“Servo suo!” said Jessica, as they stood at the door.
“Bon di, Patron!” responded Larry, in Venetian fashion; then as the door closed behind them he said to John Manning, “Seems to me you were in a hurry! You could have had that glass for half the money.”
“Perhaps I could,” was Manning’s quiet reply, “but I was eager to get it back at once.”
“Get it back? Why, it wasn’t stolen from you, was it? I never did suppose he came by it honestly.”
“It was not stolen from me personally, but it belonged to my family. It was made for Giovanni Manin, who fled from Venice to Amsterdam three hundred odd years ago. His grandson and namesake left Amsterdam for New Amsterdam half a century later. And when the English changed New Amsterdam into New York, Jan Mannin became John Manning—and I am his direct descendant, and the first of my blood to return to Venice to get the goblet Giovanni Manin ordered and left behind.”
“Well, I’m damned!” said Larry, pensively.
“And now,” continued John Manning as they took their seats in the gondola, “tell the man to go to the church where the picture of Mary Magdalen is. I want a good look at that woman!”
In the evening, as John Manning sat in a little caffè under the arcades of the Piazza San Marco, sipping a tiny cup of black coffee, Larry entered with a rush of righteous indignation.