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262 fair deduction from the known to the unknown, to conclude that he would in all probability have a few more still.

Lady Frances, who was not young even for her age, had one youthful fancy left, and that was that she delighted in being rowed about Venice in her sandolo – as those light canoe-like boats are called, which stand in much the same relation to a gondola that a London hansom does to a four-wheeled cab. This particular sandolo was a very perfect little craft of its kind, and was rowed by a youth rejoicing in the immortal name of Michael Angelo, who was his mistress's private and particular henchman, and her favourite of all her household. To look at, Michael Angelo was not wholly unworthy of the name he bore, which, it will be owned, is saying a good deal. He was a beautiful youth, with one of those thrice-fortunate faces, more common in Italy than elsewhere, which seem endowed by Heaven with the enviable prerogative of expressing any sentiment, however amiable or lofty, with which its owner may chance to be momentarily inspired. Whether this Michael Angelo's soul was quite equal to the capabilities of his face, it is perhaps unnecessary to inquire too curiously. Gratitude the latter certainly did express, and that in no stinted measure, whenever his eyes rested upon his patroness. Lady Frances had picked him up upon one of those barges which bring firewood and planks to Venice from the mainland, where he, as a boy of twelve, had been kept working all the day, and often half the night too, for a few pence and the food of a masterless dog. In the contours of his throat, as well as in the great eyes that were almost too large for the face, there were signs, even still, that told of the early pinch of starvation: they were not enough, however, to impair their beauty, – rather they enhanced it with a touch of wistfulness which otherwise would have been wanting. In his well-fitting gondolier's summer dress of white linen, with the red sash weighted with gold fringe, which swung to and fro like a pendulum with every motion of his graceful body; in his small cap of red cloth, under and around which his black hair curled like the tendrils of the bryony, he might have been set by a painter to ply an oar in the barge of Queen Venus herself. People in Venice, to whom the pair were as well known as the two Colossi upon the steps of the Doge's palace, used to laugh when they saw them passing, pointing them out to one another with loud-voiced open-mouthed comments, not maliciously, but audaciously, like schoolboys, to whom everything under heaven is obviously given as food for them to exercise their wits upon.

Lady Frances was well accustomed to these comments, and she did not really mind them, though, from habit and shyness, she often looked cross enough, poor soul, in vulgar parlance, "to frighten the horses," had there been any such animals in Venice to be frightened. A momentary ray of benevolence – a spark of goodness, of which she herself was hardly conscious – was about the only manifestation of the woman within which ever succeeded in finding its way through that impenetrable husk of ugliness behind which all her finer and better qualities lay shrouded. Everything else was locked up, swathed, unexpressed, like some tropical plant stowed away in a dark cellar, whose potential wealth of beauty is forbidden to produce so much as a leaf.