"Yes," he said. "It is not a face one could forget easily," he added.
Then he rose and went back to his table.
CHAPTER VII
The sun was high over Venice, gleaming on the blue lagoons that lightly
rippled under a southerly breeze, filling the vast square of Saint
Mark's with blinding light, casting deep shadows behind the church and
in the narrow alleys and canals to northward, about the Merceria. The
morning haze had long since blown away, and the outlines of the old
church and monastery on Saint George's island, and of the buildings on
the Guidecca, and on the low-lying Lido, were hard and clear against the
cloudless sky, mere designs cut out in rich colours, as if with a sharp
knife, and reared up against a background of violent light. In Venice
only the melancholy drenching rain of a winter's day brings rest to the
eye, when water meets water and sky is washed into sea and the city lies
soaking and dripping between two floods. But soon the wind shifts to the
northeast, out breaks the sun again, and all Venice is instantly in a
glare of light and colour and startling distinctness, like the sails and
rigging of a ship at sea on a clear day.
It was Sunday morning and high mass was over in Saint Mark's. The crowd
had streamed out of the central door, spreading like a bright fan over
the square, the men in gay costumes, red, green, blue, yellow, purple,
brown, and white, their legs particoloured in halves and quarters, so
that when looking at a group it was mere guesswork to match the pair
that belonged to one man; women in dresses of one tone, mostly rich and
dark, and often heavily embroidered, for no sumptuary laws could
effectually limit outward display, and the insolent vanity of an age
still almost mediaeval made it natural that the rich should attire
themselves as richly as they could, and that the poor should be despised
for wearing poor clothes.
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