Chapter 5

STORM

"Myself, arch-traitor to myself; My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe, My clog whatever road I go."

XVII

"'Among the numerous daubs with which Tintoret, to his everlasting shame, has covered this church--'"

"Good Heavens!--what does the man mean?--or is he talking of another church?" said Ashe, raising his head and looking in bewilderment, first at the magnificent Tintoret in front of him, and then at the lines he had just been reading.

"William!" cried Kitty, "_do_ put that fool down and come here; one sees it splendidly!"

She was standing in one of the choir-stalls of San Giorgio Maggiore, somewhat raised above the point where Ashe had been studying his German hand-book.

"My dear, if this man doesn't know, who does!" cried Ashe, flourishing his volume in front of him as he obeyed her.

"'Dans le royaume des aveugles,'" said Kitty, contemptuously. "As if any German could even begin to understand Tintoret! But--don't talk!"

And clasping both hands round Ashe's arm, she stood leaning heavily upon him, her whole soul gazing from the eyes she turned upon the picture, her lips quivering, as though, from some physical weakness, she could only just hold back the tears with which, indeed, the face was charged.

She and Ashe were looking at that "Last Supper" of Tintoret's which hangs in the choir of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice.

It is a picture dear to all lovers of Tintoret, breathing in every line and group the passionate and mystical fancy of the master.

The scene passes, it will be remembered, in what seems to be the spacious guest-chamber of an inn. The Lord and His disciples are gathered round the last sacred meal of the Old Covenant, the first of the New. On the left, a long table stretches from the spectator into the depths of the picture; the disciples are ranged along one side of it; and on the other sits Judas, solitary and accursed. The young Christ has risen; He holds the bread in His lifted hands and is about to give it to the beloved disciple, while Peter beyond, rising from his seat in his eagerness, presses forward to claim his own part in the Lord's body.

The action of the Christ has in it a very ecstasy of giving; the bending form, indeed, is love itself, yearning and triumphant. This is further expressed in the light which streams from the head of the Lord, playing upon the long line of faces, illuminating the vehement gesture of Peter, the adoring and radiant silence of St. John--and striking even to the farthest corners of the room, upon a woman, a child, a playing dog. Meanwhile, from the hanging lamps above the supper-party there glows another and more earthly light, mingled with fumes of smoke which darken the upper air. But such is the power of the divine figure that from this very darkness breaks adoration. The smoke-wreaths change under the gazer's eye into hovering angels, who float round the head of the Saviour, and look down with awe upon the first Eucharist; while the lamp-light, interpenetrated by the glory which issues from the Lord, searches every face and fold and surface, displays the figures of the serving men and women in the background, shines on the household stuff, the vases and plates, the black and white of the marble floor, the beams of the old Venetian ceiling. Everywhere the double ray, the two-fold magic! Steeped in these "majesties of light," the immortal scene lives upon the quiet wall. Year after year the slender, thought-worn Christ raises His hands of blessing; the disciples strain towards Him; the angels issue from the darkness; the friendly domestic life, happy, natural, unconscious, frames the divine mystery. And among those who come to look there are, from time to time, men and women who draw from it that restlessness of vague emotion which Kitty felt as she hung now, gazing, on Ashe's arm.

For there is in it an appeal which torments them--like the winding of a mystic horn, on purple heights, by some approaching and unseen messenger. Ineffable beauty, offering itself--and in the human soul, the eternal human discord: what else makes the poignancy of art--the passion of poetry?

* * * * *

"That's enough!" said Kitty, at last, turning abruptly away.

"You like it?" said Ashe, softly, detaining her, while he pressed the little hand upon his arm. His heart was filled with a great pity for his wife in these days.

"Oh, I don't know!" was Kitty's impatient reply.

"It haunts me. There's still another to see--in a chapel. The sacristan's making signs to us."

"Is there?" Ashe stifled a yawn. He asked Margaret French, who had come up with them, whether Kitty had not had quite enough sight-seeing. He himself must go to the Piazza, and get the news before dinner. As an English cabinet minister, he had been admitted to the best club of the Venice residents. Telegrams were to be seen there; and there was anxious news from the Balkans.

Kitty merely insisted that she could not and would not go without her remaining Tintoret, and the others yielded to her at once, with that indulgent tenderness one shows to the wilfulness of a sick child. She and Margaret followed the sacristan. Ashe lingered behind in a passage of the church, surreptitiously reading an Italian newspaper. He had the ordinary cultivated pleasure in pictures; but this ardor which Kitty was throwing into her pursuit of Tintoret--the Wagner of painting--left him cold. He did not attempt to keep up with her.

Two ladies were already in the cloister chapel, with a gentleman. As Kitty and her friend entered, these persons had just finished their inspection of the damaged but most beautiful "Pietà" which hangs over the altar, and their faces were towards the entrance.

"Maman!" cried Kitty, in amazement.

The lady addressed started, put up a gold-rimmed eye-glass, exclaimed, and hurried forward.

Kitty and she embraced, amid a torrent of laughter and interjections from the elder lady, and then Kitty, whose pale cheeks had put on scarlet, turned to Margaret French.

"Margaret!--my mother, Madame d'Estrées."

Miss French, who found herself greeted with effusion by the strange lady, saw before her a woman of fifty, marvellously preserved. Madame d'Estrées had grown stout; so much time had claimed; but the elegant gray dress with its floating chiffon and lace skilfully concealed the fact; and for the rest, complexion, eyes, lips were still defiant of the years. If it were art that had achieved it, nature still took the credit; it was so finely done, the spectator could only lend himself and admire. Under the pretty hat of gray tulle, whereof the strings were tied bonnet-fashion under the plump chin, there looked out, indeed, a face gay, happy, unconcerned, proof one might have thought of an innocent past and a good conscience.

Kitty, who had drawn back a little, eyed her mother oddly.

"I thought you were in Paris. Your letter said you wouldn't be able to move for weeks--"

"_Ma chère!_--_un miracle!_" cried Madame d'Estrées, blushing, however, under her thin white veil. "When I wrote to you, I was at death's door--wasn't I?" She appealed to her companion, without waiting for an answer. "Then some one told me of a new doctor, and in ten days, _me voici_! They insisted on my going away--this dear woman--Donna Laura Vercelli--my daughter, Lady Kitty Ashe!--knew of an apartment here belonging to some relations of hers. And here we are--charmingly _installées_!--and really _nothing_ to pay!"--Madame d'Estrées whispered, smiling, in Kitty's ear--"nothing, compared to the hotels. I'm economizing splendidly. Laura looks after every sou. Ah! my dear William!"

For Ashe, puzzled by the voices within, had entered the chapel, and stood in his turn, open-mouthed.

"Why, we thought you were an invalid."

For, some three weeks before, a letter had reached him at Haggart, so full of melancholy details as to Madame d'Estrées' health and circumstances that even Kitty had been moved. Money had been sent; inquiries had been made by telegraph; and but for a hasty message of a more cheerful character, received just before they started, the Ashes, instead of journeying by Brussels and Cologne, would have gone by Paris that Kitty might see her mother. They had intended to stop there on their way back. Ashe was not minded that Kitty should see more of Madame d'Estrées than necessity demanded; but on this occasion he would have felt it positively brutal to make difficulties.

And now here was this moribund lady, this forsaken of gods and men, disporting herself at Venice, evidently in the pink of health and attired in the freshest of Paris toilettes! As he coldly shook hands, Ashe registered an inner vow that Madame d'Estrées' letters henceforward should receive the attention they deserved.

And beside her was her somewhat mysterious friend of London days, the Colonel Warington who had been so familiar a figure in the gatherings of St. James's Place--grown much older, almost white-haired, and as gentlemanly as ever. Who was the lady? Ashe was introduced, was aware of a somewhat dark and Jewish cast of face, noticed some fine jewels, and could only suppose that his mother-in-law had picked up some one to finance her, and provide her with creature comforts in return for the social talents that Madame d'Estrées still possessed in some abundance. He had more than once noticed her skill in similar devices; but, indeed, they were indispensable, for while he allowed Madame d'Estrées one thousand a year, she was, it seemed, firmly determined to spend a minimum of three.

He and Warington looked at each other with curiosity. The bronzed face and honest eyes of the soldier betrayed nothing. "Are you going to marry her at last?" thought Ashe. "Poor devil!"

Meanwhile Madame d'Estrées chattered away as though nothing could be more natural than their meeting, or more perfect than the relations between herself and her daughter and son-in-law.

As they all strolled down the church she looked keenly at Kitty.

"My dear child, how ill you look!--and your mourning! Ah, yes, of course!"--she bit her lip--"I remember--the poor, poor boy--"

"Thank you!" said Kitty, hastily. "I got your letter--thank you very much. Where are you staying? We've got rooms on the Grand Canal."

"Oh, but, Kitty!" cried Madame d'Estrées--"I was so sorry for you!"

"Were you?" said Kitty, under her breath. "Then, please, never speak of him to me again!"

Startled and offended, Madame d'Estrées looked at her daughter. But what she saw disarmed her. For once even she felt something like the pang of a mother. "You're _dreadfully_ thin, Kitty!"

Kitty frowned with annoyance.

"It's not my fault," she said, pettishly. "I live on cream, and it's no good. Of course, I know I'm an object and a scarecrow; but I'd rather people didn't tell me."

"What nonsense, _chére enfant!_ You're much prettier than you ever were."

A wild and fugitive radiance swept across the face beside her.

"Am I?" said Kitty, smiling. "That's all right! If I had died it wouldn't matter, of course. But--"

"Died! What do you mean, Kitty?" said Madame d'Estrées, in bewilderment. "When William wrote to me I thought he meant you had overtired yourself."

"Oh, well, the doctors said it was touch and go," said Kitty, indifferently. "But, of course, it wasn't. I'm much too tough. And then they fussed about one's heart. And that's all nonsense, too. I couldn't die if I tried."

But Madame d'Estrées pondered--the bright, intermittent color, the emaciation, the hollowness of the eyes. The effect, so far, was to add to Kitty's natural distinction, to give, rather, a touch of pathos to a face which even in its wildest mirth had in it something alien and remote. But she, too, reflected that a little more, a very little more, and--in a night--the face would have dropped its beauty, as a rose its petals.

