BY BRANDER MATTHEWS.

I.
IN THE OLD WORLD.

They had been to the Lido for a short swim in the slight but bracing surf of the Adriatic. They had had a mid-day breakfast in a queer little restaurant, known only to the initiated, and therefore early discovered by Larry, who had a keen scent for a cook learned in the law. They had loitered along the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking at a perambulatory puppet-show, before which a delighted audience sturdily disregarded the sharp wind which bravely fluttered the picturesque tatters of the spectators; and they were moved to congratulate the Venetians on their freedom from the monotonous repertory of the Anglo-American Punch and Judy, which consists solely of a play really unique in the exact sense of that much-abused word. They were getting their fill of the delicious Italian art which is best described by an American verb—to loaf. And yet they were not wont to be idle, and they had both the sharp, quick American manner, on which laziness sits uneasily and infrequently.

John Manning and Laurence Laughton were both young New Yorkers. Larry—for so in youth was he called by everybody pending the arrival of years which should make him a universal uncle, to be known of all men as “Uncle Larry”—was as pleasant a travelling companion as one could wish. He was the only son and heir of a father, now no more, but vaguely understood when alive and in the flesh to have been “in the China trade;” although whether this meant crockery or Cathay no one was able with precision to declare. Larry Laughton had been graduated from Columbia College with the class of 1860, and the following spring found him here in Venice after a six months’ ramble through Europe with his old friend, John Manning, partly on foot and partly in an old carriage of their own, in which they enjoyed the fast-vanishing pleasures of posting.

John Manning was a little older than Larry; he had left West Point in 1854 with a commission as second lieutenant in the Old Dragoons. For nearly six years he did his duty in that state of life in which it pleased the Secretary of War and General Scott to call him; he had crossed the plains one bleak winter to a post in the Rocky Mountains, and he had danced through two summers at Fort Adams at Newport; he had been stationed for a while in New Mexico, where there was an abundance of the pleasant sport of Indian-fighting,—even now he had only to make believe a little to see the tufted head of a Navajo peer around the columns supporting the Lion of Saint Mark, or to mistake the fringe of facchini on the edge of the Grand Canal for a group of the shiftless half-breeds of New Mexico. In time the Old Dragoons had been ordered North, where the work was then less pleasant than on the border; and, in fact, it was a distinct unwillingness to execute the Fugitive Slave Law which forced John Manning to resign his commission in the army, although it was the hanging of John Brown which drew from him the actual letter of resignation. Before settling down to other work—for he was a man who could not and would not be idle—he had gratified his long desire of taking a turn through the Old World. Larry Laughton had joined him in Holland, where he had been making researches into the family history, and proving to his own satisfaction at least that the New York Mannings, in spite of their English name, had come from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam. And now, toward the end of April, 1861, John Manning and Laurence Laughton stood on the Rialto, hesitating Fra Marco e Todaro, as the Venetians have it, in uninterested question whether they should go into the Ghetto, among the hideous homes of the chosen people, or out again to Murano for a second visit to the famous factory of Venetian glass.

“I say, John,” remarked Larry as they lazily debated the question, gazing meanwhile on the steady succession of gondolas coming and going to and from the steps by the side of the bridge, “I’d as lief, if not liefer, go to Murano again, if they’ve any of their patent anti-poison goblets left. You know they say they used to make a glass so fine that it was shattered into shivers whenever poison might be poured into it. Of course I don’t believe it, but a glass like that would be mighty handy in the sample-rooms of New York. I’m afraid a man walking up Broadway could use up a gross of the anti-poison goblets before he got one straight drink of the genuine article, unadulterated and drawn from the wood.”

“You must not make fun of a poetic legend, Larry. You have to believe everything over here, or you do not get the worth of your money,” said John Manning.

“Well, I don’t know,” was Larry’s reply; “I don’t know just what to believe. I was talking about it last night at Florian’s, while you were writing letters home.”

“I did not know Mr. Laughton had friends in Venice.”

“Oh, I can make friends anywhere. And this one was lots of fun. He was a priest, an abbate, I think he calls himself. He had read five newspapers in the caffÈ and paid for one tiny cup of coffee. When I finished the DÉbats I passed it to him for his sixth—and he spoke to me in French, and I wasn’t going to let an Italian talk French to me without answering back, so I just sailed in and began to swap stories with him.”

