Garin’s squire, Rainier, had been sent ahead to the inn, and now rode back to meet them. “Sirs, a Venetian merchant-lord and his people possess the house! But I have caught one fair chamber from the Italian’s clutch and the hostess promises good supper and soon. For the men, the next street hath the Olive Tree and the Sheaf and Sickle.” They came to the great inn, a low, capacious building with a courtyard, and in a corner of this a spacious arbour overrun by a grape-vine. It was sunset. The knights and their squires dismounted, and a sumpter mule with its load was brought from the rear. Men came from the inn stable and took away the horses. Orders as to the morning start having been given, the troop from Panemonde trotted off, down an unpaved lane, to the lesser hostels. The hostess appeared, a woman of great size with a face as genial as the sun. She poured forth words as to preëmpted quarters, regrets, admirations, welcomes, hints that they were as well off here as at the castle where the lord was healing him of a grisly wound, and the lady had yesterday been brought to bed of a woman-child. Then she herself marshalled the knights, the squire Rainier following, to a chamber reasonably large and clean. Maids brought basins and ewers of water. Rainier busied himself with squire’s duties. He, too, looked to knighthood, somewhere in the future. The bright evening light came through the window. Below, under the grape-arbour, serving-men placed boards on trestles, and furnished forth a table. The inn followed a good fashion, and on these warm and long days spread supper in the largest, most open hall that might be. When they descended to the court it was to find the Venetian great merchant already at table, sitting with two others above the salt. He was a lordly person, dressed in prune-coloured cendal, breathing potencies of travel and trade. In his air were Venice and her doges, the equal sea and the flavour of gold. He greeted the two knights courteously, and they returned his greeting. They took their places, the squire below them. Supper went well, with the hum of life around the arbour, and the sky’s warm tint showing between twisted branches of the vine. When hunger was satisfied, they talked. They who spent years in the East came back to Europe with certain Saracenic touches of conduct and manner that to such as the Venetian told at least part of their history. He began at once to speak of cities beyond the sea—of Jaffa, Tripoli, Edessa, Aleppo, Damascus. In turn Garin and Aimar questioned him of Venice, paved with the sea.