She was lost! He had left her as he would have left some light love, almost with the manner of a stranger, almost impatient even, drawn by the freshness of the dawn, by the freedom of the morning.
From her window she perceived Stelio on the bank of the canal; he was inhaling deep breaths of the fresh morning air; then in the perfect calm that reigned over all things, she heard his clear, confident voice calling the gondolier:
The man was asleep in the bottom of his gondola, and his human slumber resembled that of the curved boat that obeyed his movements. Stelio touched him lightly with his foot, and instantly he sprang up, jumped to his place and seized the oar. Man and boat awoke at the same time, as if they had but one body, ready to glide over the water.
"Your servant, Signor!" said Zorzi with a smile, glancing up at the brightening sky. "Sit down, Signor, and I will row."
Opposite the palace, the door of a large workshop was thrown open. It was a stonecutter's shop, where steps were fashioned from the stone of Val-di-Sole.
"To ascend!" thought Stelio, and his superstitious soul rejoiced at the good omen. On the sign, the name of the quarry seemed radiant with promise--the Valley of the Sun. He had already seen, a short time before, the image of a stairway, on a coat-of-arms in the Gradenigo garden--a symbol of his own ascension. "Higher, always higher!" Joy came bubbling up from the depths of his being. The morning awakened all manly energies.
"And Perdita? And Ariadne?" He saw them again, as they descended the marble stairway, in the light of the smoking torches. "And La Tanagra?" The Syracusan appeared to his vision, with her long, goat-like eyes, reposing gracefully upon her mother earth, motionless as a bas-relief on the marble in which it is carved. "The Dionysian Trinity!" He fancied them as exempt from all passion, immune from all evil, like creations of art. The surface of his soul seemed covered with swift and splendid images, like sails scattered over a swelling sea. His heart beat calmly, and with the approaching sunrise he felt a renewal of his life-forces, as if he were born anew with the morning.
"We do not need this light any longer," murmured the gondolier slyly, extinguishing the lantern of the gondola.