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"I dare say they are," Geof laughed, "but I'm sure that those flat-nosed fellows are much more entertaining than they would be if they had been labelled. Jove! What a sight that is!" He had suddenly turned and looked up at the front of San Marco, gleaming in the brilliant illumination, like a shrine studded with precious stones.
The rain had ceased, and a timid relenting had stolen into the west. Geof turned and glanced from the sky to Vittorio's gondola which still lay moored under the shelter of the bridge. "If I only dared!" he said to himself; and then, flinging his head back, with a free, boyish gesture, he strode on to the entrance of the gallery. Pauline had returned to her seat before the great Titian.
No wonder that there was that about him that excited the imagination. Geof had himself felt it; his mother had spoken of it. Who could know how powerful the appeal might be to one who had not the key to the puzzle?
"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.
"Do they?" said May, in her most matter-of-fact voice, giving Geof a glance of quick intelligence, and putting herself instantly on the defensive; "I should have said it was rather touch and go with their feelings. Ah! There's Mr. Kenwick, pretending he doesn't see us!" A Summer's Day
"The felze!" she exclaimed, under her breath. If Geof heard her, he was too wise to admit that he did. "To the Madonna of the Palazzo Rezzonico," he commanded, quite as if Vittorio had been his own gondolier. It crossed his mind that he ought to apologise for his presumption, but he was not in the mood for apologies.
Geof is twenty-nine," she added thoughtfully; "just the age of his father when we first met. He is like his father, only happier." "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.
Geof turned in at the open door of San Marco, and found his way to one of his favourite haunts, a certain dimly sumptuous side-chapel, where a hint of incense always hovers, and a whispered echo, as of long-past aves and salves, lingers on the air.
"Pity you can't paint as well as you can chaff," the artist observed, glancing from his own clever sketch to his friend's block, which was leaning, face inward, against the side of the boat. Geof was lolling on the steps, his legs somewhat entangled among the easels, paint-boxes, and the like that cumbered the floor of the boat, one arm resting on the deck of the prow.
She feared that Kenwick might go in pursuit of Geof and May, who had disappeared round the corner into the Piazzetta, and knowing that he liked to talk of his millionaire friends and their steam-yacht, she proceeded to draw him out upon the subject.
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