Ralph Henry Barbour

“ The darkness is flecked here and there with the red gleam from a gondola, and in the darker shadows of the shuttered house-walls stars are twinkling far down in the green water. Sometimes an open doorway sends a path of yellow light across the darkness. Faintly sounds the tinkle of distant music, and the lisping splash of the dipping oar keeps time to it. In a gondola are three persons, a man, a woman, and a girl. Ahead of them the red light of their lantern swims along the water-road. ”

“ Sciar! Signori!' for another gondola has slipped from the deeper shadows of the smaller canal, and the two come together——”
“And that was you!” she exclaimed wonderingly.
“I who reached out instinctively as the boats jostled, and who, by what we call chance, closed my hand upon your hand for a moment in the darkness. It was all over in an instant. The boats floated apart, the poppes consigning each other to perdition courteously and musically, but in that instant the light from a lantern fell across your face. Then our hands parted and our gondolas slipped away into the green shadows. ”

“ A night—why, like this, with just such a moon, to be seen now and then at the end of some dim canyon of dark walls. Instead of this fragrance of flowers and dewy earth, the bouquet of Venice, that half-stale smell of water that mingles with a thousand other odors from open doorways or windows. ”