All day long children sprawl and quarrel and play on the sun-baked pavement; and artists paint endless pictures of the red and orange sails drifting slowly by, with the Salute and Ducal Palace for a background. Yes, the Giudecca quarter is the quarter of the people. But to me the stevedores, the children, and the haggling old women have a charm all their own. And here, at the Casa Frollo where I lived, no red-booked tourist sets foot.

Our gondolier, winded with his long pull against wind and tide, steered for some steps a hundred feet this side the Casa Frollo. I called 132to him to row farther up the quay, but St. Hilary irritably declared it easier for us to walk the distance than for him to row.

132

“But why walk in the rain?” I expostulated. “And how are you going to return to your hotel on the Riva if you dismiss your gondolier? Gondoliers hereabouts at two o’clock in the morning are as rare as horses on the Piazza.”

“It happens that I don’t intend to return to-night to my hotel. As a matter of fact there will be no bed for you, my dear Hume.”

“No bed? It is not possible that you have already brought back our clock?”

“It is not only possible, it is true. I returned this evening in time to get your telegram and to meet you.”

“You have had it repaired in a week?”

“Yes; so far as it could be repaired.”

“Then there could not have been much the matter with it.”

“As it happened, there was not.”

“Then it seems to me that your trip to Amsterdam was not so very remarkable after all?” I grumbled.

“Sometimes,” quietly replied St. Hilary, “one has to go to a great deal of trouble and expense to get a merely negative result. Sometimes it is necessary to find out simply what a thing is not.”

133“And have you found out that it is not, after all, an automaton clock?”

133

“My dear fellow, be reasonable. In the first place, this clock had to be set going. It was too intricate a piece of mechanism to 

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