hen, to his own surprise, he found himself entering with much gusto
upon the story of their christening. By the time he had finished, he
felt quite toned up and invigorated.

"Tell me some more about them," she begged.

She was leaning back in her seat, serenely receptive. The Colonel,
sitting opposite to her in the straight-backed chair such as he always
chose, noted, with a curiously disengaged pleasure, the wonderful
opaline quality of the impression she made. The soft grey folds of her
dress, the still more softened grey of the hair, and the deep grey of
the beautiful eyes,--none of these quiet shades was dull and fixed. A
delicate play of light and shadow made them vital, as the grey of the
lagoons is vital, when there are clouds before the sun, and a strange,
mystic luminousness traverses their tranquil spaces. She had always
reminded him of the lagoons. The association only seemed to make each
more exquisite and apart. And now, as he told her about his Pollys, it
was with very much the same sense of perfect gratification with which
he had taken them out upon the water the day before. There was also the
same singular absence of the old, familiar pain and oppression.

"What are they interested in?" she asked, and there could be no doubt in
the Colonel's mind that she really cared to know.

"Well; they are interested in pretty much everything, though in a
different way. For instance, they are making short work of Italian. They
speak better than I do, after all these years," he declared with
delighted self-depreciation, "though perhaps that's not much to brag of.
One of them has got the accent and the other the grammar, so they pull
very well together. Then the younger one can sing like a bird."

The Colonel was warming to his subject, and the Signora, as he liked to
call her, did not interrupt.

"She has been studying with Firenzo in Rome. He says she's got a tip-top
voice and plenty of execution. Sketches, too,--not particularly well,
though. Her things look right enough, but somehow they don't say much.
Firenzo thinks that's the trouble with her singing. Good voice, you
know, but it doesn't speak. Young, I suppose! That's it; eh?"

"Twenty years old, you say? Yes, I should call that young! And the other
one? Tell me about her."

"Well, Polly hasn't much ambition. Nice contralto voice, not much
cultivated. Rather a contralto little woman, don't you know? The kind
that somehow warms the cockles of your heart