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“Fishes for crabs, like his father?” I asked.

“Yes, crabs and young girls,” he answered with a frown. “A poor lot, these crab catchers, Signore. Was it the charcoal or a brush you wanted?”

Francesco did not interest me,–nor did the grownup sister; nor the mother, over whom Luigi also shrugged his shoulders. It was Loretta’s chubbiness that delighted my soul.

Even at five she was a delightful little body, and full of entrancing possibilities. One can always tell what the blossom will be from the bud. In her case, all the essentials of beauty were in evidence: dark, lustrous velvety eyes; dazzling teeth–not one missing; jet-black hair–and such a wealth of it, almost to her shoulders; a slender figure, small hands and feet; neat, well-turned ankles and wrists, and rounded plump arms above the elbows.

“What do you intend to do, little one, when you grow up?” I asked her one morning. She was sitting beside me, her eyes following every movement of my brush.

“Oh, what everybody does. I shall string beads and then when I get big like my sister I shall go to the priest and get married, and have a ring and new shoes and a beautiful, beautiful veil all over my hair.”

“So! And have you picked him out yet?”

“Oh, no, Signore! Why, I am only a little girl. But he will surely come,–they always come.”

These mornings in the gondola continued until she was ten years old. Sometimes it was a melon held high in the air that tempted her; or a basket of figs, or some huge bunches of grapes; or a roll and a broiled fish from a passing cook-boat: but the bait always sufficed. With a little cry of joy the beads would be dropped, or the neighbor’s child passed to another or whatever else occupied her busy head and small hands, and away she would run to the water steps and hold out her arms until Luigi rowed over and lifted her in. She had changed, of course, in these five years, and was still changing, but only as an expanding bud changes. The eyes were the same and so were the teeth–if any had dropped out, newer and better ones had taken their places; the hair though was richer, fuller, longer, more like coils of liquid jet, with a blue sheen where the sky lights touched its folds. The tight, trim little figure, too, had loosened out in certain places–especially about the chest and hips. Before many years she would flower into the purest type of the Venetian–the most beautiful woman the world knows.

At sixteen she burst into bloom.

I have never seen a black tulip, not a real velvet-black, but if inside its shroud of glossy enfoldings–so like Loretta’s hair–there lies enshrined a mouth red as a pomegranate and as enticing, and if above it there burn two eyes that would make a holy man clutch his rosary; and if the flower sways on its stalk with the movement of a sapling caressed by a summer breeze;–then the black tulip is precisely the kind of flower that Loretta bloomed into.

And here the real trouble began,–just as it begins for every other pretty Venetian, and here, too, must I place the second pin in my chart.

It all came through Francesco. The older sister had died with the first child, and this crab catcher had begun to stretch out his claws for Loretta. She and her mother still lived with Francesco’s father, who was a widower. The mother kept the house for all,–had done so for Francesco and her daughter during their brief married life.

In her persecution Loretta would pour out her heart to Luigi, telling how they bothered her,–her mother the most of all. She hated Francesco,–hated his father,–hated everybody who wanted her to marry the fisherman. (Luigi, poor fellow, had lost his only daughter when she was five years of age, which accounted, I always thought, for his interest in the girl.)