The ladies began to question and sympathize. After all, things might not be so bad as they had feared.
“He will be a loss to the world, as well as to his friends,” Don Claudio said. “His knowledge of languages is something wonderful. Besides that, he is one of the best of men. His mode of teaching caught the attention at once. ‘Sometimes,’ he once said to me, ‘you may see protruding from the earth an ugly end of dry stick. Pull it, and you find a long root attached. Follow the root, and it may lead you to a beautiful plant laden with blossoms. And so a seemingly dry and insignificant fact may prove the key to a treasure of hidden knowledge.’ That was his way of teaching. However dry the proposition with which he began a discourse, it was sure to lead to something interesting.”
“You must feel very sad!” the young girl said compassionately.
“It is sad,” he answered, and let his eyes dwell on her fair, innocent face. Then, the entrance of other visitors creating a little stir, he bent toward her and murmured “Thanks!”
SAN SALVADOR.
CHAPTER I.
It was a still night, and all eastward-looking Venice, above a certain height, was enameled as with ivory by the light of a moon but little past its full. Below, flickering reflections from the water danced on the dark walls. The bending lines of street lamps showed in dull golden blotches in that radiant air. The same golden spots were visible on gun-boat or steamship, and on a gondola moored at the steps of Casa Mora.
Above this waiting gondola a window stood wide open to the night. It seemed to be the only open window in Venice. All the others had their iron shutters closed.
Seen from without, this open window was as dark as the mouth of a cave. But inside, so penetrating an effulgence filled the room, one might have read the titles of the books in cases that lined all the walls.
The wide-open, curtainless window admitted a square of moonlight so splendid as to seem tangible; and in the midst of it, on a pallet, lay the old professor, his face, hair, and beard almost as white as the pillow they rested on. A slender girl knelt at his right hand, her head bowed down. One could see that her thick knot of hair was floss-fine and gold-tinted, and her neck white and smooth. At the opposite side of the couch a young man was seated, bending toward it. In an arm-chair near the foot, with her back to the light, sat a woman. Her cheek resting on her hand, she gazed intently at the dying man.