taken the smallest pains to test this imaginary knowledge. Possibly, in
their different ways, they knew him better than he knew them.

The glass-house was guarded from outsiders as carefully as a nunnery,
and somewhat resembled a convent in having no windows so situated that
curious persons might see from without what went on inside. The place
was entered by a low door from the narrow paved path that ran along the
canal. In a little vestibule, ill-lighted by one small grated window,
sat the porter, an uncouth old man who rarely answered questions, and
never opened the door until he had assured himself by a deliberate
inspection through the grating that the person who knocked had a right
to come in. Marietta remembered him in his den when she had been a
little child, and she vaguely supposed that he had always been there. He
had been old then, he was not visibly older now, he would probably never
die of old age, and if any mortal ill should carry him off, he would
surely be replaced by some one exactly like him, who would sleep in the
same box bed, sit all day in the same black chair, and eat bread,
shellfish and garlic off the same worm-eaten table. There was no other
entrance to the glass-house, and there could be no other porter to guard
it.

Beyond the vestibule a dark corridor led to a small garden that formed
the court of the building, and on one side of which were the large
windows that lighted the main furnace room, while the other side
contained the laboratory of the master. But the main furnace was entered
from the corridor, so that the workmen never passed through the garden.
There were a few shrubs in it, two or three rose-bushes and a small
plane-tree. Zorzi, who had been born and brought up in the country, had
made a couple of flower-beds, edged with refuse fragments of coloured
and iridescent slag, and he had planted such common flowers as he could