The group stood talking awhile on the steps outside the church. Kitty and her mother exchanged addresses, Donna Laura opened her mouth once or twice, and produced a few contorted smiles for Kitty's benefit, while Colonel Warington tipped the sacristan, found the gondolier, and studied the guide-book.

As Madame d'Estrées stepped into her gondola, assisted by him, she tapped him on the arm.

"Are you coming, Markham?"

The low voice was pitched in a very intimate note. Kitty turned with a start.

* * * * *

"A casa!" said Madame d'Estrées, and she and her friend made for one of the canals that pierce the Zattere, while Colonel Warington went off for a walk along the Giudecca.

Kitty and Ashe bade their gondoliers take them to the Piazzetta, and presently they were gliding across waters of flame and silver, where the white front and red campanile of San Giorgio--now blazing under the sunset--mirrored themselves in the lagoon. The autumn evening was fresh and gay. A light breeze was on the water; lights that only Venice knows shone on the tawny sails of fishing-boats making for the Lido, on the white sides of an English yacht, on the burnished prows of the gondolas, on the warm reddish-white of the Ducal Palace. The air blowing from the Adriatic breathed into their faces the strength of the sea; and in the far distance, above that line of buildings where lies the heart of Venice, the high ghosts of the Friulian Alps glimmered amid the sweeping regiments and purple shadows of the land-hurrying clouds.

"This does you good, darling!" said Ashe, stooping down to look into his wife's face, as she nestled beside him on the soft cushions of the gondola.

Kitty gave him a slight smile, then said, with a furrowed brow:

"Who could ever have thought we should find maman here!"

"Don't have her on your mind!" said Ashe, with some sharpness. "I can't have anything worrying you."

She slipped her hand into his.

"Is that man going to marry her--at last? She called him 'Markham.' That's new."

"Looks rather like it," said Ashe. "Then _he'll_ have to look after the debts!"

They began to piece together what they knew of Colonel Warington and his relation to Madame d'Estrées. It was not much. But Ashe believed that originally Warington had not been in love with her at all. There had been a love-affair between her and Warington's younger brother, a smart artillery officer, when she was the widowed Lady Blackwater. She had behaved with more heart and scruple than she had generally been known to do in these matters, and the young officer adored her--hoped, indeed, to marry her. But he was called on--in Paris--to fight a duel on her account, and was killed. Before fighting, he had commended Lady Blackwater to the care of his much older brother, also a soldier, between whom and himself there existed a rare and passionate devotion; and ever since the poor lad's death, Markham Warington had been the friend and quasi-guardian of the lady--through her second marriage, through the checkered years of her existence in London, and now through the later years of her residence on the Continent, a residence forced upon her by her agreement with the Tranmores. Again and again he had saved her from bankruptcy, or from some worse scandal which would have wrecked the last remnants of her fame.

But, all the time, he was himself bound by strong ties of gratitude and affection to an elder sister who had brought him up, with whom he lived in Scotland during half the year. And this stout Puritan lady detested the very name of Madame d'Estrées.

"But she's dead," said Ashe. "I remember noticing her death in the _Times_ some three months ago. That, of course, explains it. Now he's free to marry."

"And so maman will settle down, and be happy ever afterwards!" said Kitty, with a sarcastic lifting of the brow. "Why should anybody be good?"

The bitterness of her look struck Ashe disagreeably. That any child should speak so of a mother was a tragic and sinister thing. But he was well aware of the causes.

"Were you very unhappy when you were a child, Kitty?" He pressed the hand he held.

"No," said Kitty, shortly. "I'm too like maman. I suppose, really, at bottom, I liked all the debts, and the excitement, and the shady people!"

"That wasn't the impression you gave me, in the first days of our acquaintance!" said Ashe, laughing.

"Oh, then I was grown up--and there were drawbacks. But I'm made of the same stuff as maman," she said, obstinately--"except that I can't tell so many fibs. That's really why we didn't get on."

Her brown eyes held him with that strange, unspoken defiance it seemed so often beyond her power to hide. It was like the fluttering of some caged thing hungering for it knows not what. Then, as they scanned the patient good-temper of his face, they melted; and her little fingers squeezed his; while Margaret French kept her eyes fixed on the two columns of the Piazzetta.

"How strange to find her here!" said Kitty, under her breath. "Now, if it had been Alice--my sister Alice!"

William nodded. It had been known to them for some time that Lady Alice Wensleydale, to whom Italy had become a second country, had settled in a villa near Treviso, where she occupied herself with a lace school for women and girls.

The mention of her sister threw Kitty into what seemed to be a disagreeable reverie. The flush brought by the sea-wind faded. Ashe looked at her with anxiety.

"You have done too much, Kitty--as usual!"

His voice was almost angry.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"What does it matter? You know very well it would be much better for you if--"

"If what?"

"If I followed Harry." The words were just breathed, and her eyes shrank from meeting his. Ashe, on the other hand, turned and looked at her steadily.

"Are you quite determined I sha'n't get _any_ joy out of my holiday?"

She shook her head uncertainly. Then, almost immediately, she began to chatter to Margaret French about the sights of the lagoon, with her natural trenchancy and fun. But her hand, hidden under the folds of her black cloak, still clung to William's.

"It is her illness," he said to himself, "and the loss of the child."

And at the remembrance of his little son, a wave of sore yearning filled his own heart. Deep under the occupations and interests of the mind lay this passionate regret, and at any moment of pause or silence its "buried life" arose and seized him. But he was a busy politician, absorbed even in these days of holiday by the questions and problems of the hour. And Kitty was a delicate woman--with no defence against the torture of grief.

He thought of those first days after the child's death, when in spite of the urgency of the doctors it had been impossible to keep the news from Kitty; of the ghastly effect of it upon nerves and brain already imperilled by causes only half intelligible; of those sudden flights from her nurses, when the days of convalescence began, to the child's room, and, later, to his grave. There was stinging pain in these recollections. Nor was he, in truth, much reassured by his wife's more recent state. It was impossible, indeed, that he should give it the same constant thought as a woman might--or a man of another and more emotional type. At this moment, perhaps, he had literally no _time_ for the subtleties of introspective feeling, even had his temperament inclined him to them, which was, in truth, not the case. He knew that Kitty had suddenly and resolutely ceased to talk about the boy, had thrown herself with the old energy into new pursuits, and, since she came to Venice in particular, had shown a feverish desire to fill every hour with movement and sight-seeing.

But was she, in truth, much better--in body or soul?--poor child! The doctors had explained her illness as nervous collapse, pointing back to a long preceding period of overstrain and excitement. There had been suspicions of tubercular mischief, but no precise test was then at command; and as Kitty had improved with rest and feeding the idea had been abandoned. But Ashe was still haunted by it, though quite ready--being a natural optimist--to escape from it, and all other incurable anxieties, as soon as Kitty herself should give the signal.

As to the moral difficulties and worries of those months at Haggart, Ashe remembered them as little as might be. Kitty's illness, indeed, had shown itself in more directions than one, as an amending and appeasing fact. Even Lord Parham had been moved to compassion and kindness by the immediate results of that horrible scene on the terrace. His leave-taking from Ashe on the morning afterwards had been almost cordial--almost intimate. And as to Lady Tranmore, whenever she had been able to leave her paralyzed husband she had been with Kitty, nursing her with affectionate wisdom night and day. While on the other members of the Haggart party the sheer pity of Kitty's condition had worked with surprising force. Lord Grosville had actually made his wife offer Grosville Park for Kitty's convalescence--Kitty got her first laugh out of the proposal. The Dean had journeyed several times from his distant cathedral town, to see and sit with Kitty; Eddie Helston's flowers had been almost a nuisance; Mrs. Alcot had shown herself quite soft and human.

The effect, indeed, of this general sympathy on Lord Parham's relations to the chief member of his cabinet had been but small and passing. Ashe disliked and distrusted him more than ever; and whatever might have happened to the Premier's resentment of a particular offence, there could be no doubt that a visit from which Ashe had hoped much had ended in complete failure, that Parham was disposed to cross his powerful henchman where he could, and that intrigue was busy in the cabinet itself against the reforming party of which Ashe was the head Ashe, indeed, felt his own official position, outwardly so strong, by no means secure. But the game of politics was none the less exhilarating for that.

As to Kitty's relation to himself--and life's most intimate and tender things--in these days, did he probe his own consciousness much concerning them? Probably not. Was he aware that, when all was said and done, in spite of her misdoings, in spite of his passion of anxiety during her illness, in spite of the pity and affection of his daily attitude, Kitty occupied, in truth, much less of his mind than she had ever yet occupied?--that a certain magic--primal, incommunicable--had ceased to clothe her image in his thoughts?

Again--probably not. For these slow changes in a man's inmost personality are like the ebb and flow of summer tides over estuary sands. Silent, the main creeps in, or out; and while we dream, the great basin fills, and the fishing-boats come in--or the gentle, pitiless waters draw back into the bosom of ocean, and the sea-birds run over the wide, untenanted flats.

* * * * *

They landed at the Piazzetta as the lamps were being lit. The soft October darkness was falling fast, and on the ledges of St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace the pigeons had begun to roost. An animated crowd was walking up and down in the Piazza where a band was playing; and on the golden horses of St. Mark's there shone a pale and mystical light, the last reflection from the western sky. Under the colonnades the jewellers and glass-shops blazed and sparkled, and the warm sea-wind fluttered the Italian flags on the great flag-staffs that but so recently had borne the Austrian eagle.

Ashe walked with his head thrown back, thinking absently, in this centre of Venice, of English politics, and of a phrase of Metternich's he had come across in a volume of memoirs he had been lately reading on the journey:

"Le jour qui court n'a aucune valeur pour moi, excepté comme la veille du lendemain. C'est toujours avec le lendemain que mon esprit lutte."

The phrase pleased him particularly.

He, too, was wrestling with the morrow, though in another sense than Metternich's. His mind was alive with projects; an exultant consciousness both of capacity and opportunity possessed him.

"Why, you've passed the club, William!" said Kitty.

Ashe awoke with a start, smiled at her, and with a wave of the hand disappeared in a stairway to the right.

Margaret French lingered in a bead-shop to make some purchases. Kitty walked home alone, and Margaret, whose watchful affection never failed, knew that she preferred it, and let her go her way.

