Miss Fenno sat motionless, her eyes on the ground. Twilight was
falling on the gallery--a twilight which seemed to emanate not so
much from the glass dome overhead as from the crepuscular depths
into which the faces of the pictures were receding. The custodian's
step sounded warningly down the corridor. When the girl looked up
she was alone.
A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT
I
THIS is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street
house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the
famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had
withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its
gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to relate to his
grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.
I
"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony
Bracknell, leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East
Indiaman, the Hepzibah B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a
faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in golden air.
It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly
of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of
old Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city
trembled into shape. _Venice!_ The name, since childhood, had been a
magician's wand to him. In the hall of the old Bracknell house at
Salem there hung a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard
Saulsbee had brought home from one of his long voyages: views of
heathen mosques and palaces, of the Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St.
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