Page:A Venetian June (1896).pdf/166

 For Geof's mother was not the woman to take unfair advantage of a defenceless position, even where her own son was concerned. So she only said, after an interval of silence that Geof had scarcely noticed: "I am glad you think us alike, for I have never met a young girl who was as sympathetic to me as Pauline Beverly."

"Sympathetic! That's it; that hits her off exactly!" Geof declared; and then, with an accession of spirits which rendered him suddenly loquacious, "And I say, Mother!" he exclaimed, "what a jolly old boy the Colonel is! I just wish you could have heard him fire up the other day, when Kenwick got off one of his cynicisms at the expense of Abraham Lincoln. Tell you what, the sparks flew! Oliver was up a tree like a cat!—Hullo! There's the flag-ship!" he interrupted his flow of words to announce, as they came in sight of San Geremia.

The procession, or the component parts of it, not yet reduced to order, was just