"And across this," said John,--"with their hour glasses spilling out the sand, come the gondolas with the dead, to the cemetery that lies in the water in the midst of the Lagoon. They churn up the water with the speed they go, and if you ask a gondolier why they go so fast, he will tell you it is because the dead cannot pay for that last journey of theirs. That is their humour in the city they call _La citta del riso sangue_. But we shall creep through the water--we can pay--at least----" he thought of his two quarters’ rent--"I suppose we can. We shall steer through the water like the shadow of a little cloud gliding across the sea. Oh----" he pressed his hands to his eyes--"but it would be wonderful there with you! And at night, when the whole city is full of darkness--strange, silent, mysterious darkness--where every lighted taper that burns and every lamp that is lit seems to illuminate a deed of mystery, we would go out into the Grand Canal, when we had said good-night to those dear old people of mine and we’d listen to them singing--and, oh,--they sing so badly, but it sounds so wonderful there. At last--one by one, the lights would begin to flicker out. The windows that were alive and awake would close their eyes and hide in the mysterious darkness; a huge white lamp of a moon would glide up out of the breast of the Adriatic, and then----" "Then?" she whispered. "Then we should turn back to the little room amongst all those other little rooms in the great darkness--the gondolier would row home, and I should be left alone with my arms tight round you and my head resting on the gentlest place in the world." He lifted his hands above his head--he laughed bitterly with the unreality of it all. "What beautiful nonsense all this is," said he. She looked up with the tears burning in her eyes. She looked up and her glance fell upon a picture that his father had painted and given him--a picture of the Rialto lifting with its white arches over the green water. She pointed to it. He followed with his eyes the white line of her finger. "Then that," said Jill, and her voice quivered--"that’s the City--the City of Beautiful Nonsense." BOOK II THE TUNNEL CHAPTER XXII THE HEART OF THE SHADOW Ideals in the human being are as the flight of a swallow, now high, now sinking to earth, borne upwards by the bright light of air, pressed downwards by the lowering of a heavy sky. When John had said his last good-bye to Jill, when it seemed to both of them that the Romance was finished--when the City of Beautiful Nonsense had just been seen upon the horizon, like a land of promise viewed from a height of Pisgah, and then faded into the mist of impossible things, John turned back to those rooms in Fetter Lane, with his ideal hugging close to earth and all the loneliness of life stretching out monotonously before him.