Excerpt from Janus: A Novel She hath directed How I shall take her from her father's house. Merchant of Venice. ON a damp May night, in the year 185 a pair of dark horses, attached to a handsome close-carriage, waited, with much stamping of hoofe and champing of bits, in a narrow and unpaved street in the suburbs of Milan. The coach man seemed much out of humor at the delay in his master's reappearance, and muttered sundry Italian oaths. The street might almost have been called a lane, for it was bordered with trees and led from a quiet avenue directly toward one of the rural roads. There were no lamps in it so far out as where the carriage had halted. Stationed in the densest shadow of the trees, the vehiele'e own lamps were unlighted. One of the distant clocks nearer the centre of the city had just struck eleven-an dahalf. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.