“No doubt you gave him much valuable information.”

“Well, I did; I just exuded information. Why the first thing he said, when I told him I was an American, was to wonder whether I hadn’t met his brother, who was also in America—in Rio Janeiro—just as if Rio was the other side of the North River.”

John Manning smiled at Larry’s disgusted expression, and asked, “What has this abbate to do with the fragile Venetian glass?”

“Only this,” answered Larry. “I told him two or three Northwesters, just as well as I could in French, and then he said that marvellous things were also done here once upon a time. And he told me about the glass which broke when poison was poured into it.”

“It is a pleasant superstition,” said John Manning. “I think Poe makes use of it, and I believe Shakespeare refers to it.”

“But did either Poe or Shakespeare say anything about the two goblets just alike, made for the twin brothers Manin nearly four hundred years ago? Did they tell you how one glass was shivered by poison and its owner killed, and how the other brother had to flee for his life? Did they inform you that the unbroken goblet exists to this day, and is in fact now for sale by an Hebrew Jew who peddles antiquities? Did they tell you that?”

“Neither Edgar Allan Poe nor William Shakespeare ever disturbs my slumbers by telling me anything of the sort,” laughed Manning.

“Well, my abbate told me just that, and he gave me the address of the Shylock who has the surviving goblet for sale.”

“Suppose we go there and see it,” suggested Manning, “and you can tell me the whole story of the twin brothers as we go along.”

“Shall we take a gondola or walk?” was Larry’s interrogative acceptance of the suggestion.

“It’s in the Ghetto, isn’t it?”

“Most of the Jew curiosity dealers have left the Ghetto. Our Shylock has a palace on the Grand Canal. I guess we had better take a gondola, though it can’t be far.”

So they sat themselves down in one of the aquatic cabs which ply the water streets of the city in the sea. The gondolier stood to his oar and put his best foot foremost, and as the boat sped forward on its way along the great S of the Grand Canal, Larry told the tale of the twin brothers and the shattered goblet.

“Well, it seems that some time in the sixteenth century, say three hundred years ago or thereabout, there were several branches of the great and powerful Manin family—the same family to which the patriotic Daniele Manin belonged, you know. And at the head of one of these branches were the twin brothers Marco Manin and Giovanni Manin. Now, these brothers were devoted to each other, and they had only one thought, one word, one deed. When one of them happened to think of a thing, it often happened that the other brother did it. So it was not surprising that they both fell in love with the same woman. She was a dangerous-looking, yellow-haired woman, with steel-gray eyes—that is, if her eyes were not really green, as to which there was doubt. But there was no doubt at all that she was powerfully handsome. The abbate said that there was a famous portrait of her in one of these churches as a Saint Mary Magdalen, with her hair down. She was a splendid creature, and lots of men were running after her besides the twin Manins. The two brothers did not quarrel with each other about the woman, but they did quarrel with some of her other lovers, and particularly with a nobleman of the highest rank and power, who was supposed to belong not only to the Council of Ten, but to the Three. Between this man and the Manins there was war to the knife and the knife to the hilt. One day Marco Manin expressed a wish for one of these goblets of Venetian glass so fine that poison shatters it, and so Giovanni went out to Murano and ordered two of them, of the very finest quality, and just alike in every particular of color and shape and size. You see the twins always had everything in pairs. But the people at Murano somehow misunderstood the order, and although they made both glasses they sent home only one. Marco Manin was at table when it arrived, and he took it in his hand at once, and after admiring its exquisite workmanship—you see, all these old Venetians had the art-feeling strongly developed—he told a servant to fill it to the brim with Cyprus wine. But as he raised the flowing cup to his lips it shivered in his grasp and the wine was spilt on the marble floor. He drew his sword and slew the servant who had sought to betray him, and rushing into the street he found himself face to face with the enemy whom he knew to have instigated the attempt. They crossed swords at once, but, before Marco Manin could have a fair fight for his life, he was stabbed in the back by a glass stiletto, the hilt of which was broken off short in the wound.”

“Where was his brother all this time?” was the first question with which John Manning broke the thread of his friend’s story.

