he noted the diamond, in its low, old-fashioned
setting, gleaming there alone.

"I am glad you are faithful to Venice," she said. "I hoped you might
come this year."

"And you still come every year?"

"Yes."

The white film had spread just as he had anticipated. He could see how
complete it was, as she seated herself in the full light of the open
window. The Colonel had sometimes been startled to find how his
premonitions in regard to her had come true. One year he had said to
himself: she will be paler than usual; I wonder if she has been ill. And
he had found that she had been ill, and there was a fragility and pallor
about her that seemed to him quite heart-breaking. Again he had said to
himself: she will be wearing crape as in the old times; I wonder why.
And when he had come to her she had told him of her mother's death a few
months previous. So to-day he had known of that lace-like whiteness of
the beautiful head, and of a certain deepening of the depression of the
cheek and chin, which had not been there five years ago.

"Yes," she was saying. "I don't find Venice anywhere else, and so I come
over every year. Happily, I like the voyage."

The Colonel did not like the voyage but that was a painful fact which he
had never felt called upon to admit.

"This year I have my boy with me," she added. "That is a great pleasure."

"And I have my nieces," he replied, deterred by a curious jealousy from
pursuing the subject of the boy.

"How delightful! That is, I suppose you find it so, since you have
brought them."

"Oh, yes; it makes quite a different thing of travelling. We came over
in October. We have been wintering in Rome."

He wondered how he should put it this time. Five words usually
sufficed,--five words that meant so much to him, and so little, so
intolerably little to her.

"I am glad you have young people with you," she said. "We need them more
and more as we grow older."

"Well, that depends," the Colonel demurred, too loyal to his Pollys,
even here and now, to allow them to be regarded generically. "There are
not many girls I should want to have on my hands. I think the Pollys are
rather exceptional."

"What did you say the name was?"

"Polly--Polly Beverly."

"And what is the other one's name?"

"Same name. They are both Pollys. I named them myself," he added, with a
quite unforeseen revival of that agreeable self-satisfaction which he
never could conceal in this connection.

And t