."

"And you have had him all these years?"

"Yes; since before Geof was born. Geof is twenty-nine," she added
thoughtfully; "just the age of his father when we first met. He is like
his father, only happier."

"Happier?" Pauline repeated, wonderingly.

"Yes; my husband had peculiar sorrows."

They were close upon the bright sail now, and they found that it was
striped with red and tipped with purple. The slight breeze had dropped
and the sail hung loose, glowing in the sunshine as the boat floated
homeward with the tide. Two men lay asleep in the shadow of the sail,
and the man at the rudder had let his pipe go out. As the gondola came
alongside the boat, a small yellow dog sprang up and barked sharply at
them, his body, from tip to tail, violently agitated with the whirr of
the internal machinery. The helmsman, thus roused, pulled out a match
and lighted his pipe; the sunshine was so bright that the light of the
match was obliterated. Mrs. Daymond and Pauline watched the little drama
rather absently.

"There are more sails," Geof remarked, nodding his head toward the mouth
of the port, where brilliant bits of colour hovered like butterflies in
the sun. Pauline did not say how pretty they were, but Geof, stooping to
look under the awning into her face, did not feel that she was
unresponsive. He had discovered before this that she had other means of
expression than audible speech.

They had come about the end of the Lido, and were following the line of
the break-water, and presently Mrs. Daymond broke the silence:

"My husband was a Southern Unionist," she said. "The war was an
inevitable tragedy to him."

Pauline felt instinctively that it was not often that Mrs. Daymond spoke
in this way of her husband to one who had not known him. She listened
with a sense of being singled out for a great honour.

"He would have given his life for his country," Mrs. Daymond was saying:
"He would have given his life for the Union,--but he was bound hand and
foot, and he came away."

They were far, far out now, still rowing toward the open sea. As Mrs.
Daymond paused, they could hear the voice of the Colonel, speaking to
Vittorio, in his peculiar Italian, only a shade less English than his
own tongue.

"And your husband came to Venice?"

"Yes; it was here that we met. He had been gathering material in many
places for a history of Venice, and he had come; here to write. We spent
three years here, summer and winter. He w