his voice, and looking an invitation at the girl to explain if she felt so inclined.
“Why, the idea is this,” she said. “We can travel with lights ablaze, and decorated like most craft will be for the water promenade up and down the Grand Canal to-morrow night. “Then, just at the time when every person in all Venice who can will be out somewhere on the canal, we move away into the smaller rios which at that time are certain to be empty. We put out our lights, carry through my project, and, if not interfered with, return to the canal, join in the merry throng with all lights and decorations beautifying ourselves, and no one the wiser. If, on the other hand, we have to disguise ourselves for some reason”
“In other words if you are interrupted, observed, shot at, or anything like that.”
“Yes, if anything unpleasant happens and we have to make a run for it we can strip our decorations in a moment and are thus effectually disguised because everybody will be seeking a launch that looks like a white-flower swan, which is what this will look like when it is finished.”
Jimmy had to admit the ingenuity of the plan, and was still hopeful that something would intervene to prevent her attempt. He was considering this when he discovered that he was without anything to smoke, and while Tommie was giving further directions walked across the tiny bridge at the end of the basin and into a cigar shop. His coming evidently was a surprise to a man who was dawdling therein, but who turned quickly as Jimmy entered. It was Giuseppe, and Jimmy resisted an impulse to seize him by the shoulder, whirl him around, and ask him if these meetings were merely coincidence, or whether he had been employed to watch his movements. The absurdity of such procedure kept him from so doing, but nevertheless he could not clear his mind of the suspicion that Giuseppe was much too frequently visible. And then he thought to himself: “Pshaw! That's what a guilty conscience does.”
But he made up his mind to test his suspicions in another way, and so returned to the launch, pleaded that he had forgotten an engagement, made an appointment for later in the day and slowly walked back past the cigar shop to give Giuseppe ample opportunity to follow him through the intricate lanes, narrow streets and unexpected market places and squares on that side of the canal. He doubled back, dodged unexpectedly, and after a half hour of playing the hare to a supposititious fox came to the conclusion that he had been mistaken. He decided to return for Tommie; but when he reached the bridge across the end of the basin and looked for her, both she and Pietro had disappeared. Also Giuseppe had gone.
Jimmy was annoyed because he had needlessly separated himself from Tommie for some hours, called himself many opprobrious kinds of an ass, and took a gondola across to the Hotel Regina where he sat under an awning and vainly tried to conceive some way of keeping the girl from carrying out her foolhardy plan. He thought of hiring the faithful Tomaso to slip around and wreck the engine of the launch at the last moment, and then decided that inasmuch as Tommie's motor engineer was almost certain to be on the watch that would prove impossible. Furthermore, that young motorist was a kinsman of Pietro's, so doubtless any attempt to bribe him would prove useless. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to his uncle, but concluded that not only would this be a betrayal of Tommie, but not playing the game. And, furthermore, he secretly admitted that inasmuch as she desired possession of that confounded casket, he really wished she might get it, or better yet, that he might be the means of getting it for her, thereby winning her undying gratitude.
And it was this last thought which finally caused him to cast all doubts and scruples aside and make his final choice.
“By the shades of Colonel Yancey Powell!” he mentally exclaimed. “She wants that box and I'm going to get it for her or at least keep her from being punished for her part of the game if she's caught.”
CHAPTER IX.
THERE is no place on the globe like Venice en fête. There is no place where the citizens of a city give themselves over so whole-heartedly to a festival as in that ancient republic, that once imperial ruler of the seas, the “Queen of the Adriatic.” And there is no more generally attended fête than that commemorating the deliverance from the great plague, which has been celebrated every year at the same time, with but a short lapse, since 1537—nearly four
