e and unconsciousness of her egotism, which he recognized as
the all too fleeting prerogative of youth, and he would not, for worlds,
have really checked it.

When she informed him that the heroic age was past, and that this was a
mercantile era, the old soldier, remembering the '60's, told her she had
better look up era in the dictionary. When she announced, with all the
zest of discovery, that Titian could not draw, it was Uncle Dan who
observed that he could paint pretty well, which was the main thing.

Yes; she caught the attention, as the most distinct sound, the most
obvious sight is pretty sure to do, when people are taking life easily,
and seeking only amusement, and she was so refreshingly unconscious
that one could look and listen one's fill, and no harm done.

Yet Geoffry Daymond discovered that when he was making believe paint
pictures, in the first freshness of early morning, or when he was
smoking his after-dinner cigar, in the lingering June twilight, the face
that interfered with the one occupation and lent charm to the other, was
not framed in golden hair, nor animated with the lively and bird-like
intelligence which he found so amusing. And not only was it Pauline
Beverly's face, with its softly blending colours, and its quiet,
indwelling light, that floated before his mental vision, but he found
that he remembered her words and even the tones of her voice, when the
gay and occasionally witty talk of the others had gone the way of mortal
breath. He somehow came to associate certain inflections of her voice
with the sweet sounds that make the undertone of Venetian life; the
plash of the oar, the cooing of doves about the Salute, the bells of
Murano, softened in the distance, the sound of the surf beating outside
the Lido of a still evening, when one floats far out on the lagoon, and
the familiar, every-day world seems farther away than those other
worlds, shining overhead. He speculated a good deal over this new
preoccupation, and more still over the sense of passive content that had
come to be associated with it.

For Geof was of an active temperament and possessed of but scant talent
for repose. This was his first real vacation in seven years, yet, in
spite of his good resolve to idle away a month in Venice for his
mother's sake, he had been on the point of finding an outlet for his
surplus energies in that tramp in the Cadore, when,--just what was it
that had deterred him from carrying out the pla