"Time-worn palaces, and the darkly doubtful water at their base"[ToList]
"How wonderful it is, when things come true!" Pauline exclaimed. "Things you have dreamed of all your life, till they have come to seem less real than the things you never dreamed of at all! I think I must have known that that woman in the sulphur shawl would be standing on that bridge, gazing upon us with her great tragic eyes; so that somehow it seems as if she might have been a mere apparition."
"I think it very likely, for I am sure she has always been there when I have passed," said Uncle Dan, with conviction.
"I didn't see anything tragic about her eyes," May objected. "I thought she looked rather stupid, as if she had forgotten what she came out for."
"Which was probably the case," Uncle Dan admitted. Whence it will be seen that Uncle Dan, gallant officer in the past and practical man of affairs to-day, was as wax in the hands of his nieces, equally ready to agree with each.
Yet Colonel Steele had not the appearance of a man of wax. On the contrary, his spare, wiry figure was full of vigour, his glance was as keen and his speech as imperative as that of the veriest martinet. He had commanded men in his day; he had fought the stern persistent fight of a good soldier, and if, when the great cause was won, he had hung up his sword and sash and laid aside his uniform, he had yet never succeeded in looking the civilian, and his military title had clung to him through thirty years of practical life. Furthermore, if it must be admitted that he looked somewhat older than his sixty years, that fact was not to be accounted for by any acknowledged infirmity, unless, indeed, the stiff leg he had brought with him from his four years' service should be reckoned as such.
"But you like it, May?"
It was Pauline who asked, and she put the question as if she valued her sister's opinion.
"Yes," May answered, in her most judicial manner; "I like it. As you say, it is very much what one expected. But of course it is rather early to judge yet."