“No, no,” he answered, in haste.  “He’d stopped before I left.  He’s all right, I imagine.  Here’s the Danieli.”

She fastened a shawl more closely about her mother, whom I, with a ringing in my ears, was trying to help up the stone steps.  “Rufus, I hope,” the sweet voice continued, so gently,—­“I hope he’s found something to do that’s very grand!  Don’t you?  Something to make up to him for doing that!”

She had not the faintest dream that it was I. It was just her beautiful heart.

The next afternoon Venice was a bleak and empty setting, the jewel gone.  How vacant it looked, how vacant it was!  We made not any effort to penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my friend.  For us the whole of Venice had become one bridge of sighs, and we sat in the shade of the piazza, not watching the pigeons, and listening very little to the music.  There are times when St. Mark’s seems to glare at you with Byzantine cruelty, and Venice is too hot and too cold.  So it was then.  Evening found us staring out at the Adriatic from the terrace of a cafe’ on the Ledo, our coffee cold before us.  Never was a greater difference than that in my companion from the previous day.  Yet he was not silent.  He talked of her continually, having found that he could talk of her to me—­though certainly he did not know why it was or how.  He told me, as we sat by the grey-growing sea, that she had spoken of me.

“She liked you, she liked you very much,” he said.  “She told me she liked you because you were quiet and melancholy.  Oh Lord, though, she likes everyone, I suppose!  I believe I’d have a better chance with her if I hadn’t always known her.  I’m afraid that this damn Italian—­I beg your pardon, Ansolini!—­”

“Ah, no,” I answered.  “It is sometimes well said.”

“I’m afraid his picturesqueness as a Kentucky Colonel appeals to her too much.  And then he is new to her—­a new type.  She only met him in Paris, and he had done some things in the Abyssinian war—­”

“What is his rank?” I asked.

“He’s a prince.  Cheap down this way; aren’t they?  I only hope” —­and Poor Jr. made a groan—­“it isn’t going to be the old story—­and that he’ll be good to her if he gets her.”

“Then it is not yet a betrothal?”

“Not yet.  Mrs. Landry told me that Alice had liked him well enough to promise she’d give him her answer before she sailed, and that it was going to be yes.  She herself said it was almost settled.  That was just her way of breaking it to me, I fear.”

“You have given up, my friend?”

“What else can I do?  I can’t go on following her, keeping up this play at second cousin, and she won’t have anything else.  Ever since I grew up she’s been rather sorrowful over me because I didn’t do anything but try to amuse myself—­that was one of the reasons she couldn’t care for me, she said, when I asked her.  Now this fellow wins, who hasn’t done anything either, except his one campaign.  It’s