“He had been to see the yellow-haired beauty, and he came back just in time to meet his brother’s lifeless body as it was carried into their desolate home. Holding his dead brother’s hand, as he had often held it living, he promised his brother to avenge his death without delay and at any cost. Then he prepared at once for flight. He knew that Venice would be too hot to hold him when the deed was done; and besides, he felt that without his brother life in Venice would be intolerable So he made ready for flight. Twenty-four hours to a minute after Marco Manin’s death the body of the hireling assassin was sinking to the bottom of the Grand Canal, while the man who had paid for the murder lay dead on the same spot with the point of a glass stiletto in his heart! And when they wanted to send him the other goblet, there was no one to send it to: Giovanni Manin had disappeared.”

“Where had he gone?” queried John Manning.

“That’s what I asked the abbate, and he said he didn’t know for sure, but that in those days Venice had a sizable trade with the Low Countries, and there was a tradition that Giovanni Manin had gone to the Netherlands.”

“To Holland?” asked John Manning with unwonted interest.

“Yes, to Amsterdam, or to Rotterdam, or to some one of those-dam towns, as we used to call them in our geography class.”

“It was to Amsterdam,” said Manning, speaking as one who had certain information.

“How do you know that?” asked Larry. “Even the abbate said it was only a tradition that he had gone to Holland at all.”

“He went to Amsterdam,” said Manning; “that I know.”

Before Larry could ask how it was that his friend knew anything about the place of exile of a man whom he had never heard of ten minutes earlier, the gondola had paused before the door of the palace in which dwelt the dealer in antiquities who had in his possession the famous goblet of Venetian glass. As they ascended to the sequence of rambling rooms cluttered with old furniture, rusty armor, and odds and ends of statuary, in which the modern Jew of Venice sat at the receipt of custom, both Larry Laughton and John Manning had to give their undivided attention to the framing in Italian of their wishes. Shylock himself was a venerable and benevolent person, with a look of wonderful shrewdness and an incomprehensibility of speech, for he spoke the Venetian dialect with a harsh Jewish accent, either of which would have daunted a linguistic veteran. Plainly enough, conversation was impossible, for he could barely understand their American-Italian, and they could not at all understand his Jewish-Venetian. But it would not do to let these Inglesi go away without paying tribute.

“CiÒ!” said Shylock, smiling graciously at his futile attempts to open communication with the enemy. Then he called Jessica from the deep window where she had been at work on the quaint old account-books of the shop, as great curiosities as anything in it, since they were kept in Venetian, but by means of the Hebrew alphabet. She spoke Italian, and to her the young men made known their wants. She said a few words to her father, and he brought forth the goblet.

It was a marvellous specimen of the most exquisite Venetian workmanship. A pair of green serpents, with eyes that glowed like fire, writhed around the golden stem of a blood-red bowl, and as the white light of the cloudless sky fell on it from the broad window, it burned in the glory of the sunshine and seemed to fill itself full of some mysterious and royal wine. Shylock revolved it slowly in his hand to show the strange waviness of its texture, and as it turned, the serpents clung more closely to the stem and arched their heads and shot a glance of hate at the strangers who came to gaze on them with curious fascination.

John Manning looked at the goblet long and eagerly. “How did it come into your possession?” he asked.

And Jessica translated Shylock’s declaration that the goblet had been at Murano for hundreds of years; it was anticho—antichissimo, as the signor could see for himself. It was of the best period of the art. That Shylock would guarantee. How came it into his possession? By the greatest good fortune. It was taken from Murano during the troubles after the fall of the Republic in the time of Napoleon. It had gone finally into the hands of a certain count, who, very luckily, was poor. Conte che non conta, non conta niente. So Shylock had been enabled to buy it. It had been the desire of his heart for years to own so fine an object.

“How much do you want for it?” asked John Manning.

Shylock scented from afar the battle of bargaining, dear in Italy to both buyer and seller. He gave a keen look at both the Inglesi, and took up the glass affectionately, as though he could not bear to part with it. Jessica interpreted. Shylock had intended that goblet for his own private collection, but the frank and generous manner of their excellencies had overcome him, and he would let them have it for five hundred florins.

“Five hundred florins! Phew!” whistled Larry, astonished in spite of his initiation into the mysteries of Italian bargaining. “Well, if you were to ask me the Shakespearian conundrum, Hath not a Jew eyes? I shouldn’t give it up; I should say he has eyes—for the main chance.”

