There were a number of distinguished Austrians in the Hotel Britannia, some few of them invalids, most of them gay and pleasure-loving and well pleased to spend a few weeks amid picturesque surroundings and in pleasant society. The colonel was beloved by all, and they eagerly welcomed his pretty daughter,--even the ladies, whom the colonel consulted as to the necessary reform in the girl's wardrobe. She sat with her father in the midst of them all at the upper end of the table, the lower end, where the other inmates of the hotel were crowded together, being the subject of much merry scorn and stigmatized as 'the menagerie.' Compassion for the daughter of the dying man deepened the sympathy called forth by the young girl's grace and charm. Old gentlemen rallied her upon her conquests, and the young men paid her devoted attention. She had a special friend in the handsome black-eyed prince Zino Capito, who had an unusual share of time to bestow upon her since the latest mistress of his affections, the famous Princess Oblonsky, had just departed for Petersburg to take possession of the effects of her husband, suddenly deceased. He daily sent Stella magnificent flowers with which to adorn the hotel apartments for her father. "Invalids are so fond of flowers," he would say, with a smile that displayed his brilliant white teeth. And when the weather was fine and the colonel felt well enough, he would invite them to take a sail in his cutter upon the blue Adriatic.
The colonel often spoke of his wife, longing to see her. The last _liaison_--that which had been the cause of a definite separation between himself and his wife, had robbed him of his self-respect, had disgraced him in his children's eyes, and had snatched from him every vestige of peace of mind--had dissolved itself more than two years before. The recollection of it disgusted him, but, like all men who have no future, he gladly allowed his thoughts to stray into the distant past. The wife from whom he had parted, elderly, learned, with her slovenliness and irritability, he had forgotten; his memory preserved the bride, in her light dress, bending above his couch of pain; he saw her on his marriage-day in the flood of sunlight which streaming through the tall window of his sick-room invested with a glorious halo the golden cross upon the improvised altar.