"Si, Signorina."
They had come opposite the Salute, and now the prow of the gondola turned in at the narrow rio that runs between the great church and the lovely old Abbazia of San Gregorio. There were deserted gondolas and other craft moored at one side of the little canal, and as they pushed their way past them, the oar lapped the water with the peculiar sound it makes in passing through a restricted passage. They glided under a low bridge, beyond which the moon appeared, just issuing from a bank of cloud, and, a moment later, they had floated out into the Giudecca, among the tall black hulls of the shipping lying there at anchor.
"How good and genuine the moon looks after those search-lights!" May exclaimed, with a sigh of satisfaction.
"Yes, but they were a wonderful sight," Pauline maintained.
"Perhaps so; but they were artificial, and one does like things to be natural."
They had rowed the length of the Giudecca, watching the moon's vicissitudes among the clouds, and now they had once more turned toward home, making their way through one of the prettiest rios of the Tolentini quarter.
"I suppose," Pauline remarked, as they came out upon the Grand Canal, "that, in a deep sense, artificial things,—of the good kind,—are just as natural as things we have no control over. I suppose we get our search-lights from Nature, only in a more round-about way."
"Perhaps we do," May replied; adding, with apparent irrelevance, "and I'm not sure that I should be willing to have missed it."
That same evening, in the fever ward of a Milan hospital, two figures were standing beside a narrow cot in earnest consultation. The patient was a child of ten. The little face had the look of many another little fever-stricken face, but the hair that lay tossed upon the pillow was of exceptional beauty.