The Ashes had rooms on the first bend of the Grand Canal looking south. To reach them by land from the Piazza, Kitty had to pass through a series of narrow streets, or _calles_, broken by _campos_, or small squares, in which stood churches. As she passed one of these churches she was attracted by the sound of gay music and by the crowd about the entrance. Pushing aside the leathern curtain over the door, she found herself in a great rococo nave, which blazed with lights and decorations. Lines of huge wax candles were fixed in temporary holders along the floor. The pillars were swathed in rose-colored damask, and the choir was ablaze with flowers, and even more brilliantly lit, if possible, than the rest of the church.

Kitty's Catholic training told her that an exposition of the Blessed Sacrament was going on. Mechanically she dipped her fingers into the holy water, she made her genuflection to the altar, and knelt down in one of the back rows.

How rich and sparkling it was--the lights, the bright colors, the dancing music! "_Dolce Sacramento! Santo Sacramento!_" these words of an Italian hymn or litany recurred again and again, with endless iteration. Kitty's sensuous, excitable nature was stirred with delight. Then, suddenly, she remembered her child, and the little face she had seen for the last time in the coffin. She began to cry softly, hiding her face in her black veil. An unbearable longing possessed her. "I shall never have another child," she thought. "_That's_ all over."

Then her thoughts wandered back to the party at Haggart, to the scene on the terrace, and to that rush of excitement which had mastered her, she scarcely knew how or why. She could still hear the Dean's voice--see the lamp wavering above her head. "What possessed me! I didn't care a straw whether the lamp set me on fire--whether I lived or died. I wanted to die."

Was it because of that short conversation with William in the afternoon?--because of the calmness with which he had taken that word "separation," which she had thrown at him merely as a child boasts and threatens, never expecting for one moment to be taken at its word? She had proposed it to him before, after the night at Hamel Weir; she had been serious then, it had been an impulse of remorse, and he had laughed at her. But at Haggart it had been an impulse of temper, and he had taken it seriously. How the wound had rankled, all the afternoon, while she was chattering to the Royalties! And as she jumped on the pedestal, and saw his face of horror, there was the typical womanish triumph that she had made him _feel_--would make him feel yet more.

How good, how tender he had been to her in her illness! And yet--yet?

"He cares for politics, for his plans--not for me. He will never trust me again--as he did once. He'll never ask me to help him--he'll find ways not to--though he'll be very sweet to me all the time."

And the thought of her nullity with him in the future, her insignificance in his life, tortured her.

Why had she treated Lord Parham so? "I can be a lady when I choose," she said, mockingly, to herself. "I wasn't even a lady."

Then suddenly there flashed on her memory a little picture of Lord Parham, standing spectacled and bewildered, peering into her slip of paper. She bent her head on her hands and laughed, a stifled, hysterical laugh, which scandalized the woman kneeling beside her.

But the laugh was soon quenched again in restless pain. William's affection had been her only refuge in those weeks of moral and physical misery she had just passed through.

"But it's only because he's so terribly sorry for me. It's all quite different. And I can't ever make him love me again in the old way.... It wasn't my fault. It's something born in me--that catches me by the throat."

And she had the actual physical sense of some one strangled by a possessing force.

"_Dolce Sacramento! Santo Sacramento!_"... The music swayed and echoed through the church. Kitty uncovered her eyes and felt a sudden exhilaration in the blaze of light. It reminded her of the bending Christ in the picture of San Giorgio. Awe and beauty flowed in upon her, in spite of the poor music and the tawdry church. What if she tried religion?--recalled what she had been taught in the convent?--gave herself up to a director?

She shivered and recoiled. How would she ever maintain her faith against William--William, who knew so much more than she?

Then, into the emptiness of her heart there stole the inevitable temptations of memory. Where was Geoffrey? She knew well that he was a violent and selfish man; but he understood much in her that William would never understand. With a morbid eagerness she recalled the play of feeling between them, before that mad evening at Hamel Weir. What perpetual excitement--no time to think--or regret!

During her weeks of illness she had lost all count of his movements. Had he been still writing during the summer for the newspaper which had sent him out? Had there not been rumors of his being wounded--or attacked by fever? Her memory, still vague and weak, struggled painfully with memories it could not recapture.

The Italian paper of that morning--she had spelled it out for herself at breakfast--had spoken of a defeat of the insurrectionary forces, and of their withdrawal into the highlands of Bosnia. There would be a lull in the fighting. Would he come home? And all this time had he been the mere spectator and reporter, or fighting, himself? Her pulses leaped as she thought of him leading down-trodden peasants against the Turk.

But she knew nothing. Surely during the last few months he had purposely made a mystery of his doings and his whereabouts. The only sign of him which seemed to have reached England had been that volume of poems--with those hateful lines! Her lip quivered. She was like a weak child--unable to bear the thought of anything hostile and unkind.

If he had already turned homeward? Perhaps he would come through Venice! Anyway, he was not far off. The day before she and Margaret had made their first visit to the Lido. And as Kitty stood fronting the Adriatic waves, she had dreamed that somewhere, beyond the farther coast, were those Bosnian mountains in which Geoffrey had passed the winter.

Then she started at her own thoughts, rose--loathing herself--drew down her veil, and moved towards the door.

* * * * *

As she reached the leathern curtain which hung over the doorway, a lady in front who was passing through held the curtain aside that Kitty might follow. Kitty stepped into the street and looked up to say a mechanical "Thank you."

But the word died on her lips. She gave a stifled cry, which was echoed by the woman before her.

Both stood motionless, staring at each other.

Kitty recovered herself first.

"It's not my fault that we've met," she said, panting a little. "Don't look at me so--so unkindly. I know you don't want to see me. Why--why should we speak at all? I'm going away." And she turned with a gesture of farewell.

Alice Wensleydale laid a detaining hand on Kitty's arm.

"No! stay a moment. You are in black. You look ill."

Kitty turned towards her. They had moved on instinctively into the shelter of one of the narrow streets.

"My boy died--two months ago," she said, holding herself proudly aloof.

Lady Alice started.

"I hadn't heard. I'm very sorry for you. How old was he?"

"Three years old."

"Poor baby!" The words were very low and soft. "My boy--was fourteen. But you have other children?"

"No--and I don't want them. They might die, too."

Lady Alice paused. She still held her half-sister by the arm, towering above her. She was quite as thin as Kitty, but much taller and more largely built; and, beside the elaborate elegance of Kitty's mourning, Alice's black veil and dress had a severe, conventual air. They were almost the dress of a religious.

"How are you?" she said, gently. "I often think of you. Are you happy in your marriage?"

Kitty laughed.

"We're such a happy lot, aren't we? We understand it so well. Oh, don't trouble about me. You know you said you couldn't have anything to do with me. Are you staying in Venice?"

"I came in from Treviso for a day or two, to see a friend--"

"You had better not stay," said Kitty, hastily. "Maman is here. At least, if you don't want to run across her."

Lady Alice let go her hold.

"I shall go home to-morrow morning."

They moved on a few steps in silence, then Alice paused. Kitty's delicate face and cloud of hair made a pale, luminous spot in the darkness of the _calle_. Alice looked at her with emotion.

"I want to say something to you."

"Yes?"

"If you are ever in trouble--if you ever want me, send for me. Address Treviso, and it will always find me."

Kitty made no reply. They had reached a bridge over a side canal, and she stopped, leaning on the parapet.

"Did you hear what I said?" asked her companion.

"Yes. I'll remember. I suppose you think it your duty. What do you do with yourself?"

"I have two orphan children I bring up. And there is my lace-school. It doesn't get on much; but it occupies me."

"Are you a Catholic?"

"Yes."

"Wish I was!" said Kitty. She hung over the marble balustrade in silence, looking at the crescent moon that was just peering over the eastern palaces of the canal. "My husband is in politics, you know. He's Home Secretary."

"Yes, I heard. Do you help him?"

"No--just the other thing."

Kitty lifted up a pebble and let it drop into the water.

"I don't know what you mean by that," said Alice Wensleydale, coldly. "If you don't help him you'll be sorry--when it's too late to be sorry."

"Oh, I know!" said Kitty. Then she moved restlessly. "I must go in. Good-night." She held out her hand.

Lady Alice took it.

"Good-night. And remember!"

"I sha'n't want anybody," said Kitty. "_Addio!_" She waved her hand, and Alice Wensleydale, whose way lay towards the Piazza, saw her disappear, a small tripping shadow, between the high, close-piled houses.

Kitty was in so much excitement after this conversation that when she reached the Campo San Maurizio, where she should have turned abruptly to the left, she wandered awhile up and down the campo, looking at the gondolas on the Traghetto between it and the Accademia, at the Church of San Maurizio, at the rising moon, and the bright lights in some of the shop windows of the small streets to the north. The sea-wind was still warm and gusty, and the waves in the Grand Canal beat against the marble feet of its palaces.

At last she found her way through narrow passages, past hidden and historic buildings, to the back of the palace on the Grand Canal in which their rooms were. A door in a small court opened to her ring. She found herself in a dark ground-floor--empty except for the _felze_ or black top of a gondola--of which the farther doors opened on the canal. A cheerful Italian servant brought lights, and on the marble stairs was her maid waiting for her. In a few minutes she was on her sofa by a bright wood fire, while Blanche hovered round her with many small attentions.

"Have you seen your letters, my lady?" and Blanche handed her a pile. Upon a parcel lying uppermost Kitty pounced at once with avidity. She tore it open--pausing once, with scarlet cheeks, to look round her at the door, as though she were afraid of being seen.

A book--fresh and new--emerged. _Politics and the Country Houses_; so ran the title on the back. Kitty looked at it frowning. "He might have found a better name!" Then she opened it--looked at a page here and a page there--laughed, shivered--and at last bethought her to read the note from the publisher which accompanied it.

"'Much pleasure--the first printed copy--three more to follow--sure to make a sensation'--hateful wretch!--'if your ladyship will let us know how many presentation copies--' Goodness!--not _one_! Oh--well!--Madeleine, perhaps--and, of course, Mr. Darrell."

She opened a little despatch-box in which she kept her letters, and slipped the book in.

