noon
He found Beroviero busy with his papers , and the results of the year 's experiments , and the old man at once spoke to him as if nothing unusual had happened , telling him what to do from time to time , so that all might be put in order against the time when the fires should be lighted again in September . By and by two men came carrying a new earthen jar for broken glass , and all fragments in which the box had lain were shovelled into it , and the pieces of the old one were taken away . The furnace was not quite cool even yet , and the crucibles might remain where they were for a few days ; but there was much to be done , and Zorzi was kept at work all the morning , while Marietta sat in the shade with her work , often looking towards the window and sometimes catching sight of Zorzi as he moved about within . Meanwhile the story of Contarini 's mishap had spread in Venice like wildfire , and before noon there was hardly one of all his many relations and friends who had not heard it . The tale ran through the town , told by high and low , by Jacopo 's own trusted servant , and the old woman who had waited on Arisa , and it had reached the market-place at an early hour , so that the ballad-makers were busy with it . For many had known of the existence of the beautiful Georgian slave and the subject was a good one for a song -- how she had caressed him to sleep and fostered his foolish security while he loved her blindly , and how she and her mysterious lover had bound him and shaved his head and face and made him a laughing-stock , so that he must hide himself from the world for months , and moreover how they had carried away by night all the precious gifts he had heaped upon the woman since he had bought her in the slave-market . Last of all , his father heard it when he came home about an hour before noon from the sitting of the Council of Ten , of which he was a member for that year .