g illumination.

Just as Geof arrived upon the scene, a boy, with a paper of corn in each
outstretched hand, came running down the length of the Piazza, followed
by a fluttering swarm of pigeons, hundreds of them on the wing, in hot
pursuit of the flying provender. The wings made a sound of multitudinous
flapping that was singularly agreeable to the ear. Geof watched their
laughing tormenter until he stopped for breath near the base of the
_campanile_, and, in an instant, the pigeons were alighting on his arms
and shoulders, and gathering in an eager, gurgling mass about his feet.
The corn fell in a golden shower among them, and great was the jostling
and gobbling and short was the duration of that golden shower.

Geof turned in at the open door of San Marco, and found his way to one
of his favourite haunts, a certain dimly sumptuous side-chapel, where a
hint of incense always hovers, and a whispered echo, as of long-past
_aves_ and _salves_, lingers on the air. Curious carvings are there, and
bits of gleaming gold and silver, and, between the pillars, enchanting
vistas open out into the transept, or down the mosaic-laid floor of the
nave, polished smooth by the feet of generations of worshippers.

As he tarried there, the familiar sense of passive content which he had
had of late stole upon him, and he was aware that a certain face and
voice were again present with him. Why, he wondered, since it was of
other things he had been thinking all day long,--why did that face and
voice come to him? Was it merely a habit of mind, a trick of thought
engendered by this idle, aimless Venetian life? Or was it a natural
association of pure and lovely impressions?

And there, in the rich gloom of the great basilica, traced out and
accentuated, as it were, by long bars of light that made a golden
pathway down from the high western windows, a light entered into his
mind, and he knew what his mother had divined long ago.

There was no shock of surprise in the discovery, only a deep, vitalising
satisfaction. It seemed as natural, as inevitable, that he should love
Pauline Beverly, as that he should love his life. He knew that he had
loved her from the hour of their first meeting; it seemed to him that he
had loved her all his life. He was glad that the realisation of it had
come to him here in the beautiful church where he had first seen her
face. Yet, as he stood looking down the marvellous perspectives of the
great sanctuary, only