"But surely, Natalie, it is for me to choose a ring for you?" "Ah, it is not that I mean," she said, quickly, and with her face flushing. "It is a ring that will remind you of the promise you have given me to-day--when we may not be able to see each other." CHAPTER XXVII. KIRSKI. To this pale student from the Reading-room of the British Museum, as he stands on a bridge crossing one of the smaller canals, surely the scene around him must seem one fitted to gladden the heart; for it is Venice at mid-day, in glowing sunlight: the warm cream-white fronts of the marble palaces and casemented houses, the tall campanili with their golden tips, the vast and glittering domes of the churches, all rising fair and dream-like into the intense dark-blue of a cloudless sky. How the hot sunlight brings out all the beautiful color of the place--the richly laden fruit-stalls in the Riva dei Schiavoni; the russet and saffron sails of the vessels; the canal-boats coming in to the steps with huge open tuns of purple wine to be ladled out with copper buckets; and then all around the shining, twinkling plain of the green-hued sea, catching here and there a reflection from the softly red walls of San Giorgio and the steel-gray gleaming domes of Santa Maria della Salute. Then the passers-by: these are not like the dusky ghosts that wander through the pale-blue mists of Bloomsbury. Here comes a buxom water-carrier, in her orange petticoat and sage-green shawl, who has the two copper cans at the end of the long piece of wood poised on her shoulders, pretty nearly filled to the brim. Then a couple of the gayer gondoliers in white and blue, with fancy waist-belts, and rings in their ears. A procession of black-garbed monks wends slowly along; they have come from the silence of the Armenian convent over there at the horizon. Some wandering minstrels shoot their gondola into the mouth of the canal, and strike up a gay waltz, while they watch the shaded balconies above. Here is a Lascar ashore from the big steamer that is to start for Alexandria on the morrow. A company of soldiers, with blue coats, canvas trousers, and white gaiters, half march and half trot along to the quick, crackling music of the buglers. A swarthy-visaged maiden, with the calm brow of a Madonna, appears in the twilight of a balcony, with a packet of maize in her hand, and in a minute or two she is surrounded with a cloud of pigeons. Then this beggar--a child of eight or ten--red-haired and blue-eyed: surely she has stepped out of one of Titian's pictures? She whines and whimpers her prayers to him; but there is something in her look that he has seen elsewhere. It belongs to another century. From these reveries Mr. Gathorne Edwards was aroused by some one tapping him on the shoulder. It was Calabressa.