“Five hundred florins,” said John Manning. “Very well. I’ll take it.”

Shylock’s astonishment at getting four times what he would have taken was equalled only by his regret that he had not asked twice as much.

“Can you pack it so that I can take it to New York safely?”

“Sicuro, signor,” and Shylock agreed to have the precious object boxed with all possible care and despatch, and delivered at the hotel that afternoon.

“Servo suo!” said Jessica, as they stood at the door.

“Bon di, Patron!” responded Larry, in Venetian fashion; then as the door closed behind them he said to John Manning, “Seems to me you were in a hurry! You could have had that glass for half the money.”

“Perhaps I could,” was Manning’s quiet reply, “but I was eager to get it back at once.”

“Get it back? Why, it wasn’t stolen from you, was it? I never did suppose he came by it honestly.”

“It was not stolen from me personally, but it belonged to my family. It was made for Giovanni Manin, who fled from Venice to Amsterdam three hundred odd years ago. His grandson and namesake left Amsterdam for New Amsterdam half a century later. And when the English changed New Amsterdam into New York, Jan Mannin became John Manning—and I am his direct descendant, and the first of my blood to return to Venice to get the goblet Giovanni Manin ordered and left behind.”

“Well, I’m damned!” said Larry, pensively.

“And now,” continued John Manning as they took their seats in the gondola, “tell the man to go to the church where the picture of Mary Magdalen is. I want a good look at that woman!”

In the evening, as John Manning sat in a little caffÈ under the arcades of the Piazza San Marco, sipping a tiny cup of black coffee, Larry entered with a rush of righteous indignation.

“What’s the matter, Larry?” was John Manning’s calm query.

“There’s the devil to pay at home. South Carolina has fired on the flag at Sumter.”

Three weeks later Colonel Manning was assigned to duty drilling the raw recruits soon to be the Army of the Potomac.

II.
IN THE NEW WORLD.

In the month of February, 1864, a chance newspaper paragraph informed whom it might concern that Major Laurence Laughton, having three weeks’ leave of absence from his regiment, was at the Astor House. In consequence of this advertisement of his whereabouts, Major Laughton received many cheerful circulars and letters, in most of which his attention was claimed for the artificial limb made by the advertiser. He also received a letter from Colonel John Manning, urgently bidding him to come out for a day at least to his little place on the Hudson, where he was lying sick, and, as he feared, sick unto death. On the receipt of this Larry cut short a promising flirtation with a war-widow who sat next him at table, and took the first train up the river. It was a bleak day, and there was at least a foot of snow on the ground, as hard and as dry as though it had clean forgot that it was made of water. As Larry left the little station, to which the train had slowly struggled at last, an hour behind time, the wind sprang up again and began to moan around his feet and to sting his face with icy shot; and as he trudged across the desolate path which led to Manning’s lonely house he discovered that rude Boreas could be as keen a sharp-shooter as any in the rifle-pits around Richmond. A hard walk up-hill for a quarter of an hour brought him to the brow of the cliff on which stood the forlorn and wind-swept house where John Manning lay. An unkempt and hideous old crone as black as night opened the door for him. He left in the hall his hat and overcoat and a little square box he had brought in his hand; and then he followed the ebony hag upstairs to Colonel Manning’s room. Here at the door she left him, after giving a sharp knock. A weak voice said, “Come in!”

Laurence Laughton entered the room with a quick step, but the light-hearted words with which he had meant to encourage his friend died on his lips as soon as he saw how grievously that friend had changed. John Manning had faded to a shadow of his former self; the light of his eye was quenched, and the spirit within him seemed broken; the fine, sensitive, noble face lay white against the pillow, looking weary and wan and hopeless. The effort to greet his friend exhausted him and brought on a hard cough, and he pressed his hand to his breast as though some hidden malady were gnawing and burning within.

“Well, John,” said Larry, as he took a seat by the bedside, “why didn’t you let me know before now that you were laid up? I could have got away a month ago.”

“Time enough yet,” said John Manning slowly; “time enough yet. I shall not die for another week, I fear.”

“Why, man, you must not talk like that. You are as good as a dozen dead men yet,” said Larry, trying to look as cheerful as might be.

