incongruous; but the riddle was immediately solved.

"Do you thing it would be judicious," said Emilio, "if we spoke our
mind in the presence of our masters?"

"You are in a land of slaves," said the Duchess, in a tone and with a
droop of the head which gave her at once the look for which the
physician had sought in vain. "Vendramin," she went on, speaking so
that only the stranger could hear her, "took to smoking opium, a
villainous idea suggested to him by an Englishman who, for other
reasons of his, craved an easy death--not death as men see it in the
form of a skeleton, but death draped with the frippery you in France
call a flag--a maiden form crowned with flowers or laurels; she
appears in a cloud of gunpowder borne on the flight of a cannon-ball
--or else stretched on a bed between two courtesans; or again, she
rises in the steam of a bowl of punch, or the dazzling vapor of a
diamond--but a diamond in the form of carbon.

"Whenever Vendramin chooses, for three Austrian lire, he can be a
Venetian Captain, he can sail in the galleys of the Republic, and
conquer the gilded domes of Constantinople. Then he can lounge on the
divans in the Seraglio among the Sultan's wives, while the Grand
Signor himself is the slave of the Venetian conqueror. He returns to
restore his palazzo with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. He can quit
the women of the East for the doubly masked intrigues of his beloved
Venetians, and fancy that he dreads the jealousy which has ceased to
exist.

"For three zwanziger he can transport himself into the Council of Ten,
can wield there terrible power, and leave the Doges' Palace to sleep