"I won't show it to William to-night--not--not till next week." The book was to be out on the 20th, a week ahead--three months from the day when she had given the MS. into Darrell's hands. She had been spared all the trouble of correcting proofs, which had been done for her by the publisher's reader, on the plea of her illness. She had received and destroyed various letters from him--almost without reading them--during a short absence of William's in the north.

Suddenly a start of terror ran through her. "No, no!" she said, wrestling with herself--"he'll scold me, perhaps--at first; of course I know he'll do that. And then, I'll make him laugh! He can't--he can't help laughing. I _know_ it'll amuse him. He'll see how I meant it, too. And nobody need ever find out."

She heard his step outside, hastily locked her despatch-box, threw a shawl over it, and lay back languidly on her pillows, awaiting him.

XVIII

The following morning, early, a note was brought to Kitty from Madame d'Estrées:

"Darling Kitty,--Will you join us to-night in an expedition? You know that Princess Margherita is staying on the Grand Canal?--in one of the Mocenigo palaces. There is to be a serenata in her honor to-night--not one of those vulgar affairs which the hotels get up, but really good music and fine voices--money to be given to some hospital or other. Do come with us. I suppose you have your own gondola, as we have. The gondolas who wish to follow meet at the Piazzetta, weather permitting, eight o'clock. I know, of course, that you are not going out. But this is _only_ music!--and for a charity. One just sits in one's gondola, and follows the music up the canal. Send word by bearer. Your fond mother,

"Marguerite d'Estrées."

Kitty tossed the note over to Ashe. "Aren't you dining out somewhere to-night?"

Her voice was listless. And as Ashe lifted his head from the cabinet papers which had just reached him by special messenger, his attention was disagreeably recalled from high matters of state to the very evident delicacy of his wife. He replied that he had promised to dine with Prince S---- at Danieli's, in order to talk Italian politics. "But I can throw it over in a moment, if you want me. I came to Venice for _you_, darling," he said, as he rose and joined her on the balcony which commanded a fine stretch of the canal.

"No, no! Go and dine with your prince. I'll go with maman--Margaret and I. At least, Margaret must, of course, please herself!"

She shrugged her shoulders, and then added, "Maman's probably in the pink of society here. Venice doesn't take its cue from people like Aunt Lina!"

Ashe smiled uncomfortably. He was in truth by this time infinitely better acquainted with the incidents of Madame d'Estrées's past career than Kitty was. He had no mind whatever that Kitty should become less ignorant, but his knowledge sometimes made conversation difficult.

Kitty was perfectly aware of his embarrassment.

"You never tell me--" she said, abruptly. "Did she really do such dreadful things?"

"My dear Kitty!--why talk about it?"

Kitty flushed, then threw a flower into the water below with a defiant gesture.

"What does it matter? It's all so long ago. I have nothing to do with what I did ten years ago--nothing!"

"A convenient doctrine!" laughed Ashe. "But it cuts both ways. You get neither the good of your good nor the bad of your bad."

"I have no good," said Kitty, bitterly.

"What's the matter with you, miladi?" said Ashe, half scolding, half tender. "You growl over my remarks as though you were your own small dog with a bone. Come here and let me tell you the news."

And drawing the sofa up to the open window which commanded the marvellous waterway outside, with its rows of palaces on either hand, he made her lie down while he read her extracts from his letters.

Margaret French, who was writing at the farther side of the room, glanced at them furtively from time to time. She saw that Ashe was trying to charm away the languor of his companion by that talk of his, shrewd, humorous, vehement, well informed, which made him so welcome to the men of his own class and mode of life. And when he talked to a woman as he was accustomed to talk to men, that woman felt it a compliment. Under the stimulus of it, Kitty woke up, laughed, argued, teased, with something of her natural animation.

Presently, indeed, the voices had sunk so much and the heads had drawn so close together that Margaret French slipped away, under the impression that they were discussing matters to which she was not meant to listen.

She had hardly closed the door when Kitty drew herself away from Ashe, and holding his arm with both hands looked strangely into his eyes.

"You're awfully good to me, William. But, you know--you don't tell me secrets!"

"What do you mean, darling?"

"You don't tell me the real secrets--what Lord Palmerston used to tell to Lady Palmerston!"

"How do you know what he used to tell her?" said Ashe, with a laugh. But his forehead had reddened.

"One hears--and one guesses--from the letters that have been published. Oh, I understand quite well! You can't trust me!"

Ashe turned aside and began to gather up his papers.

"Of course," said Kitty, a little hoarsely, "I know it's my own fault, because you used to tell me much more. I suppose it was the way I behaved to Lord Parham?"

She looked at him rather tremulously. It was the first time since her illness began that she had referred to the incidents at Haggart.

"Look here!" said Ashe, in a tone of decision; "I shall _really_ give up talking politics to you if it only reminds you of disagreeable things."

She took no notice.

"Is Lord Parham behaving well to you--now--William?"

Ashe colored hotly. As a matter of fact, in his own opinion, Lord Parham was behaving vilely. A measure of first-rate importance for which he was responsible was already in danger of being practically shelved, simply, as it seemed to him, from a lack of elementary trustworthiness in Lord Parham. But as to this he had naturally kept his own counsel with Kitty.

"He is not the most agreeable of customers," he said, gayly. "But I shall get through. Pegging away does it."

"And then to see how our papers flatter him!" cried Kitty. "How little people know, who think they know! It would be amusing to show the world the real Lord Parham."

She looked at her husband with an expression that struck him disagreeably. He threw away his cigarette, and his face changed.

"What we have to do, my dear Kitty, is simply to hold our tongues."

Kitty sat up in some excitement.

"That man never hears the truth!"

Ashe shrugged his shoulders. It seemed to him incredible that she should pursue this particular topic, after the incidents at Haggart.

"That's not the purpose for which Prime Ministers exist. Anyway, _we_ can't tell it him."

Undaunted, however, by his tone, and with what seemed to him extraordinary excitability of manner, Kitty reminded him of an incident in the life of a bygone administration, when the near relative of an English statesman, staying at the time in the statesman's house, had sent a communication to one of the quarterlies attacking his policy and belittling his character, by means of information obtained in the intimacy of a country-house party.

"One of the most treacherous things ever done!" said Ashe, indignantly. "Fair fight, if you like! But if that kind of thing were to spread, I for one should throw up politics to-morrow."

"Every one said it did a vast deal of good," persisted Kitty.

"A precious sort of good! Yes--I believe Parham in particular profited by it--more shame to him! If anybody ever tried to help me in that sort of way--anybody, that is, for whom I felt the smallest responsibility--I know what I should do."

"What?" Kitty fell back on her cushions, but her eye still held him.

"Send in my resignation by the next post--and damn the fellow that did it! Look here, Kitty!" He came to stand over her--a fine formidable figure, his hands in his pockets. "Don't you ever try that kind of thing--there's a darling."

"Would you damn me?"

She smiled at him--with a tremor of the lip.

He caught up her hand and kissed it. "Blow out my own brains, more like," he said, laughing. Then he turned away. "What on earth have we got into this beastly conversation for? Let's get out of it. The Parhams are there--male and female--aren't they?--and we've got to put up with them. Well, I'm going to the Piazza. Any commissions? Oh, by-the-way"--he looked back at a letter in his hands--"mother says Polly Lyster will probably be here before we go--she seems to be touring around with her father."

"Charming prospect!" said Kitty. "Does mother expect me to chaperon her?"

Ashe laughed and went. As soon as he was gone, Kitty sprang from the sofa, and walked up and down the room in a passionate preoccupation. A tremor of great fear was invading her; an agony of unavailing regret.

"What can I do?" she said to herself, as her upper lip twisted and tortured the lower one.

Presently she caught up her purse, went to her room, where she put on her walking things without summoning Blanche, and stealing down the stairs, so as to be unheard by Margaret, she made her way to the back gate of the Palazzo, and so to the streets leading to the Piazza. William had taken the gondola to the Piazzetta, so she felt herself safe.

She entered the telegraphic office at the western end of the Piazza, and sent a telegram to England that nearly emptied her purse of francs. When she came out she was as pale as she had been flushed before--a little, terror-stricken figure, passing in a miserable abstraction through the intricate backways which took her home.

"It won't be published for ten days. There's time. It's only a question of money," she said to herself, feverishly--"only a question of money!"

* * * * *

All the rest of the day, Kitty was at once so restless and so languid that to amuse her was difficult. Ashe was quite grateful to his amazing mother-in-law for the plan of the evening.

As night fell, Kitty started at every sound in the old Palazzo. Once or twice she went half-way to the door--eagerly--with hand out-stretched--as though she expected a letter.

"No other English post to-night, Kitty!" said Ashe, at last, raising his head from the finely printed _Poetæ Minores_ he had just purchased at Ongania's. "You don't mean to say you're not thankful!"

* * * * *

The evening arrived--clear and mild, but moonless. Ashe went off to dine with his prince, in the ordinary gondola of commerce, hired at the Traghetto; while Margaret and Kitty followed a little later in one which had already drawn the attention of Venice, owing to the two handsome gondoliers, habited in black from head to foot, who were attached to it. They turned towards the Piazzetta, where they were to meet with Madame d'Estrées' party.

Kitty, in her deep mourning, sank listlessly into the black cushions of the gondola. Yet almost as they started, as the first strokes carried them past the famous palace which is now the Prefecture, the spell of Venice began to work.

City of rest!--as it seems to our modern senses--how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless, and covetous a life as history shows us should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice! The easy passage of the gondola through the soft, imprisoned wave; the silence of wheel and hoof, of all that hurries and clatters; the tide that comes and goes, noiseless, indispensable, bringing in the freshness of the sea, carrying away the defilements of the land; the narrow winding ways, now firm earth, now shifting sea, that bind the city into one social whole, where the industrial and the noble alike are housed in palaces, equal often in beauty as in decay; the marvellous quiet of the nights, save when the northeast wind, Hadria's stormy leader, drives the furious waves against the palace fronts in the darkness, with the clamor of an attacking host; the languor of the hot afternoons, when life is a dream of light and green water, when the play of mirage drowns the foundations of the _lidi_ in the lagoon, so that trees and buildings rise out of the sea as though some strong Amphion-music were but that moment calling them from the deep; and when day departs, that magic of the swiftly falling dusk, and that white foam and flower of St. Mark's upon the purple intensity of the sky!--through each phase of the hours and the seasons, _rest_ is still the message of Venice, rest enriched with endless images, impressions, sensations, that cost no trouble and breed no pain.

