hey call it
over there. The Contessa di Abbriglia. Hannibal, her husband's name
is--always seemed like a Newfoundland dog's name, to me. He hasn't any
such amount of land as Barkington, but the family's older, I believe.
Hannibal's old enough, anyhow. How old was the count, Mrs. Leeth, when
Irene married him?"

"Miss Irene was twenty-one, Mr. Vail, and Count Hannibal was forty."

"You knew them both?" I asked her, caught by a sudden curiosity to see
those deep, secret brown eyes once more. The famous Absolom was just
what I had supposed he would be, neither more nor less; the most
interesting thing I could see in him was this simple, friendly kindness
to an old retainer.

"I dressed both the young ladies for their weddings," she replied
quietly.

"It must be very pleasant to you--these talks of old times," I hazarded.

"It is," she answered.

I thought of a number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old
companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I
marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like
the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire
flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent
and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked
restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there--for they were
friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same class,
undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, the solid
bourgeoisie that is essentially alike in all countries and
centuries--these two friends exhaled an atmosphere of contented trust
in each other and what life had left for them that spread like a
visible cloud, a sort of sunset autumn haze, quite through the little,
homely room, and took me under it, with them. No wonder he liked to
come there: it did not require much imaginative faculty to infer that
neither Barkington nor di Abbriglia had been able to offer such an
asylum to their father-in-law....

Asylum! How unconsciously I had fitted the original sense of the
kindly old word to its technical uses! Asylum: that was what it was, a
refuge, a shelter, a little back-water in the great whirlpool of
overstrained, nervous modern life. And Absolom Vail had found one
here, it seemed. For he was unmistakably at home here; this was not
the first nor the second visit, that was plain. Such atmospheres do
not grow from casual encounters.

We exchanged comfortable, old commonp