Marietta awoke before sunrise, with a smile on her lips, and as she
opened her eyes, the world seemed suddenly gladder than ever before, and
her heart beat in time with it. She threw back the shutters wide to let
in the June morning as if it were a beautiful living thing; and it
breathed upon her face and caressed her, and took her in its spirit
arms, and filled her with itself.

Not a sound broke the stillness, as she looked out, and the glassy
waters of the canal reflected delicate tints from the sky, palest green
and faintest violet and amber with all the lovely changing colours of
the dawn. By the footway a black barge was moored, piled high with round
uncovered baskets of beads, white, blue, deep red and black, waiting to
be taken over to Venice where they would be threaded for the East, and
the colours stood out in strong contrast with the grey stones, the faint
reflections in the water and the tender sky above. There were flowers on
the window-sill, a young rose with opening buds, growing in a red
earthen jar, and a pot of lavender just bursting into flower, with a
sweet geranium beside it and some rosemary. Zorzi had planted them all
for her, and her serving-woman had helped her to fasten the pots in the
window, because it would have been out of the question that any man
except her father should enter her room, even when she was not there.
But they were Zorzi's flowers, and she bent down and smelt their
fragrance. On a table behind her a single rose hung over the edge of a
tall glass with a slender stem, almost the counterpart of the one in
which Contarini had drunk her health at midnight. Her father had given
it to her as it came from the annealing oven, still warm after long
hours of cooling with many others like it. She loved it for its grace
and lightness, and as for the rose, it was the one she had made Zorzi
give back to her yesterday. She meant to keep it in water till it faded,