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 genuine compassion in her voice. "It can't be half so nice as being a gondolier."

But Nanni was again intent upon his work, rowing with long, steady strokes, his eyes fixed upon the course of the gondola.

"Do you like it as well?" she asked, with a quite inexplicable sense of temerity. She felt herself on the verge of being overawed by the stately reticence of this hospital servant.

"It is my work," said Nanni, in a gentler tone. "A man's work is his life."

"But if you had a good gondola and a place at a traghetto, wouldn't you rather come back to Venice?"

"No, Signorina; I love my work."

"Polly, you ought to have been a lawyer," Uncle Dan remarked, highly amused at the insuccess of her catechizing, which he by this time perceived to be harmless.

They had turned in to one of the canals