“I shall send Charles to you very often; and if possible, without attracting attention, I shall occasionally come with him,” observed Laura; “so mind you are not to freeze up again into a marble misanthrope: I consider I have improved you vastly since you have been under my tuition, and I by no means desire to have laboured in vain.”
“You have shown me kindness which I may never be able to repay,” answered Lewis; “but to prove that I neither forget nor feel ungrateful for it, I will struggle against the faults you so justly reprobate: if I sometimes fail, you must remember that it is difficult to preserve a cheerful, easy manner with an aching heart, and so pardon me.”
Having taken a cordial leave of his host and hostess, and refused Charles’s offer of walking home with him, partly because he knew it would be an act of self-denial in his friend to relinquish his wife’s society, partly because he wished to be alone, Lewis quitted the Palazzo Grassini and strolled on in the direction of his own abode. As he passed under the Piazza of St. Mark, a particularly beautiful effect of moonlight on the opposite buildings struck him, and leaning against one of the columns, he paused to observe it. The place where he was standing was in deep shadow, and to any one approaching from the left his figure was invisible, the massive column effectually hiding it. Having thoroughly fixed in his recollection the appearance which had attracted him, and which he proposed to transfer to canvas, he was about to quit the Piazza when a figure wrapped in a dark mantle advanced with a quick yet stealthy tread.
As the new-comer approached the spot where Lewis was stationed a low whistle pierced the air, and immediately a second figure, also disguised in a dark robe, appeared from behind a pillar which had hitherto concealed him, and addressing the other, observed—
“You are late; I have waited for you.”
“The delay was unavoidable, Signor,” was the reply; “I was forced to wait myself for Paulo, as until I had seen him I could not bring you the password.”
“And what is it?” inquired the first speaker eagerly. The other glanced round with a suspicious air as he replied, “I Martiri di Cosenza.” *
* The brothers Bandiera, two youths of high Patrician Venetian descent, were denounced to the Austrian government, and shot as conspirators at Cosenza, June 25th, 1844.
“Good!” was the rejoinder; “and the place of meeting?”
“The great Hall of the Palazzo—iani,” naming one of the many ruined palaces which are to be found in Venice.