“I am as good as dead myself,” said his friend seriously, as befitted a man under the shadow of death; “and I have no wish to live. The sooner I am out of this pain and powerlessness the better I shall like it.”

“I say, John, old man, this is no way for you to talk! Brace up, and you will soon be another man!”

“I shall soon be in another world, I hope,” and the helpless misery of the tone in which these few words were said smote Laurence Laughton to the heart.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked with as lively an air as he could attain, for the ominous and inexplicable sadness of the situation was fast taking hold on him.

“I have a bullet through the lungs and a pain in the heart.”

“But men do not die of a bullet in the lungs and a pain in the heart,” was Larry’s encouraging response.

“I shall.”

“Why should you more than others?”

“Because there is something else—something mysterious, some unknown malady—which bears me down and burns me up. There is no use trying to deceive me, Larry. My papers are made out, and I shall get my discharge from the Army of the Living in a very few days now. But I must not waste the little breath I have left in talking about myself. I sent for you to ask a favor.”

Larry held out his hand, and John Manning took it, and seemed to gain strength from the firm clasp.

“I knew I could rely on you,” he said, “for much or for little. And this is not much, for I have not much to leave. This worn old house, which belonged to my grandmother, and in which I spent the happiest hours of my boyhood, this and a few shares of stock here and there are all I have to leave. I do not know what the house is worth, and I shall be glad when I am gone from it. If I had not come here, I think I might perhaps have got well. There seems to be something deadly about the place.” The sick man’s voice sank to a wavering whisper, as if it were borne down by a sudden weight of impending danger against which he might struggle in vain; he gave a fearful glance about the room, as though seeking a mystic foe, hidden and unknown. “The very first day we were here the cat lapped its milk by the fire and then stretched itself out and died without a sign. And I had not been here two days before I felt the fatal influence: the trouble from my wound came on again, and this awful burning in my breast began to torture me. As a boy, I thought that heaven must be like this house; and now I should not want to die if I thought hell could be worse!”

“Why don’t you leave the hole, since you hate it so?” asked Larry, with what scant cheeriness he could muster; he was yielding himself slowly to the place, though he fought bravely against his superstitious weakness.

“Am I fit to be moved?” was Manning’s query in reply.

“But you will be better soon, and then”—

“I shall be worse before I am better, and I shall never be better in this life or in this place. No, no, I must die in my hole, like a dog. Like a dog!” and John Manning repeated the words with a wistful face, “Do you remember the faithful beast who always welcomed me here when we came up before we went to Europe?”

“Of course I do,” said Larry, glad to get the sick man away from his sickness, and to ease his mind by talk on a healthy topic; “he was a splendid fellow, too. CÆsar, that was his name, wasn’t it?”

“CÆsar Borgia I called him,” was Manning’s sad reply. “I knew you could not have forgotten him. He is dead. CÆsar Borgia is dead. He was the last living thing that loved me—except you, Larry, I know—and he is dead. He died this morning. He came to my bedside as usual, and he licked my hand gently and looked up in my face, and laid him down alongside of me on the carpet here and died. Poor CÆsar Borgia—he loved me, and he is dead! And you, Larry, you must not stay here. The air is fatal. Every breath may be your last. When you have heard what I want, you must be off at once. If you like, you may come up again to the funeral before your leave is up. I saw you had three weeks.”

Laurence Laughton moved uneasily in his chair and swallowed with difficulty. “John,” he managed to say after an effort, “if you talk to me like that, I shall go at once. Tell me what it is you want me to do for you.”

“I want you to take care of my wife and of my child, if there be one born to me after my death.”

“Your wife?” repeated Larry, in staring surprise.

“You did not know I was married? I knew it at the time, as the boy said,” and John Manning smiled bitterly.

“Where is she?” was Larry’s second query.

“Here.”

“Here?”

“In this house. You shall see her before you go. And after the funeral I want you to get her away from here with what speed you can. Sell this house for what it will bring, and put the money into government bonds. You may find it hard to persuade her to move, for she seems to have a strange liking for this place. She breathes freely in the deadly air that suffocates me. But you must not let her remain here; this is no place for her now that a new life and new duties are before her.”

