became the more I raged inwardly. I cursed myself for not having deduced the obvious probabilities before this. It was nearly two o'clock when we reached the hotel, but it required my utmost power of will to refrain from waking Treadwell up. As it was, after a sleepless night, in which I worked myself up to a most unenviable frame of mind, I arose early and was waiting for Treadwell when he appeared in the hall on his way to the dining-room. "One moment, Treadwell," I called. As he stopped, wonderingly, I nodded toward the veranda and he followed me. "Look here, Treadwell; why did you tell Miss Gray who I was?" "You heard what I said," I growled. "I asked you how long it would take you to drive me to the place where your sister, Cecil Gray, is?" He hesitated no longer, but he spoke as though it were an effort. "Why, sir, about-about an hour, I think." "All right." I settled back into my seat and drew out my watch. "It is now nine o'clock. I understood you to say one hour. Let it be no more, my boy." As a matter of record we made the trip to a smaller hotel, situated in a great valley below us, well within the stipulated time. "You wait here," I ordered, and, leap He flushed and stammered, and then ing from the car, entered the front door. found voice. A young woman was at the clerk's desk and, approaching her, I asked for Miss Gray. "I didn't," he declared. "Whom did you tell, then?" My voice was rasping, I'm afraid. I was very much overwrought. "Why-I-I-naturally enough, when I learned who you were, I told several of the hotel guests, among them perhaps Mrs. Oliphant, whose children have been in Miss Gray's charge." "Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant!" I sneered. "Don't you know she was the first one you told?" "Well," flared Treadwell, "and if she was? When her own brother was coming to this hotel as your chauf "Her-what?" "Her brother. He is your driver, if you wish to know it. When she learned that she went away. No one drove her out of the hotel, as you seem to But I had turned away and was running toward the garage. My driver was working over the engine and looked up at me in some surprise, as I was flushed, breathless, excited. "Frank," I said, "I want you to get the car ready at once and come around to the veranda. Hurry, please. Do you understand?" He nodded and in five minutes the car was at the steps. As I climbed into the tonneau I leaned forward. "Young man," said I gruffly, "how long, do you estimate, will it take to drive to where your sister is?" "I-I-sir?" He regarded me daz edly. "Tell her," I added, "that her brother is waiting below." The clerk nodded toward a small anteroom, which I entered, not unmindful of the fact that my state of mind was an utterly strange and curious thing. Presently, as it seemed after an hour of waiting, I heard her quick, firm step in the hall outside. She burst into the room hurriedly and then, seeing me, stopped with a little cry. I was utterly composed, absolutely sure of myself, for the emotions which her appearance inspired in me were corroborative and convincing to the last detail. If there had been any doubt as I entered this room, there was none now. I knew! And thus knowing I spoke. "Cecil Gray, you did a cruel thing in running away from me as you did. I have come for you. You are going to play golf with me this afternoon." She stood trembling, with face averted. I advanced toward her. "Cecil, aren't you glad that I didn't let you go away without raising a hand? Aren't you glad that-I-I-cared?" She turned slowly, her face crimson, her eyes glowing. And then-well, I don't know, but I must have held out my arms, or done something. Anyway, I'd have given a hundred thousand dollars in good securities if old Shelburn could have seen his "empty husk of a man minute. "that W BY KENYON COX II-THE VENETIANS E are apt to think of the Venetian school of art as much later in date than the other schools of Italy, and there is indeed some justification for this thought in the facts of the case. The Venetian school of painting was late in beginning and late in ending. Until the latter part of the fifteenth century it produced little that the world would hold in remembrance were it not for what came after it, and it continued to produce masterpieces of a high order until nearly the end of the sixteenth century, when the art of the rest of Italy had become a sterile imitation. Even in the seventeenth century the art of Venice was not without some lingering sparks of vitality, and in the eighteenth it flamed up again for a moment before its final extinction. Yet Venetian art arrived at maturity almost at the same moment as that of the rest of Italy. Giorgione was but two or three years younger than Michelangelo and was five or six years older than Raphael, and even if we place Titian's birth, as some modern writers would have us do, thirteen years later than the traditional date of 1477, he was still four years older than Correggio. It is the intense vitality of the school, which kept it at its height full fifty years after the decline had begun elsewhere, and its fecundity, which made it the direct ancestor of our modern art, that mislead us, a little, as to its chronology. But there is no illusion in the other feeling we have, that Venetian art is profoundly different from that of the other Italian schools. Venice produced a splendid architecture, but it is an architecture of color or of effect rather than an architecture of structure or of form. She produced very little sculpture worthy of consideration. But she produced a school of painting which is one of the supreme manifestations of the human spirit, so that the very words "Venetian art" have come to mean "painting" and little else. And the one element of the art of painting which the Venetians developed further than any other, the element of painting which they made specially their own, is just that element which is most distinctive of the art and least to be found in any other the element of color. This reliance upon and this mastery of color is, however, only the most striking of the differences which separate the art of Venice from that of the mainland. The difference in choice and in treatment of subject-matter is nearly as great, and the difference in temper is almost greater. Climate doubtless had some influence in giving its peculiar character to Venetian art. The schools of color have nearly always been the product of wet