at it, "that if I were a disinterested person, and heard his suspicion
met with the explanation that we were a little party out here for
pleasure at half past twelve P. M., I should say he was right. At any
rate we won't engage him in controversy. Quick, quick!" he added to the
gondoliers, glancing at the receding shore, and then at the first of
the lagoon forts which they were approaching. A dim shape moved along
the top of the wall, and seemed to linger and scrutinize them. As they
drew nearer, the challenge, "_Wer da?_" rang out.

The gondoliers eagerly answered with the one word of German known to
their craft, "_Freunde_," and struggled to urge the boat forward;
the oar of the gondolier in front slipped from the high rowlock, and
fell out of his hand into the water. The gondola lurched, and then
suddenly ran aground on the shallow. The sentry halted, dropped his gun
from his shoulder, and ordered them to go on, while the gondoliers
clamored back in the high key of fear, and one of them screamed out to
his passengers to do something, saying that, a few weeks before, a
sentinel had fired upon a fisherman and killed him.

"What's that he's talking about?" demanded Mrs. Vervain. "If we don't
get on, it will be that man's duty to fire on us; he has no choice,"
she said, nerved and interested by the presence of this danger.

The gondoliers leaped into the water and tried to push the boat off. It
would not move, and without warning, Don Ippolito, who had sat silent
since they left Fusina, stepped over the side of the gondola, and
thrusting an oar under its bottom lifted it free of the shallow.

"Oh, how very unnecessary!" cried Mrs. Vervain, as the priest and the
gondoliers clambered back into the boat. "He will take his death of