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One morning she called to him and waited on the quay until he could hail a passing barca and step from the gondola to its deck and so ashore. Then the two disappeared through the gate of the garden.

“She is too pretty to go alone,” he explained on his return. “Every day she must pay a boy two soldi, Signore, to escort her to the lace factory–the boy is sick today and so I went with her. But their foolishness will stop after this;–these rats know Luigi.”

From this day on Loretta had the Riva to herself.

II

So far there has been introduced into this story the bad man, Francesco, with crab-like tendencies, who has just lost his wife; the ravishingly beautiful Loretta; the girl’s mother, of whom all sorts of stories were told–none to her credit; big tender-hearted Luigi Zanaletto, prince of gondoliers, and last, and this time least, a staid old painter who works in a gondola up a crooked canal which is smothered in trees, choked by patched-up boats and flanked by tattered rookeries so shaky that the slightest earth quiver would tumble them into kindling wood.

There enters now another and much more important character,–one infinitely more interesting to my beautiful Lady of the Shipyards than any grandfather gondolier or staid old painter who ever lived. This young gentleman is twenty-one; has a head like the Hermes, a body like the fauns, and winsome, languishing eyes with a light in their depths which have set the heart of every girl along his native Giudecca pitapatting morning, noon, and night. He enjoys the distinguished name of Vittorio Borodini, and is the descendant of a family of gondoliers–of the guild of the Castellani–who can trace their ancestral calling back some two hundred years (so can Luigi; but then Luigi never speaks of it, and the Borodinis always do). Being aristocrats, the Zanalettos and Borodinis naturally fraternize, and as they live in the same quarter–away up on the Giudecca–two miles from my canal–the fathers of Vittorio and Luigi have become intimate friends. Anything, therefore, touching the welfare of any one of the descendants of so honorable a guild is more or less vital to the members of both families.

At the moment something HAD touched a Borodino–and in the most vital of spots. This was nothing less than the heart of young Vittorio, the pride and hope of his father. He had seen the “Rose of the Shipyards,” as she was now called, pass the traghetto of the Molo, off which lay his gondola awaiting custom,–it was on one of the days when the two-soldi boy acted as chaperon,–and his end had come.

It had only been a flash from out the lower corner of the left eye of Loretta as she floated along past the big columns of the Palazzo of the Doges, but it had gone through the young gondolier and out on the other side, leaving a wound that nothing would heal. She had not intended to hurt him, or even to attract him;–he only happened to be in the way when her search-light illumined his path.

Vittorio knew at a glance that she came from the rookeries and that he, the scion of a noble family, should look higher for his mate, but that made no difference. She was built for him and he was built for her, and that was the end of it: not for an intrigue–he was not constructed along those lines–but with a ring and a priest and all the rest of it. The main difficulty was to find some one who knew her. He would not,–could not, confront her; nor would he follow her home; but something must be done, and at once: a conclusion, it will be admitted, than an incalculable number of young Vittorios have reached, sooner or later, the world over.

When, therefore, a rumor came to his ears that Luigi the Primo was protecting her–the kind of protection that could never be misunderstood in Luigi’s case–a piece of news which his informer was convinced would end the projected intrigue of the young gondolier, then and there and for all time, Vittorio laughed so loud and so long, and so merrily, that he lost, in consequence, two fares to San Giorgio, and came near being reprimanded by the Gastaldo for his carelessness.