regions, where the air is saturated with moisture, where atmosphere becomes visible while solid objects seem tremulous and wavering; and the opalescent light of the lagoons must have had its effect upon the Venetian painters. But indirectly the lagoons exercised an even greater influence by isolating and protecting the Venetian Republic; by separating it from the mainland, so that it might grow rich and prosperous in its own way, without much out poetic or sensuous or naturalistic. It was, above all, secular and even worldly, delighting to represent the pride of life and the joy of living. side interference; by making it a seapower and a nation of traders, whose trade lay to the East. During a large part of its history Venice was more intimately associated with the Eastern empire For whatever reason, it is certain that than with the rest of Italy. It was its Venice did produce a school of art of this intercourse with Byzantium that kept it a entirely distinctive character a school nation of mosaic workers when elsewhere more homogeneous and more abundant Italy was developing the art of the fres- than almost any other, and one in which canti, and mosaic is essentially an art of there are so many secondary masters, color while fresco-painting is an art of often of very great merit, that the rôle of form. It was its trade with the East that the individual genius is less decisive than familiarized it with rich stuffs and splen- elsewhere. Individual geniuses it haddid brocades. It was its isolation that masters of the very highest rank-but made it safe and well-governed and pros- perhaps the school as a whole would not perous, and enabled it to keep even the have been very different, though much Roman Church in some sort of tolerable less glorious, if they had not lived. To subjection to the civil power. The art of get any view of it we must consider its the rest of Italy was religious or scientific achievements and its methods as a whole, or intellectual. The art of Venice was and then devote some attention to the few great individualities which stand out above their fellows. One of the most notable originalities of the Venetian School is its early abandonment of ecclesiastical rigidity even in the treatment of religious subjects. From the early years of the sixteenth century, before the great frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael had been completed in Rome, the Venetians had begun to paint what were known as Santi Conversatzioni or informal groups of holy personages, generally in a landscape setting, talking quietly together. Such pictures have neither the regular pattern of the conventional altar-piece nor any attempt at story-telling or dramatic action. Except for the aureoles, which are not always present, they might be scenes of domestic genre. The next step is easy to take, and in these same years conversations no longer holy are painted-pictures of men and women, nude or draped or clothed in contemporary costumes, seated under the trees and making music or eating and drinking together-pictures in which, if they have any definite subjects, the subject has become so unimportant that we have forgotten what it is. They are full of poetry and romantic charm, these pictures; they are never coarsely or meanly realistic; but they mark the beginning of our modern tendency to accept life and nature as the sufficient subjects of art. They no longer have any object outside themselves. They are no longer aids to devotion or books for the illiterate, or even, in any proper sense, decorations. They are just pictures, self-limited and selfcontained, with no other end to serve than to be beautiful and enjoyable possessions -with them our modern art has definitely begun. One of the most notable of the characteristics of modern art is its interest in landscape, and this also comes to us directly from the Venetians. In their conversation pieces the landscape background plays a vastly more important part than it had ever done elsewhere. The figures are not in front of the landscape, they are in it, and in many of them the importance of the landscape becomes so great that they might properly be called landscapes with figures. The final step of removing the figures altogether they never took, but neither did Claude or Poussin, whom we all admit to be primarily landscape-painters. Giorgione and Titian were the first painters to show a deep interest in landscape for its own sake. They painted it with far more truth than any of their predecessors or contemporaries, and they gave it a beauty and nobility that are still unequalled. In technic as in temper and in treatment of subject the Venetians are the ancestors of the moderns. Some of them occasionally painted in fresco and, of necessity, the earlier men painted in tempera. Neither of these processes fully satisfied the Venetian love of color, and they eagerly seized upon the new process of oils, commonly said to have been brought to them from Flanders by Antonello da Messina. Wherever they got it, they rapidly made it their own and developed its special qualities to the highest possible point. Fortunately, they did not repeat Leonardo's experiment of painting with it directly upon the plaster. They preferred, even in mural decoration, to substitute framed canvases for paintings upon the wall itself. Fresco they inclined to reserve for the outsides of buildings, and most of their fresco-paintings have disappeared, while their great paintings in oil are intact even when discolored and embrowned by age. For a long time the Venetians retained in their paintings the underground of tempera, and it is difficult to know when, if ever, they finally abandoned it. It is a question of little importance to the layman, except as it bears upon the preservation of their works, for the painting we see is in oils and the material of the underpainting has little bearing on the results attained. At first this surface painting. was entirely in transparent glazings, and by these glazes was achieved a splendor and richness of color hitherto unknown. But much as the Venetians loved this decorative splendor it did not satisfy them. Gradually the glazes are broken up, opaque and semi-opaque tones are added, the surfaces are thumbed and kneaded; finally, light and atmosphere are added to color, complete illusion is attained, and we have the full portrayal of the colored world-that world about us which, so far as our vision is concerned, |