all that region. It wouldn't do for me to be—er—biased by your judgments, I think. Of course, your plans may prove the ones we will adopt—quite possibly so—but we ought to form independent judgments, hadn't we?”
“That sounds reasonable,” she agreed after a moment's rumination.
She started to speak again when the distant ringing of a mellow, musical bell became audible.
“My goodness!” she exclaimed, rising to her feet. “I had no idea it was so late. That is the warning bell to clear the gardens for the night. We must hurry lest we be locked in.”
He did not dare tell her that such a contretemps would be welcomed by him, and that he could find no more enjoyable way of passing the soft Venetian night than seated with her on the cool old bench with its winged lions, or dawdling through the great groves amid fragrant, somnolent flowers, or leaning over aged sea walls to watch the waves, and be together to welcome the pallor of the vivid and whispering Adriatic dawn. He did not tell her that the bell's voice, singing and ringing like the voice of a great contralto, sounded to him like the strident and disturbing clangor of a mere policeman's gong, distracting, unwelcome, and officiously interfering. But the spell was broken. He arose and accompanied her down through the long promenade shaded on one side by great and friendly old trees, on the other by the dim wall that faced the quiet, surging sea, and thence across the ancient bridge and out through the great bronze gates. They strolled quietly down to the Riva, and at his shout of “Poppe!” a gondola, black, slender, with no tomblike felza to cut off the now brilliant light of the moon, slid placidly alongside and took them aboard.
The oar seemed to caress the water. The high prow with its likeness of a Phœnician blade and quaint studs swung outward and, accompanied by other late-returning craft, on some of which the musically inclined sang in soft Venetian voices the old, old songs of the gondoliers, they swam toward the sleeping city. For no reason that he could define both he and the girl from Rocky Crossing, Kentucky, were silent; but once he felt that she moved a little closer to him in the lazy, comfortable, and well-cushioned seat, and his heart beat with a warm sense of protection, and a great wish to take her into his arms as lovers do in that quaint old city of the seas.
It was not until they parted in the dim vestibule of the hotel that she suddenly put out her hand and said softly, as if in fear that her confession might be overheard by prying ears, “Do you know, I've been thinking it all over, and I'm glad—mighty glad—that I trusted and took you into my confidence, because now I feel that I—that is, that we—are going to succeed. I've been right dubious these last few days and felt that I needed one of my own kind of folks to help me out. And I'm glad I found you, Mr. Ware!”
Before he could make a reply she was gone—off up the dim hallway. It swallowed her in its gloom but some of the
