Excerpt: ... shot out the word. "Never-you are mine; I have come all these ocean miles to find you. I have come for an accounting with the vision that troubles man." Her face drew nearer. "I am Venice, you said. I am set in the mare morto. I am built on the sea- weed. But from me you shall not go. You came over the mountains for this." The man sighed. Some ultimate conception of life seemed to outline itself on the whitish walls of the Cimeterio-a question of sex. The man would go questioning visions. The woman was held by one. "Caspar Severance will find his way, and will play your game for you," she went on coaxingly. "But this," her eyes were near him, "this is a moment of life. You have chosen. There is no mine and thine." One by one the campaniles of Venice loomed, dark pillars in the white sky. And all around toward Mestre and Treviso and Torcello; to San Pietro di Castello and the grim walls of the arsenal, the mare morto heaved gently and sighed. CHICAGO, January, 1897. THE PRICE OF ROMANCE They were paying the price of their romance, and the question was whether they would pay it cheerfully. They had been married a couple of years, and the first flush of excitement over their passion and the stumbling-blocks it had met was fading away. When he, an untried young lawyer and delicate dilettante, had married her she was a Miss Benton, of St. Louis, "niece of Oliphant, that queer old fellow who made his money in the Tobacco Trust," and hence with no end of prospects. Edwards had been a pleasant enough fellow, and Oliphant had not objected to his loafing away a vacation about the old house at Quogue. Marriage with his niece, the one remaining member of his family who walked the path that pleased him, was another thing. She had plenty of warning. Had he not sent his only son adrift as a beggar because he had married a little country cousin? He could make nothing out of Edwards except that he was not keen after business-loafed much, smoked much, and...