It was this spell of rest that descended for a while on Kitty as they glided downward to the Piazzetta. The terror of the day relaxed. Her telegram would be in time; or, if not, she would throw herself into William's arms, and he _must_ forgive her!--because she was so foolish and weak, so tired and sad. She slipped her hand into Margaret's; they talked in low voices of the child, and Kitty was all appealing melancholy and charm.

At the Piazzetta there was already a crowd of gondolas, and at their head the _barca_, which carried the musicians.

"You are late, Kitty!" cried Madame d'Estrées, waving to them. "Shall we draw out and come to you?--or will you just join on where you are?"

For the Vercelli gondola was already wedged into a serried line of boats in the wake of the _barca_.

"Never mind us," said Kitty. "We'll tack on somehow."

And inwardly she was delighted to be thus separated from her mother and the chattering crowd by which Madame d'Estrées seemed to be surrounded. Kitty and Margaret bade their men fall in, and they presently found themselves on the Salute side of the floating audience, their prow pointing to the canal.

The _barca_ began to move, and the mass of gondolas followed. Round them, and behind them, other boats were passing and repassing, each with its slim black body, its swanlike motion, its poised oarsman, and its twinkling light. The lagoon towards the Guidecca was alive with these lights; and a magnificent white steamer adorned with flags and lanterns--the yacht, indeed, of a German prince--shone in the mid-channel.

On they floated. Here were the hotels, with other illuminated boats in front of their steps, whence spoiled voices shouted, "Santa Lucia," till even Venice and the Grand Canal became a vulgarity and a weariness. These were the "serenate publiche," common and commercial affairs, which the private serenata left behind in contempt, steering past their flaring lights for the dark waters of romance which lay beyond.

Suddenly Kitty's sadness gave way; her starved senses clamored; she woke to poetry and pleasure. All round her, stretching almost across the canal, the noiseless flock of gondolas--dark, leaning figures impelling them from behind, and in front the high prows and glow-worm lights; in the boats, a multitude of dim, shrouded figures, with not a face visible; and in their midst the _barca_, temple of light and music, built up of flowers, and fluttering scarves, and many-colored lanterns, a sparkling fantasy of color, rose and gold and green, shining on the bosom of the night. To either side, the long, dark lines of thrice-historic palaces; scarcely a poor light here and there at their water-gates; and now and then the lamps of the Traghetti.... Otherwise, darkness, soundless motion, and, overhead, dim stars.

"Margaret! Look!"

Kitty caught her companion's arm in a mad delight.

Some one for the amusement of the guests of Venice was experimenting on the top of the campanile of St. Mark's with those electric lights which were then the toys of science, and are now the eyes and tools of war. A search-light was playing on the basin of St. Mark's and on the mouth of the canal. Suddenly it caught the Church of the Salute--and the whole vast building, from the Queen of Heaven on its topmost dome down to the water's brim, the figures of saints and prophets and apostles which crowd its steps and ledges, the white whorls, like huge sea-shells, that make its buttresses, the curves and volutes of its cornices and doorways, rushed upon the eye in a white and blinding splendor, making the very darkness out of which the vision sprang alive and rich. Not a Christian church, surely, but a palace of Poseidon! The bewildered gazer saw naiads and bearded sea-gods in place of angels and saints, and must needs imagine the champing of Poseidon's horses at the marble steps, straining towards the sea.

The vision wavered, faded, reappeared, and finally died upon the night. Then the wild beams began to play on the canal, following the serenata, lighting up now the palaces on either hand, now some single gondola, revealing every figure and gesture of the laughing English or Americans who filled it, in a hard white flash.

"Oh! listen, Kitty!" said Margaret. "Some one is going to sing 'Ché faro.'"

Miss French was very musical, and she turned in a trance of pleasure towards the _barca_ whence came the first bars of the accompaniment.

She did not see meanwhile that Kitty had made a hurried movement, and was now leaning over the side of the gondola, peering with arrested breath into the scattered group of boats on their left hand. The search-light flashed here and there among them. A gondola at the very edge of the serenata contained one figure beside the gondolier, a man in a large cloak and slouch hat, sitting very still with folded arms. As Kitty looked, hearing the beating of her heart, their own boat was suddenly lit up. The light passed in a second, and while it lasted those in the flash could see nothing outside it. When it withdrew all was in darkness. The black mass of boats floated on, soundless again, save for an occasional plash of water or the hoarse cry of a gondolier--and in the distance the wail for Eurydice.

Kitty fell back in her seat. An excitement, from which she shrank in a kind of terror, possessed her. Her thoughts were wholly absorbed by the gondola and the figure she could no longer distinguish--for which, whenever a group of lamps threw their reflections on the water, she searched the canal in vain. If what she madly dreamed were true, had she herself been seen--and recognized?

The serenata in honor of Italy's beautiful princess duly made its way to the Grand Canal. The princess came to her balcony, while the "Jewel Song" in "Faust" was being sung below, and there was a demonstration which echoed from palace to palace and died away under the arch of the Rialto. Then the gondolas dispersed. That of Lady Kitty Ashe had some difficulty in making its way home against a force of wind and tide coming from the lagoon.

* * * * *

Kitty was apparently asleep when Ashe returned. He had sat late with his hosts--men prominent in the Risorgimento and in the politics of the new kingdom--discussing the latest intricacies of the Roman situation and the prospects of Italian finance. His mind was all alert and vigorous, ranging over great questions and delighting in its own strength. To come in contact with these able foreigners, not as the mere traveller but as an important member of an English government, beginning to be spoken of by the world as one of the two or three men of the future--this was a new experience and a most agreeable one. Doors hitherto closed had opened before him; information no casual Englishman could have commanded had been freely poured out for him; last, but not least, he had at length made himself talk French with some fluency, and he looked back on his performance of the evening with a boy's complacency.

For the rest, Venice was a mere trial of his patience! As his gondola brought him home, struggling with wind and wave, Ashe had no eye whatever for the beauty of this Venice in storm. His mind was in England, in London, wrestling with a hundred difficulties and possibilities. The old literary and speculative habit was fast disappearing in the stress of action and success. His well-worn Plato or Horace still lay beside his bedside; but when he woke early, and lit a candle carefully shaded from Kitty, it was not to the poets and philosophers that he turned; it was to a heap of official documents and reports, to the letters of political friends, or an unfinished letter of his own, the phrases of which had perhaps been running through his dreams. The measures for which he was wrestling against the intrigues of Lord Parham and Lord Parham's clique filled all his mind with a lively ardor of battle. They were the children--the darlings--of his thoughts.

Nevertheless, as he entered his wife's dim-lit room the eager arguments and considerations that were running through his head died away. He stood beside her, overwhelmed by a rush of feeling, alive through all his being to the appeal of her frail sweetness, the helplessness of her sleep, the dumb significance of the thin, blue-veined hand--eloquent at once of character and of physical weakness--which lay beside her. Her face was hidden, but the beautiful hair with its childish curls and ripples drew him to her--touched all the springs of tenderness.

It was a loveliness so full, it seemed, of meaning and of promise. Hand, brow, mouth--they were the signs of no mere empty and insipid beauty. There was not a movement, not a feature, that did not speak of intelligence and mind.

And yet, were he to wake her now and talk to her of the experience of his evening, how little joy would either get out of it.

Was it because she had no intellectual disinterestedness? Well, what woman had! But other women, even if they saw everything in terms of personality, had the power of pursuing an aim, steadily, persistently, for the sake of a person. He thought of Lady Palmerston--of Princess Lieven fighting Guizot's battles--and sighed.

By Jove! the women could do most things, if they chose. He recalled Kitty's triumph in the great party gathered to welcome Lord Parham, contrasting it with her wilful and absurd behavior to the man himself. There was something bewildering in such power--combined with such folly. In a sense, it was perfectly true that she had insulted her husband's chief, and jeopardized her husband's policy, because she could not put up with Lord Parham's white eyelashes.

Well, let him make his account with it! How to love her, tend her, make her happy--and yet carry on himself the life of high office--there was the problem! Meanwhile he recognized, fully and humorously, that she had married a political sceptic--and that it was hard for her to know what to do with the enthusiast who had taken his place.

Poor, pretty, incalculable darling! He would coax her to stay abroad part of the Parliamentary season--and then, perhaps, lure her into the country, with the rebuilding and refurnishing of Haggart. She must be managed and kept from harm--and afterwards indulged and spoiled and _fêted_ to her heart's content.

If only the fates would give them another child!--a child brilliant and lovely like herself, then surely this melancholy which overshadowed her would disperse. That look--that tragic look--she had given him on the day of the _fête_, when she spoke of "separation"! The wild adventure with the lamp had been her revenge--her despair. He shuddered as he thought of it.

He fell asleep, still pondering restlessly over her future and his own. Amid all his anxieties he never stooped to recollect the man who had endangered her name and peace. His optimism, his pride, the sanguine perfunctoriness of much of his character were all shown in the omission.

* * * * *

Kitty, however, was not asleep while Ashe was beside her. And she slept but little through the hours that followed. Between three and four she was finally roused by the sounds of storm in the canal. It was as though a fleet of gigantic steamers--in days when Venice knew but the gondola--were passing outside, sending a mountainous "wash" against the walls of the old palace in which they lodged. In this languid autumnal Venice the sudden noise and crash were startling. Kitty sprang softly out of bed, flung on a dressing-gown and fur cloak, and slipped through the open window to the balcony.

A strange sight! Beneath, livid waves, lashing the marble walls; above, a pale moonlight, obscured by scudding clouds. Not a sign of life on the water or in the dark palaces opposite. Venice looked precisely as she might have looked on some wild sixteenth-century night in the years of her glorious decay, when her palaces were still building and her state tottering. Opposite, at the Traghetto of the Accademia, there were lamps, and a few lights in the gondolas; and through the storm-noises one could hear the tossed boats grinding on their posts.

The riot of the air was not cold; there was still a recollection of summer in the gusts that beat on Kitty's fair hair and wrestled with her cloak. As she clung to the balcony she pictured to herself the tumbling waves on the Lido; the piled storm-clouds parting like a curtain above a dead Venice; and behind, the gleaming eternal Alps, sending their challenge to the sea--the forces that make the land, to the forces that engulf it.

