"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.