am sure it is much too good
to be interrupted."

He was at the disadvantage of holding his hat in his hand, in deference
to place, so that he was unable to indicate a deference to persons by
lifting it. Yet he took his leave with so good a manner that the Colonel
was moved to detain him. As the stranger made his way past him, the
elder man remarked: "It must be worth while to be up on architecture in
this part of the world."

"It's worth while to be up on architecture in any part of the world,"
the young man replied. "Where there is nothing to see there is all the
more to do."

He paused a moment, as if St. Mark's were really more interesting than
his own opinions. Then: "Have you travelled much in our own West?" he
asked.

"No," was the Colonel's unblushing admission; for he was a New
Englander of the New Englanders and valued his own limitations.

"There's good work going on out there; it's a great field."

"But surely you are not a Westerner!" the Colonel protested.

"No; but I sometimes wish I were. It's the thing to be."

There was no challenge in his voice, yet Colonel Steele was half
inclined to take umbrage at the unprejudiced statement of fact. The
ease, however, with which the young man again indicated a courteous
leave-taking without the aid of a hat disarmed criticism, and as the
Colonel watched the slowly retreating figure, he willingly accorded to
the heresy the indulgence due to youthful vagaries. To be sure, he could
not remember that an exaggerated estimate of the Great West had ever
been a vagary of his own youth. But then, he supposed that the West had
made advances since his day!

A glance at his watch changed the direction of his thoughts, and a few
minutes later Vittorio was rowing him swiftly, with the tide, up the
Grand Canal. Just as the noon gun roared out from the base of San
Giorgio, the Colonel rang the bell of the Palazzo Darino.

She was sitting, the lady of his evening reverie, the lady of a
life-long reverie, one might as truly say, just as he had hoped to find
her, alone and disengaged. Two or three open letters lay upon the table
beside her, but they lay there meekly, as if they knew that they must
bide their time.

"Ah! Colonel Steele!"

She spoke his name as no one else had ever done, somehow as if it were a
title of nobility, and as she came forward to meet him, the soft rustle
of her garments filled him with content. He took the extended hand, and,
bending above it,