“How was it I did not know of your marriage?” asked Larry.

“I knew nothing about it myself twenty-four hours before it happened,” answered John Manning. “You need not look surprised. It is a simple story. I had this shot through the breast at Gettysburg last Fourth of July. I lay on the hillside a day and a night before relief came. Then a farmer took me into his house. A military surgeon dressed my wounds, but I owed my life to the nursing and care and unceasing attention of a young lady who was staying with the farmer’s daughter. She had been doing her duty as a nurse as near to the field as she could go ever since the first Bull Run. She saved my life, and I gave it to her—what there was of it. She was a beautiful woman, indeed I never saw a more beautiful—and she has a strange likeness to—but that you shall see for yourself when you see her. She is getting a little rest now, for she has been up all night attending to me. She will wait on me in spite of all I say; of course I know there is no use wasting effort on me now. She is the most devoted nurse in the world; and we shall part as we met—she taking care of me at the last as she did at the first. Would God our relation had never been other than patient and nurse! It would have been better for both had we never been husband and wife!” And John Manning turned his face to the wall with a weary sigh; then he coughed harshly, and raised his hand to his breast as though to stifle the burning within him.

“It seems to me, John, that you ought not to talk like that of the woman you loved,” said Laurence Laughton, with unusual seriousness.

“I never loved her,” answered Manning, coldly. Then he turned, and asked hastily, “Do you think I should want to die if I loved her?”

“But she loves you,” said Laurence.

“She never loved me!” was Manning’s impatient retort.

“Then why were you married?”

“That’s what I would like to know. It was fate, I suppose. What is to be, is. I never used to believe in predestination, but I know that of my own free will I could never have done what I did.”

“I confess I do not understand you,” said Larry.

“I do not understand myself. There is so much in this world that is mysterious—I hope the next will be different. I was under the charm, I fancy, when I married her. She is a beautiful woman, as I told you, and I was a man, and I was weak, and I had hope. Why she married me that early September evening I do not know. It was not long before we both found out our mistake. And it was too late then. We were man and wife. Don’t suppose I blame her—I do not. I have no cause of complaint. She is a good wife to me, as I have tried to be a good husband to her. We made a mistake in marrying each other, and we know it—that’s all!”

Before Laurence Laughton could answer, the door opened gently and Mrs. Manning entered the room. Laurence rose to greet his friend’s wife, but the act was none the less a homage to her resplendent beauty. In spite of the worn look of her face, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had tawny, tigress hair, and hungry, tigress eyes. The eyes, indeed, were fathomless and indescribable, and their fitful glance had something uncanny about it. The hair was nearly of the true Venetian color, and she had the true Venetian sumptuousness of appearance, simple as was her attire. She seemed as though she had just risen from the couch whereon she reclined before Titian or Tintoretto, and, having clothed herself, had walked forth in this nineteenth century and these United States. She was a strange and striking figure, and Laurence found it impossible to analyze exactly the curious and weird impression she produced on him. Her voice, as she greeted him, gave him a peculiar thrill; and when he shook hands with her he seemed to feel himself face to face with some strange being from another land and another century. She inspired him with a supernatural awe he was not wont to feel in the presence of woman. He had a dim consciousness that there lingered in his memory the glimmering image of some woman seen somewhere, he knew not when, who was like unto the woman before him.

As she took her seat by the side of the bed she gave Laurence Laughton a look that seemed to peer into his soul. Laurence felt himself quiver under it. It was a look to make a man fearful. Then John Manning, who had moved uneasily as his wife entered, said, “Laurence, can you see any resemblance in my wife to any one you ever saw before?”

Their eyes met again, and again Laurence had a vague remembrance as though he and she had stood face to face before in some earlier existence. Then his wandering recollections took shape, and he remembered the face and the form and the haunting mystery of the expression, and he felt for a moment as though he had been permitted to peer into the cabalistic darkness of an awful mystery, though he failed wholly to perceive its occult significance—if significance there were of any sort.

“I think I do remember,” he said at last. “It was in Venice—at the Church of Santa Maria Magdalena—the picture there that”—

“You remember aright!” interrupted John Manning. “My wife is the living image of the Venetian woman for whose beauty Marco Manin was one day stabbed in the back with a glass stiletto, and Giovanni Manin fled from the place of his birth and never saw it again. It is idle to fight against the stars in their courses. We met here in the New World, she and I, as they met in the Old World so long ago—and the end is the same. It was to be—it was to be!”