Her wild fancy went out to meet the tumult of blast and wave. She felt herself, as it were, anchored a moment at sea, in the midst of a war of elements, physical and moral.

Yes, yes!--it was Geoffrey. Once, under the skipping light, she had seen the face distinctly. Paler than of old--gaunt, unhappy, absent. It was the face of one who had suffered--in body and mind. But--she trembled through all her slight frame!--the old harsh power was there unchanged.

Had he seen and recognized her--slipping away afterwards into the mouth of a side canal, or dropping behind in the darkness? Was he ashamed to face her--or angered by the reminder of her existence? No doubt it seemed to him now a monstrous absurdity that he should ever have said he loved her! He despised her--thought her a base and coward soul. Very likely he would make it up with Mary Lyster now, accept her nursing and her money.

Her lip curled in scorn. No, _that_ she didn't believe! Well, then, what would be his future? His name had been but little in the newspapers during the preceding year; the big public seemed to have forgotten him. A cloud had hung for months over the struggle of races and of faiths now passing in the Balkans. Obscure fighting in obscure mountains; massacre here, revolt there; and for some months now hardly an accredited voice from Turk or Christian to tell the world what was going on.

But Geoffrey had now emerged--and at a moment when Europe was beginning perforce to take notice of what she had so far wilfully ignored. _À lui la parole!_ No doubt he was preparing it, the bloody, exciting story which would bring him before the foot-lights again, and make him once more the lion of a day. More social flatteries, more doubtful love-affairs! Fools like herself would feel his spell, would cherish and caress him, only to be stung and scathed as she had been. The bitter lines of his "portrait" rung in her ears--blackening and discrowning her in her own eyes.

She abhorred him!--but the thought that he was in Venice burned deep into senses and imagination. Should she tell William she had seen him? No, no! She would stand by herself, protect herself!

So she stole back to bed, and lay there wakeful, starting guiltily at William's every movement. If he knew what had happened!--what she was thinking of! Why on earth should he? It would be monstrous to harass him on his holiday--with all these political affairs on his mind.

Then suddenly--by an association of ideas--she sat up shivering, her hands pressed to her breast. The telegram--the book! Oh, but _of course_ she had been in time!--_of course_! Why, she had offered the man two hundred pounds! She lay down laughing at herself--forcing herself to try and sleep.

XIX

Sir Richard Lyster unfolded his _Times_ with a jerk.

"A beastly rheumatic hole I call this," he said, looking angrily at the window of his hotel sitting-room, which showed drops from a light shower then passing across the lagoon. "And the dilatoriness of these Italian posts is, upon my soul, beyond bearing! This _Times_ is _three_ days old."

Mary Lyster looked up from the letter she was writing.

"Why don't you read the French papers, papa? I saw a _Figaro_ of yesterday in the Piazza this morning."

"Because I can't!" was the indignant reply. "There wasn't the same amount of money squandered on _my_ education, my dear, that there has been on yours."

Mary smiled a little, unseen. Her father had been, of course, at Eton. She had been educated by a succession of small and hunted governesses, mostly Swiss, whose remuneration had certainly counted among the frugalities rather than the extravagances of the family budget.

Sir Richard read his _Times_ for a while. Mary continued to write checks for the board wages of the servants left at home, and to give directions for the beating of carpets and cleaning of curtains. It was dull work, and she detested it.

Presently Sir Richard rose, with a stretch. He was a tall old man, with a shock of white hair and very black eyes. A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class--too much money and too few ideas. He came abroad every year, reluctantly. He did not choose to be left behind by county neighbors whose wives talked nonsense about Botticelli. And Mary would have it. But Sir Richard's tours were generally one prolonged course of battle between himself and all foreign institutions; and if it was Mary who drove him forth, it was Mary also who generally hurried him home.

"Who was it you saw last night in that ridiculous singing affair?" he asked, as he put the fire together.

"Kitty Ashe--and her mother," said Mary--after a moment--still writing.

"Her mother!--what, that disreputable woman?"

"They weren't in the same gondola."

"Ashe will be a great fool if he lets his wife see much of that woman! By all accounts Lady Kitty is quite enough of a handful already. By-the-way, have you found out where they are?"

"On the Grand Canal. Shall we call this afternoon?"

"I don't mind. Of course, I think Ashe is doing an immense amount of harm."

"Well, you can tell him so," said Mary.

Sir Richard frowned. His daughter's manners seemed to him at times abrupt.

"Why do you see so little now of Elizabeth Tranmore?" he asked her, with a sharp look. "You used to be always there. And I don't believe you even write to her much now."

"Does she see much of anybody?"

"Because, you mean, of Tranmore's condition? What good can she be to him now? He knows nobody."

"She doesn't seem to ask the question," said Mary, dryly.

A queer, soft look came over Sir Richard's old face.

"No, the women don't," he said, half to himself, and fell into a little reverie. He emerged from it with the remark--accompanied by a smile, a little sly but not unkind:

"I always used to hope, Polly, that you and Ashe would have made it up!"

"I'm sure I don't know why," said Mary, fastening up her envelopes. As she did so it crossed her father's mind that she was still very good-looking. Her dress of dark-blue cloth, the plain fashion of her brown hair, her oval face and well-marked features, her plump and pretty hands, were all pleasant to look upon. She had rather a hard way with her, though, at times. The servants were always giving warning. And, personally, he was much fonder of his younger daughter, whom Mary considered foolish and improvident. But he was well aware that Mary made his life easy.

"Well, you were always on excellent terms," he said, in answer to her last remark. "I remember his saying to me once that you were very good company. The Bishop, too, used to notice how he liked to talk to you."

When Mary and her father were together, "the Bishop" was Sir Richard's property. He only fell to Mary's share in the old man's absence.

Mary colored slightly.

"Oh yes, we got on," she said, counting her letters the while with a quick hand.

"Well, I hope that young woman whom he _did_ marry is now behaving herself. It was that fellow Cliffe with whom the scandal was last year, wasn't it?"

"There was a good deal of talk," said Mary.

"A rum fellow, that Cliffe! A man at the club told me last week it is believed he has been fighting for these Bosnian rebels for months. Shocking bad form I call it. If the Turks catch him, they'll string him up. And quite right, too. What's he got to do with other people's quarrels?"

"If the Turks will be such brutes--"

"Nonsense, my dear! Don't you believe any of this radical stuff. The Turks are awfully fine fellows--fight like bull-dogs. And as for the 'atrocities,' they make them up in London. Oh, of course, what Cliffe wants is notoriety--we all know that. Well, I'm going out to see if I can find another English paper. Beastly climate!"

But as Sir Richard turned again to the window, he was met by a burst of sunshine, which hit him gayly in the face like a child's impertinence. He grumbled something unintelligible as Mary put him into his Inverness cape, took hat and stick, and departed.

Mary sat still beside the writing-table, her hands crossed on her lap, her eyes absently bent upon them.

She was thinking of the serenata. She had followed it with an acquaintance from the hotel, and she had seen not only Kitty and Madame d'Estrées, but also--the solitary man in the heavy cloak. She knew quite well that Cliffe was in Venice; though, true to her secretive temper, she had not mentioned the fact to her father.

Of course he was in Venice on Kitty's account. It would be too absurd to suppose that he was here by mere coincidence. Mary believed that nothing but the intervention of Cliffe's mighty kinsman from the north had saved the situation the year before. Kitty would certainly have betrayed her husband but for the _force majeure_ arrayed against her. And now the magnate who had played Providence slumbered in the family vault. He had passed away in the spring, full of years and honors, leaving Cliffe some money. The path was clear. As for the escapade in the Balkans, Geoffrey was, of course, tired of it. A sensational book, hurried out to meet the public appetite for horrors--and the pursuance of his intrigue with Lady Kitty Ashe--Mary was calmly certain that these were now his objects. He was, no doubt, writing his book and meeting Kitty where he could. Ashe would soon have to go home. And then! As if that girl Margaret French could stop it!

Well, William had only got his deserts! But as her thoughts passed from Kitty or Cliffe to William Ashe, their quality changed. Hatred and bitterness, scorn or wounded vanity, passed into something gentler. She fell into recollections of Ashe as he had appeared on that bygone afternoon in May when he came back triumphant from his election, with the world before him. If he had never seen Kitty Bristol!--

"I should have made him a good wife," she said to herself. "_I_ should have known how to be proud of him."

And there emerged also the tragic consciousness that if the fates had given him to her she might have been another woman--taught by happiness, by love, by motherhood.

It was that little, heartless creature who had snatched them both from her--William and Geoffrey Cliffe--the higher and the lower--the man who might have ennobled her--and the man, half charlatan, half genius, whom she might have served and raised, by her fortune and her abilities. Her life might have been so full, so interesting! And it was Kitty that had made it flat, and cold, and futureless.

Poor William! Had he really liked her, in those boy-and-girl days? She dreamed over their old cousinly relations--over the presents he had sometimes given her.

Then a thought, like a burning arrow, pierced her. Her hands locked, straining one against the other. If this intrigue were indeed renewed--if Geoffrey succeeded in tempting Kitty from her husband--why then--then--

She shivered before the images that were passing through her mind, and, rising, she put away her letters and rang for the waiter, to order dinner.

"Where shall we go?" said Kitty, languidly, putting down the French novel she was reading.

* * * * *

"Mr. Ashe suggested San Lazzaro." Margaret looked up from her writing as Kitty moved towards her. "The rain seems to have all cleared off."

"Well, I'm sure it doesn't matter where," said Kitty, and was turning away; but Margaret caught her hand and caressed it.

"Naughty Kitty! why this sea air can't put some more color into your cheeks I don't understand."

"I'm _not_ pale!" cried Kitty, pouting. "Margaret, you do croak about me so! If you say any more I'll go and rouge till you'll be ashamed to go out with me--there! Where's William?"

William opened the door as she spoke, the _Gazetta di Venezia_ in one hand and a telegram in the other.

"Something for you, darling," he said, holding it out to Kitty. "Shall I open it?"

"Oh no!" said Kitty, hastily. "Give it me. It's from my Paris woman."

