beneath each other's noses, and they appeared almost on the point of quarreling when the captain and his companion approached.
“Bah! Giuseppe, take this from me—you ask too many questions. It must stop!” Jimmy heard Pietro declare as with a final snap of his thumb and finger he turned and joined them.
“You seem frightfully disturbed about something,” Miss Cardell remarked with a smile and her excited guide doffed his hat, thrust his fingers through his hair and asserted, “Disturbed, signorina? Yes, I am. That pig of a guide, Giuseppe, becomes too—what you Americans call—the fresh—that's it! Too fresh with me. Pfaugh! What is he, the swine? Just a guide! Nothing but a guide! He does not understand me, for I am not only a guide, but a poet! The signorina will bear out my assertion, I am certain.”
And then with one of the sudden changes of temper that made him so boyishly attractive his face suddenly broke into smiles and he laughed heartily.
“We quarreled over the first stanza of Dante's immortal work, and I should have known it was useless to be disturbed by such an ignorant clod as my friend Giuseppe, who is always wrong. He laughs at my poem which I shall publish at my own expense on the next Feast of Il Redentore, which of course you understand.”
Ware looked blank and Pietro scornful at such ignorance.
“The Feast of the Redeemer,” he said severely, as if speaking to a child “commemorates the deliverance from the great plague of 1537 and is celebrated the third Sunday of every July by our greatest municipal procession on the canals, because in that terrible time tens of thousands of our citizens, to escape the plague, took refuge in boats on the canals and lived there till the plague, through the efficacy of prayer, was checked. The poem which I am composing endeavors to be worthy of such a tragic event and solemn commemoration. It is nearly completed, and needs to be, for there are but ten days more until it must be issued.”
Captain Jimmy had difficulty in retaining his smiles at the grandiloquence and self-assurance of Pietro, this child of Venice, who took his city, and its fêtes, and his own work with such prodigious seriousness. He was spared comment by Miss Cardell, who straightway won a still warmer place in Pietro's heart by declaring, with the utmost kindliness, “And I am certain, Pietro, that your poem will be worthy.”
“The signorina appreciates my genius,” Pietro declared gravely. “And now if I can be of no further service, perhaps the signorina will excuse me for the day—that is, unless she wishes me to accompany her and the signor to the concert this evening.”
He looked at Jimmy almost as severely as if he thought the girl might need a cicerone or a knight-errant, and appeared so boyishly eager to protect her that again Ware was tempted to laughter.
“No, I shall not need you, Pietro,” his employer said in that same kindly and tolerant tone, much as if she were speaking to a child. “Mr. Ware will take good care of me. You may go now, if you wish.”
He murmured his thanks with an elaborate bow, and would have started away had she not halted him with a suggestion.
“There is no need for you to take one of the ferries,” she said. “Use my launch and have it return here after it has landed you on the other side.”
“The signorina is ever thoughtful,” Pietro declared with a dazzling smile of gratitude and again started away; but again, as if recalling something, the girl turned swiftly to Ware, said, “Please excuse me a moment. There is something I must say to him,” and called to her retainer in her clear voice arresting his departure. Ware seated himself on one of the benches and watched her as she hurried across the intervening space and addressed Pietro, who listened to whatever she had to say with an almost exaggerated gravity and deference.
“She's making a frightful mistake with that boy, I'm afraid,” Ware meditated, as he observed the guide's air of adoration. “He is infatuated with her. If it weren't for his constant attitude of respect I'd be tempted to advise her to send him on his way; to get rid of him; to tell him to shove off! But he gives her the same look that I notice he gives to the Madonna whenever he goes into one of these musty old churches and begins to rave about the glories of Venice. He's Venetian, all right! I'll hand that to him. And somehow, although he distrusts me, I like him.”
The girl well groomed, beautiful, so typically American thoroughbred, and as