Laurence Laughton gave a swift glance at his friend’s wife to see what effect these words might have on her, and he was startled to detect on her face the same enigmatic smile which was the chief memory he had retained of the Venetian picture. Truly the likeness between the painting and the wife of his friend was marvellous; and Laurence tried to shake off a morbid wonder whether there might be any obscure and inscrutable survival from one generation to another across the seas and across the years.

“If you remember the picture,” said John Manning, “perhaps you remember the quaint goblet of Venetian glass I bought the same day?”

“Of course I do,” said Larry, glad to get Manning started on a topic of talk a little less personal.

“Perhaps you know what has become of it?” asked Manning.

“I can answer ‘of course’ to that, too,” replied Larry, “because I have it here.”

“Here?”

“Here—in a little square box, in the hall,” answered Larry. “I had it in my trunk, you know, when we took passage on the Vanderbilt at Havre that May morning. I forgot to give it to you in the hurry of landing, and I haven’t had a chance since. This is the first time I have seen you for nearly three years. I found the box this morning, and I thought you might like to have it again, so I brought it up.”

John Manning rang the bell at the head of his bed. The black crone answered it, and soon returned with the little square box. Manning impatiently broke the seals and cords that bound its cover and began eagerly to release the goblet from the cotton and tissue paper in which it had been carefully swathed and bandaged. Mrs. Manning, though her moods were subtler and more intense, showed an anxiety to see the goblet quite as feverish as her husband’s. In a minute the last wrapping was twisted off and the full beauty of the Venetian glass was revealed to them. Assuredly no praise was too loud for its delicate and exquisite workmanship.

“Does Mrs. Manning know the story of the goblet?” asked Larry; “has she been told of the peculiar virtue ascribed to it?”

“She has too great a fondness for the horrible and the fantastic not to have heard the story in its smallest details,” said Manning.

Mrs. Manning had taken the glass in her fine, thin hands. Evidently it and its mystic legend had a morbid fascination for her. A strange light gleamed in her wondrous eyes, and Laughton was startled again to see the extraordinary resemblance between her and the picture they had looked at on the day the goblet had been bought.

“When the poison was poured into it,” she said at last, with quick and restless glances at the two men, “the glass broke—then the tale was true?”

“It was a coincidence only, I’m afraid,” said her husband, who had rallied and regained strength under the unwonted excitement.

Just then the old-fashioned clock on the stairs struck five. Mrs. Manning started up, holding the goblet in her hand.

“It is time for your medicine,” she said.

“As you please,” answered her husband wearily, sinking back on his pillow. “My wife insists on giving me every drop of my potions with her own hands. I shall not trouble her much longer, and I doubt if it is any use for her to trouble me now.”

“I shall give you everything in this glass after this,” she said.

“In the Venetian glass?” asked Larry.

“Yes,” she said, turning on him fiercely; “why not?”

“Do you think the doctor is trying to poison me?” asked her husband.

“No, I do not think the doctor is trying to poison you,” she repeated mechanically, as she moved toward a little sideboard in a corner of the room. “But I shall give you all your medicines in this hereafter.”

She stood at the little sideboard, with her back toward them, and she mingled the contents of various phials in the Venetian goblet. Then she turned to cross the room to her husband. As she walked with the glass in her hand there was a rift in the clouds high over the other side of the river, and the rays of the setting sun thrust themselves through the window and lighted up the glory of her hair and showed the strange gleam in her staring eyes. Another step, and the red rays fell on the Venetian glass, and it burned and glowed, and the green serpents twined about its ruby stem seemed to twist and crawl with malignant life, while their scorching eyes shot fire. Another step, and she stood by the bedside. As John Manning reached out his hand for the goblet, a tremor passed through her, her fingers clinched the fragile stem, and the glass fell on the floor and was shattered to shivers as its fellow had been shattered three centuries ago and more. She still stared steadily before her; then her lips parted, and she said, “The glass broke—the glass broke—then the tale is true!” And with one hysteric shriek she fell forward amid the fragments of the Venetian goblet, unconscious thereafter of all things.