before his master's house and guided his skiff through the canal,
scarcely moving the single oar, as the rising tide took his boat
silently along. It was not until he had passed the last of the
glass-houses on his right, and was already in the lagoon that separates
Murano from Venice, that he began to row, gently at first, for fear of
being heard by some one ashore, and then more quickly, swinging his oar
in the curved crutch with that skilful, serpentine stroke which is
neither rowing nor sculling, but which has all the advantages of both,
for it is swift and silent, and needs scarcely to be slackened even in a
channel so narrow that the boat itself can barely pass.

Now that he was away from the houses, the stars came out and he felt the
pleasant land breeze in his face, meeting the rising tide. Not a boat
was out upon the shallow lagoon but his own, not a sound came from the
town behind him; but as the flat bow of the skiff gently slapped the
water, it plashed and purled with every stroke of the oar, and a faint
murmur of voices in song was borne to him on the wind from the still
waking city.

He stood upright on the high stern of the shadowy craft, himself but a
moving shadow in the starlight, thrown forward now, and now once more
erect, in changing motion; and as he moved the same thought came back
and back again in a sort of halting and painful rhythm. He was out that
night on a bad errand, it said, helping to sell the life of the woman he
loved, and what he was doing could never be undone. Again and again the
words said themselves, the far-off voices said them, the lapping water
took them up and repeated them, the breeze whispered them quickly as it
passed, the oar pronounced them as it creaked softly in the crutch
rowlock, the stars spelled out the sentences in the sky, the lights of
Venice wrote them in the water in broken reflections. He was not alone