These mornings in the gondola continued until she was ten years old. Sometimes it was a melon held high in the air that tempted her; or a basket of figs, or some huge bunches of grapes; or a roll and a broiled fish from a passing cook-boat: but the bait always sufficed. With a little cry of joy the beads would be dropped, or the neighbor's child passed to another or whatever else occupied her busy head and small hands, and away she would run to the water steps and hold out her arms until Luigi rowed over and lifted her in. She had changed, of course, in these five years, and was still changing, but only as an expanding bud changes. The eyes were the same and so were the teeth--if any had dropped out, newer and better ones had taken their places; the hair though was richer, fuller, longer, more like coils of liquid jet, with a blue sheen where the sky lights touched its folds. The tight, trim little figure, too, had loosened out in certain places--especially about the chest and hips. Before many years she would flower into the purest type of the Venetian--the most beautiful woman the world knows. At sixteen she burst into bloom. I have never seen a black tulip, not a real velvet-black, but if inside its shroud of glossy enfoldings--so like Loretta's hair--there lies enshrined a mouth red as a pomegranate and as enticing, and if above it there burn two eyes that would make a holy man clutch his rosary; and if the flower sways on its stalk with the movement of a sapling caressed by a summer breeze;--then the black tulip is precisely the kind of flower that Loretta bloomed into. And here the real trouble began,--just as it begins for every other pretty Venetian, and here, too, must I place the second pin in my chart. It all came through Francesco. The older sister had died with the first child, and this crab catcher had begun to stretch out his claws for Loretta. She and her mother still lived with Francesco's father, who was a widower. The mother kept the house for all,--had done so for Francesco and her daughter during their brief married life. In her persecution Loretta would pour out her heart to Luigi, telling how they bothered her,--her mother the most of all. She hated Francesco,--hated his father,--hated everybody who wanted her to marry the fisherman. (Luigi, poor fellow, had lost his only daughter when she was five years of age, which accounted, I always thought, for his interest in the girl.) One morning she called to him and waited on the quay until he could hail a passing barca and step from the gondola to its deck and so ashore. Then the two disappeared through the gate of the garden. "She is too pretty to go alone," he explained on his return. "Every day she must pay a boy two soldi, Signore, to escort her to the lace factory--the boy is sick today and so I went with her. But their foolishness will stop after this;--these rats know Luigi." From this day on Loretta had the Riva to herself. II