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[Illustration: THE DOGE SAT ALONE IN A GREAT CARVEN CHAIR]




[Illustration]


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                              THE ISLAND
                            OF ENCHANTMENT

                                  BY
                          JUSTUS MILES FORMAN

                            ILLUSTRATED BY
                              HOWARD PYLE

                            [Illustration]

                          NEW YORK AND LONDON

                           HARPER & BROTHERS
                          PUBLISHERS  *  MCMV




                Copyright, 1905, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                        _All rights reserved._
                      Published September, 1905.

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Contents


                                             PAGE

  I. YOUNG ZUAN GRADENIGO                       1

  II. THE WOMAN OF ABOMINATION                 59




Illustrations


  "THE DOGE SAT ALONE IN A GREAT
  CARVEN CHAIR"                    _Frontispiece_

  HE LAID THE MANTLE OVER THE
  GIRL'S SHOULDERS                _Facing p._  32

  "HE LAY AWHILE, CONSCIOUS OF
  GREAT COMFORT"                  _Facing p._  60

  SHE HUNG DROOPING IN THE GREAT
  CHAIR OF STATE                  _Facing p._  98

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The Island of Enchantment




I

Young Zuan Gradenigo


Evil tidings have their own trick of spreading abroad. You cannot
bury them. The news which had come secretly to Venice was known from
the Giudecca to Madonna dell'Orto in two hours. Before noon it was in
Murano.

Young Zuan Gradenigo, making his way on foot from the crowded Merceria
into the Piazza di San Marco, ran upon his friend, the young German
captain, whom men called Il Lupo--his name was Wölfart--and learned,
what almost every other man in the city already knew, how Lewis of
Hungary, taking excuse of a merchant ship looted in Venetian waters,
was on his way to a second invasion, and had given over the Dalmatian
towns to the ban of Bosnia to ravage.

The two men were still eagerly discussing the matter and its probable
outcome, half an hour later, standing beside one of the gayly painted
booths which, at this time--the spring of 1355--were clustered about
the foot of the great Campanile, when a servant in the livery of the
doge touched young Zuan's arm and, in a low tone, gave him a message.

Gradenigo turned back to the German.

"My uncle wishes to see me at once in the palace," he said. "If you are
not pressed, go to my house and wait for me there. I may have important
news for you." Then, with a parting wave of the hand, he went quickly
across the Piazzetta and under the gateway to the right of St. Mark's.

At the head of the great stair two men were awaiting him, and they led
him at once through a narrow passage with secret sliding-doors to an
inner cabinet of the private apartments of the newly elected doge, his
uncle, Giovanni Gradenigo.

The doge sat alone in a great carven chair before a table which was
littered with papers and with maps and with writing-materials. From a
high window at one side  beams of light slanted down and rested
in crimson and blue splashes upon the dark oak of the table and what
lay there, and upon the rich velvet of the doge's robe, and upon his
peculiar cap of office. He was not a very old man, but he was far from
strong. Indeed, even at this time he was slowly wasting away with the
disease which carried him off a year later, but as he sat there, bowed
before the table, he looked old and very worn and tired. His face had
no color at all. It was like a dead man's face--cold and damp.

And yet, although he was ill and seemed quite unfit for labors or
duties of any sort, he was in reality an unusually keen and shrewd
man, capable of unremitting toil. There burned somewhere within the
shrunken, pallid body an astonishingly fierce flame of life. He had
been elected to office hard upon the Faliero catastrophe partly because
his name was one of the very greatest in Venice--two others of his
house had worn the cap and ring within the century past--but chiefly
because his sympathies were as remote as possible from the liberal