II


Mr. Ferris took his way through the devious footways where the shadow
was chill, and through the broad campos where the sun was tenderly
warm, and the towers of the church rose against the speck-less azure of
the vernal heaven. As he went along, he frowned in a helpless
perplexity with the case of Don Ippolito, whom he had begun by doubting
for a spy with some incomprehensible motive, and had ended by pitying
with a certain degree of amusement and a deep sense of the futility of
his compassion. He presently began to think of him with a little
disgust, as people commonly think of one whom they pity and yet cannot
help, and he made haste to cast off the hopeless burden. He shrugged
his shoulders, struck his stick on the smooth paving-stones, and let
his eyes rove up and down the fronts of the houses, for the sake of the
pretty faces that glanced out of the casements. He was a young man, and
it was spring, and this was Venice. He made himself joyfully part of
the city and the season; he was glad of the narrowness of the streets,
of the good-humored jostling and pushing; he crouched into an arched
doorway to let a water-carrier pass with her copper buckets dripping at
the end of the yoke balanced on her shoulder, and he returned her
smiles and excuses with others as broad and gay; he brushed by the
swelling hoops of ladies, and stooped before the unwieldy burdens of
porters, who as they staggered through the crowd with a thrust hero,
and a shove there forgave themselves, laughing, with "We are in Venice,
signori;" and he stood aside for the files of soldiers clanking heavily