I reached Venice by the midnight express. St. Hilary was waiting for me on the platform.

“St. Hilary!” I cried with affected gaiety, “what brings you here at two o’clock in the morning?”

“Ah, what!” he grumbled. “Have you no imagination? But wait till we are in my gondola. You are going to your rooms, I suppose?”

We were scarcely seated when he turned eagerly toward me. His yellow face was haggard for want of sleep and lined like an old carved ivory, but in the pale light of the lamps of the landing I saw his eyes gleam.

“You are in good enough spirits to have good news. Come, no one can hear us now. Tell me of your little trip to Russia.”

I recounted to him the story of my fruitless journey. He listened to me in silence. When I had finished, he drew aside the curtains of the gondola and looked out.

“I might have known that you would have just such ill luck,” he said bitterly, and did not again speak until we had reached the Giudecca.

129We entered the Grand Canal. One thinks of the Grand Canal as a mise en scène for endless processions of tourists. Your true flaneur shuns it. He keeps, as far as possible, to the cool blue shadows of the little canals.

But to-night this majestic waterway laid a fresh spell on me. It awed me. This silent stream, black as death, was full of mystery. A menace lurked in the deep shadows of the great palaces, pallid and ghostlike in the darkness. The steel prow of our gondola, curving upward proudly, dipped and glided through the inky waters. Is there in the whole world anything inanimate so graceful, so almost alive, so light and so cruelly sharp and strong as the prow of a gondola? It is the very incarnation of the spirit of the Venetians of the Renaissance.

To-night, as we penetrated the gloom that was absolute, except for the light of a tiny lantern on the deck forward, I could put myself back in the middle ages. I could see the black barge of the Fante, the captain of the inquisitorial guard, swiftly rowed with muffled oars to the palazzo of the unhappy wretch who had offended against the laws of Venice. The barge stops at his door; the bolts are slipped by a spy within; the messenger of torture and imprisonment, somber as the night, makes his way to the bedside 130of the doomed man. He starts from his deep sleep; he is beckoned silently down the echoing stairs; he seats himself in the black barge; and so, shivering, he goes to his end.

We shot into one of the narrow, crooked little canals. And now our gondola scraped the very walls of the window-barred store-houses that once overflowed with the wealth of the Orient. It was impossible to think of myself as a simple gentleman with a letter of credit at my bankers. St. Hilary and I were marauders, adventurers, brawlers, and this prosaic umbrella between my knees was a long, keen blade, ready for a lively bout with the watch.

We were in the Giudecca now, dodging this chain and that of the shipping moored along the Fondamenta della Zattere. As we made for the shore opposite, the rain, which had been coming down in a gentle drizzle, fell smartly, and St. Hilary shouted to the gondolier to row faster.

Giudecca quarter is anything but fashionable. Gondoliers repeat the word twice with scorn when the tourist expresses a wish to go there. Steamers from Greece and America, laden with corn, are anchored along its quay. From early dawn to night, hundreds of barefooted stevedores, each with his sack on his shoulder, patter up the narrow plank that spans ship and shore. 131An instant they poise their burden on the scale that stands at the doorway of the magazines, while an official from the customs-house jealously notes that it is full weight. Then shouldering it again, they are swallowed up in the cavernous interiors.

Most of the old palaces of the Giudecca have degenerated into these store-houses. But here and there, as a thing so insignificant that it is overlooked, one finds a low-ceiled trattoria, where at the noon hour the stevedores drink the strong wines of Chioggia and shout out their lusty songs; or it may be an infinitesimal shop, where sharp-faced old women sell fish and cheese and cherries.

All day long children sprawl and quarrel and play on the sun-baked pavement; and artists paint endless pictures of the red and orange sails drifting slowly by, with the Salute and Ducal Palace for a background. Yes, the Giudecca quarter is the quarter of the people. But to me the stevedores, the children, and the haggling old women have a charm all their own. And here, at the Casa Frollo where I lived, no red-booked tourist sets foot.

Our gondolier, winded with his long pull against wind and tide, steered for some steps a hundred feet this side the Casa Frollo. I called 132to him to row farther up the quay, but St. Hilary irritably declared it easier for us to walk the distance than for him to row.

“But why walk in the rain?” I expostulated. “And how are you going to return to your hotel on the Riva if you dismiss your gondolier? Gondoliers hereabouts at two o’clock in the morning are as rare as horses on the Piazza.”

“It happens that I don’t intend to return to-night to my hotel. As a matter of fact there will be no bed for you, my dear Hume.”

“No bed? It is not possible that you have already brought back our clock?”

“It is not only possible, it is true. I returned this evening in time to get your telegram and to meet you.”

“You have had it repaired in a week?”

“Yes; so far as it could be repaired.”

“Then there could not have been much the matter with it.”

“As it happened, there was not.”

“Then it seems to me that your trip to Amsterdam was not so very remarkable after all?” I grumbled.

“Sometimes,” quietly replied St. Hilary, “one has to go to a great deal of trouble and expense to get a merely negative result. Sometimes it is necessary to find out simply what a thing is not.”

133“And have you found out t............