"Ah--ha!" laughed Ashe. "Some extravagance you want to keep to yourself, I'll be bound. I've a good mind to see!"

And he teasingly held it up above her head. But she gave a little jump, caught it, and ran off with it to her room.

"Much regret impossible stop publication. Fifty copies distributed already. Writing."

She dropped speechless on the edge of her bed, the crumpled telegram in her hand. The minutes passed.

"When will you be ready?" said Ashe, tapping at the door.

"Is the gondola there?"

"Waiting at the steps."

"Five minutes!" Ashe departed. She rose, tore the telegram into little bits, and began with deliberation to put on her mantle and hat.

"You've got to go through with it," she said to the white face in the glass, and she straightened her small shoulders defiantly.

* * * * *

They were bound for the Armenian convent. It was a misty day, with shafts of light on the lagoon. The storm had passed, but the water was still rough, and the clouds seemed to be withdrawing their forces only to marshal them again with the darkness. A day of sudden bursts of watery light, of bands of purple distance struck into enchanting beauty by the red or orange of a sail, of a wild salt breath in air that seemed to be still suffused with spray. The Alps were hidden; but what sun there was played faintly on the Euganean hills.

"I say, Margaret, at last she does us some credit!" said Ashe, pointing to his wife.

Margaret started. Was it rouge?--or was it the strong air? Kitty's languor had entirely disappeared; she was more cheerful and more talkative than she had been at any time since their arrival. She chattered about the current scandals of Venice--the mysterious contessa who lived in the palace opposite their own, and only went out, in deep mourning, at night, because she had been the love of a Russian grand-duke, and the grand-duke was dead; of the Carlist pretender and his wife, who had been very popular in Venice until they took it into their heads to require royal honors, and Venice, taking time to think, had lazily decided the game was not worth the candle--so now the sulky pair went about alone in a fine gondola, turning glassy eyes on their former acquaintance; of the needy marchese who had sold a Titian to the Louvre, and had then found himself boycotted by all his kinsfolk in Venice who were not needy and had no Titians to sell--all these tales Kitty reeled out at length till the handsome gondoliers marvelled at the little lady's vivacity and the queer brightness of her eyes.

"Gracious, Kitty, where do you get all these stories from?" cried Ashe, when the chatter paused for a moment.

He looked at her with delight, rejoicing in her gayety, the slight touches of white which to-day for the first time relieved the sombreness of her dress, the return of her color. And Margaret wondered again how much of it was rouge.

At the Armenian convent a handsome young monk took charge of them. As George Sand and Lamennais had done before them, they looked at the printing-press, the garden, the cloister, the church; they marvelled lazily at the cleanliness and brightness of the place; and finally they climbed to the library and museum, and the room close by where Byron played at grammar-making. In this room Ashe fell suddenly into a political talk with the young monk, who was an ardent and patriotic son of the most unfortunate of nations, and they passed out and down the stairs, followed by Margaret French, not noticing that Kitty had lingered behind.

Kitty stood idly by the window of Byron's room, thinking restlessly of verses that were not Byron's, though there was in them, clothed in forms of the new age, the spirit of Byronic passion, and more than a touch of Byronic affectation--thinking also of the morning's telegram. Supposing Darrell's prophecy, which had seemed to her so absurd, came true, that the book did William harm, not good--that he ceased to love her--that he cast her off?...

... A plash of water outside, and a voice giving directions. From the lagoon towards Malamocco a gondola approached. A gentleman and lady were seated in it. The lady--a very handsome Italian, with a loud laugh and brilliant eyes--carried a scarlet parasol. Kitty gave a stifled cry as she drew back. She fled out of the room and overtook the other two.

"May we go back into the garden a little?" she said, hurriedly, to the monk who was talking to William. "I should like to see the view towards Venice."

William held up a watch, to show that there was but just time to get back to the Piazza, for lunch. Kitty persisted, and the monk, understanding what the impetuous young lady wished, good-naturedly turned to obey her.

"We must be _very_ quick!" said Kitty. "Take us please, to the edge, beyond the trees."

And she herself hurried through the garden to its farther side, where it was bounded by the lagoon.

The others followed her, rather puzzled by her caprice.

"Not much to be seen, darling!" said Ashe, as they reached the water--"and I think this good man wants to get rid of us!"

And, indeed, the monk was looking backward across the intervening trees at a party which had just entered the garden.

"Ah, they have found another brother!" he said, politely, and he began to point out to Kitty the various landmarks visible, the arsenal, the two asylums, San Pietro di Castello.

The new-comers just glanced at the garden apparently, as the Ashes had done on arrival, and promptly followed their guide back into the convent.

Kitty asked a few more questions, then led the way in a hasty return to the garden door, the entrance-hall, and the steps where their gondola was waiting. Nothing was to be seen of the second party. They had passed on into the cloisters.

* * * * *

Animation, oddity, inconsequence, all these things Margaret observed in Kitty during luncheon in a restaurant of the Merceria, and various incidents connected with it; animation above all. The Ashes fell in with acquaintance--a fashionable and harassed mother, on the fringe of the Archangels, accompanied by two daughters, one pretty and one plain, and sore pressed by their demands, real or supposed. The parents were not rich, but the girls had to be dressed, taken abroad, produced at country-houses, at Ascot, and the opera, like all other girls. The eldest girl, a considerable beauty, was an accomplished egotist at nineteen, and regarded her mother as a rather inefficient _dame de compagnie_. Kitty understood this young lady perfectly, and after luncheon, over her cigarette, her little, sharp, probing questions gave the beauty twenty minutes' annoyance. Then appeared a young man, ill-dressed, red-haired, and shy. Carelessly as he greeted the mother and daughters, his entrance, however, transformed them. The mother forgot fatigue; the beauty ceased to yawn; the younger girl, who had been making surreptitious notes of Kitty's costume in the last leaf of her guide-book, developed a charming gush. He was the owner of the Magellan estates and the historic Magellan Castle; a professed hater of "absurd womankind," and, in general, a hunted and self-conscious person. Kitty gave him one finger, looked him up and down, asked him whether he was yet engaged, and when he laughed an embarrassed "No," told him that he would certainly die in the arms of the Magellan housekeeper.

This got a smile out of him. He sat down beside her, and the two laughed and talked with a freedom which presently drew the attention of the neighboring tables, and made Ashe uncomfortable. He rose, paid the bill, and succeeded in carrying the whole party off to the Piazza, in search of coffee. But here again Kitty's extravagances, the provocation of her light loveliness, as she sat toying with a fresh cigarette and "chaffing" Lord Magellan, drew a disagreeable amount of notice from the Italians passing by.

"Mother, let's go!" said the angry beauty, imperiously, in her mother's ear. "I don't like to be seen with Lady Kitty! She's impossible!"

And with cold farewells the three ladies departed. Then Kitty sprang up and threw away her cigarette.

"How those girls bully their mother!" she said, with scorn. "However, it serves her right. I'm sure she bullied hers. Well, now we must go and do something. Ta-ta!"

Lord Magellan, to whom she offered another casual finger, wanted to know why he was dismissed. If they were going sight-seeing, might he not come with them?"

"Oh no!" said Kitty, calmly. "Sight--seeing with people you don't really know is too trying to the temper. Even with one's best friend it's risky."

"Where are you? May I call?" said the young man.

"We're always out," was Kitty's careless reply. "But--"

She considered--

"Would you like to see the Palazzo Vercelli?"

"That magnificent place on the Grand Canal? Very much."

"Meet me there to-morrow afternoon," said Kitty. "Four o'clock."

"Delighted!" said Lord Magellan, making a note on his shirt-cuff. "And who lives there?"

"My mother," said Kitty, abruptly, and walked away.

Ashe followed her in discomfort. This young man was the son of a certain Lady Magellan, an intimate friend of Lady Tranmore's--one of the noblest women of her generation, pure, high-minded, spiritual, to whom neither an ugly word nor thought was possible. It annoyed him that either he or Kitty should be introducing _her_ son to Madame d'Estrées.

It was really tiresome of Kitty! Rich young men with characters yet indeterminate were not to be lightly brought in contact with Madame d'Estrées. Kitty could not be ignorant of it--poor child! It had been one of her reckless strokes, and Ashe was conscious of a sharp annoyance.

However, he said nothing. He followed his companions from church to church, till pictures became an abomination to him. Then he pleaded letters, and went to the club.

"Will you call on maman to-morrow?" said Kitty, as he turned away, looking at him a little askance.

She knew that he had disapproved of her invitation to Lord Magellan. Why had she given it? She didn't know. There seemed to be a kind of revived mischief and fever in the blood, driving her to these foolish and ill-considered things.

Ashe met her question with a shake of the head and the remark, in a decided tone, that he should be too busy.

Privately he thought it a piece of impertinence that Madame d'Estrées should expect either Kitty or himself to appear in her drawing-room at all. That this implied a complete transformation of his earlier attitude he was well aware; he accepted it with a curious philosophy. When he and Kitty first met he had never troubled his head about such things. If a woman amused or interested him in society, so long as his taste was satisfied she might have as much or as little character as she pleased. It stirred his mocking sense of English hypocrisy that the point should be even raised. But now--how can any individual, he asked himself, with political work to do, affect to despise the opinions and prejudices of society? A politician with great reforms to put through will make no friction round him that he can avoid--unless he is a fool. It weighed sorely, therefore, on his present mind that Madame d'Estrées was in Venice--that she was a person of blemished repute--that he must be and was ashamed of her. It would have been altogether out of consonance with his character to put any obstacle in the way of Kitty's seeing her mother. But he chafed as he had never yet chafed under the humiliation of his relationship to the notorious Margaret Fitzgerald of the forties, who had been old Blackwater's _chère amie_ before she married him, and, as Lady Blackwater, had sacrificed her innocent and defenceless step-daughter to one of her own lovers, in order to secure for him the step-daughter's fortune--black and dastardly deed!

Was it all part of the general growth and concentration that any shrewd observer might have read in William Ashe?--the pressure--enormous, unseen--of the traditional English ideals, English standards, asserting itself at last in a brilliant and paradoxical nature? It had been so--conspicuously--in the case of one of his political predecessors. Lord Melbourne had begun his career as a person of idle habits and imprudent adventures, much given to coarse conversation, and unable to say the simplest thing without an oath. He ended it as the man of scrupulous dignity, tact, and delicacy, who moulded the innocent youth of a girl-queen, to his own lasting honor and England's gratitude. In ways less striking, the same influence of vast responsibilities was perhaps acting upon William Ashe. It had already made him a sterner, tougher, and--no doubt--a greater man.

