"Happier?" Pauline repeated, wonderingly.
"Yes; my husband had peculiar sorrows."
They were close upon the bright sail now, and they found that it was striped with red and tipped with purple. The slight breeze had dropped and the sail hung loose, glowing in the sunshine as the boat floated homeward with the tide. Two men lay asleep in the shadow of the sail, and the man at the rudder had let his pipe go out. As the gondola came alongside the boat, a small yellow dog sprang up and barked sharply at them, his body, from tip to tail, violently agitated with the whirr of the internal machinery. The helmsman, thus roused, pulled out a match and lighted his pipe; the sunshine was so bright that the light of the match was obliterated. Mrs. Daymond and Pauline watched the little drama rather absently.
"There are more sails," Geof remarked, nodding his head toward the mouth of the port, where brilliant bits of colour hovered like butterflies in the sun. Pauline did not say how pretty they were, but Geof, stooping to look under the awning into her face, did not feel that she was unresponsive. He had discovered before this that she had other means of expression than audible speech.
They had come about the end of the Lido, and were following the line of the break-water, and presently Mrs. Daymond broke the silence:
"My husband was a Southern Unionist," she said. "The war was an inevitable tragedy to him."
Pauline felt instinctively that it was not often that Mrs. Daymond spoke in this way of her husband to one who had not known him. She listened with a sense of being singled out for a great honour.
"He would have given his life for his country," Mrs. Daymond was saying: "He would have given his life for the Union,—but he was bound hand and foot, and he came away."
They were far, far out now, still rowing toward the open sea. As Mrs. Daymond paused, they could hear the voice of the Colonel, speaking to Vittorio, in his peculiar Italian, only a shade less English than his own tongue.
"And your husband came to Venice?"