The defection of William only left Kitty, it seemed, still more greedy of things to see and do. Innumerable sacristans opened all possible doors and unveiled all possible pictures. Bellini succeeded Tintoret, and Carpaccio Bellini. The two sable gondoliers wore themselves out in Kitty's service, and Margaret's kind, round face grew more and more puzzled and distressed. And whence this strange impression that the whole experience was a _flight_ on Kitty's part?--or, rather, that throughout it she was always eagerly expecting, or eagerly escaping from some unknown, unseen pursuer? A glance behind her--a start--a sudden shivering gesture in the shadows of dark churches--these things suggested it, till Margaret herself was caught by the same suppressed excitement that seemed to be alive in Kitty. Did it all point merely to some mental state--to the nervous effects of her illness and her loss?

When they reached home about five o'clock, Kitty was naturally tired out. Margaret put her on the sofa, gave her tea, and tended her, hoping that she might drop asleep before dinner. But just as tea was over, and Kitty was lying curled up, silent and white, with that brooding look which kept Margaret's anxiety about her constantly alive, there was a sudden sound of voices in the anteroom outside.

"Margaret!" cried Kitty, starting up in dismay--"say I'm not at home."

Too late! Their smiling Italian housemaid threw the door open, with the air of one bringing good-fortune. And behind her appeared a tall lady, and an old gentleman hat in hand.

"May we come in, Kitty?" said Mary Lyster, advancing. "Cousin Elizabeth told us you were here."

Kitty had sprung up. The disorder of her fair hair, her white cheeks, and the ghostly thinness of her small, black-robed form drew the curious eyes of Sir Richard. And the oddness of her manner as she greeted them only confirmed the old man's prejudice against her.

However, greeted they were, in some sort of fashion; and Miss French gave them tea. She kept Sir Richard entertained, while Kitty and Mary conversed. They talked perfunctorily of ordinary topics--Venice, its sights, its hotels, and the people staying in them--of Lady Tranmore and various Ashe relations. Meanwhile the inmost thought of each was busy with the other.

Kitty studied the lines of Mary's face and the fashion of her dress.

"She looks much older. And she's not enjoying her life a bit. That's my fault. I spoiled all her chances with Geoffrey--and she knows it. She _hates_ me. Quite right, too."

"Oh, you mean that nonsensical thing last night?" Sir Richard was saying to Margaret French. "Oh no, I didn't go. But Mary, of course, thought she must go. Somebody invited her."

Kitty started.

"You were at the serenata?" she said to Mary.

"Yes, I went with a party from the hotel."

Kitty looked at her. A sudden flush had touched her pale cheeks, and she could not conceal the trembling of her hands.

"That was marvellous, that light on the Salute, wasn't it?"

"Wonderful!--and on the water, too. I saw two or three people I knew--just caught their faces for a second."

"Did you?" said Kitty. And thoughts ran fast through her head. "Did she see Geoffrey?--and does she mean me to understand that she did? How she detests me! If she did see him, of course she supposes that I know all about it, and that he's here for me. Why don't I ask her, straight out, whether she saw him, and make her understand that I don't care twopence?--that she's welcome to him--as far as I'm concerned?"

But some hidden feeling tied her tongue. Mary continued to talk about the serenata, and Kitty was presently conscious that her every word and gesture in reply was closely watched. "Yes, yes, she saw him. Perhaps she'll tell William--or write home to mother?"

And in her excitement she began to chatter fast and loudly, mostly to Sir Richard--repeating some of the Venice tales she had told in the gondola--with much inconsequence and extravagance. The old man listened, his hands on his stick, his eyes on the ground, the expression on his strong mouth hostile or sarcastic. It was a relief to everybody when Ashe's step was heard stumbling up the dark stairs, and the door opened on his friendly and courteous presence.

"Why, Polly!--and Cousin Richard! I wondered where you had hidden yourselves."

Mary's bright, involuntary smile transformed her. Ashe sat down beside her, and they were soon deep in all sorts of gossip--relations, acquaintance, politics, and what not. All Mary's stiffness disappeared. She became the elegant, agreeable woman, of whom dinner-parties were glad. Ashe plunged into the pleasant malice of her talk, which ranged through the good and evil fortunes--mostly the latter--of half his acquaintance; discussed the debts, the love-affairs, and the follies of his political colleagues or Parliamentary foes; how the Foreign Secretary had been getting on at Balmoral--how so-and-so had been ruined at the Derby and restored to sanity and solvency by the Oaks--how Lady Parham, at Hatfield, had been made to know her place by the French Ambassador--and the like; passing thereby a charming half-hour.

Meanwhile Kitty, Margaret French, and Sir Richard kept up intermittent remarks, pausing at every other phrase to gather the crumbs that fell from the table of the other two.

Kitty was very weary, and a dead weight had fallen on her spirits. If Sir Richard had thought her bad form ten minutes before, his unspoken mind now declared her stupid. Meanwhile Kitty was saying to herself, as she watched her husband and Mary:

"I used to amuse William just as well--last year!"

When the door closed on them, Kitty fell back on her cushions with an "ouf!" of relief. William came back in a few minutes from showing the visitors the back way to their hotel, and stood beside his wife with an anxious face.

"They were too much for you, darling. They stayed too long."

"How you and Mary chattered!" said Kitty, with a little pout. But at the same moment she slipped an appealing hand into his.

Ashe clasped the hand, and laughed.

"I always told you she was an excellent gossip."

* * * * *

Sir Richard and Mary pursued their way through the narrow _calles_ that led to the Piazza. Sir Richard was expatiating on Ashe's folly in marrying such a wife.

"She looks like an actress!--and as to her conversation, she began by telling me outrageous stories and ended by not having a word to say about anything. The bad blood of the Bristols, it seems to me, without their brains."

"Oh no, papa! Kitty is very clever. You haven't heard her recite. She was tired to-night."

"Well, I don't want to flatter you, my dear!" said the old man, testily, "but I thought it was pathetic--the way in which Ashe enjoyed your conversation. It showed he didn't get much of it at home."

Mary smiled uncertainly. Her whole nature was still aglow from that contact with Ashe's delightful personality. After months of depression and humiliation, her success with him had somehow restored those illusions on which cheerfulness depends.

How ill Kitty looked--and how conscious! Mary was impetuously certain that Kitty had betrayed her knowledge of Cliffe's presence in Venice; and equally certain that William knew nothing. Poor William!

Well, what can you expect of such a temperament--such a race? Mary's thoughts travelled confusedly towards--and through--some big and dreadful catastrophe.

And then? After it?

It seemed to her that she was once more in the Park Lane drawing-room; the familiar Morris papers and Burne-Jones drawings surrounded her; and she and Elizabeth Tranmore sat, hand in hand, talking of William--a William once more free, after much folly and suffering, to reconstruct his life....

"Here we are," said Sir Richard Lyster, moving down a dark passage towards the brightly lit doorway of their hotel.

With a start--as of one taken red-handed--Mary awoke from her dream.

XX

Madame d'Estrées and her friend, Donna Laura, occupied the _mezzanin_ of the vast Vercelli palace. The palace itself belonged to the head of the Vercelli family. It was a magnificent erection of the late seventeenth century, at this moment half furnished, dilapidated, and forsaken. But the _entresol_ on the eastern side of the _cortile_ was in good condition, and comfortably fitted up for the occasional use of the Principe. As he was wintering in Paris, he had let his rooms at an ordinary commercial rent to his kinswoman, Donna Laura. She, a soured and melancholy woman, unmarried in a Latin society which has small use or kindness for spinsters, had seized on Marguerite d'Estrées--whose acquaintance she had made in a Mont d'Or hotel--and was now keeping her like a caged canary that sings for its food.

Madame d'Estrées was quite willing. So long as she had a sofa on which to sit enthroned, a sufficiency of new gowns, a maid, cigarettes, breakfast in bed, and a supply of French novels, she appeared the most harmless and engaging of mortals. Her youth had been cruel, disorderly, and vicious. It had lasted long; but now, when middle age stood at last confessed, she was lapsing, it seemed, into amiability and good behavior. She was, indeed, fast forgetting her own history, and soon the recital of it would surprise no one so much as herself.

It was five o'clock. Madame d'Estrées had just established herself in the silk-panelled drawing-room of Donna Laura's apartment, expectant of visitors, and, in particular, of her daughter.

In begging Kitty to come on this particular afternoon, she had not thought fit to mention that it would be Donna Laura's "day." Had she done so, Kitty, in consideration of her mourning, would perhaps have cried off. Whereas, really--poor, dear child!--what she wanted was distraction and amusement.

And what Madame d'Estrées wanted was the presence beside her, in public, of Lady Kitty Ashe. Kitty had already visited her mother privately, and had explored the antiquities of the Vercelli palace. But Madame d'Estrées was now intent on something more and different.

For in the four years which had now elapsed since the Ashe's marriage this lively lady had known adversity. She had been forced to leave London, as we have seen, by the pressure of certain facts in her past history so ancient and far removed when their true punishment began that she no doubt felt it highly unjust that she should be punished for them at all. Her London debts had swallowed up what then remained to her of fortune; and, afterwards, the allowance from the Ashes was all she had to depend on. Banished to Paris, she fell into a lower stratum of life, at a moment when her faithful and mysterious friend, Markham Warington, was held in Scotland by the first painful symptoms of his sister's last illness, and could do but little for her. She had, in fact, known the sordid shifts and straits of poverty, though the smallest moral effort would have saved her from them. She had kept disreputable company, she had been miserable, and base; and although shame is not easy to persons of her temperament, it may perhaps be said that she was ashamed of this period of her existence. Appeals to the Ashes yielded less and less, and Warington seemed to have forsaken her. She awoke at last to a panic-stricken fear of darker possibilities and more real suffering than any she had yet known, and under the stress of this fear she collapsed physically, writing both to Warington and to the Ashes in a tone of mingled reproach and despair.

The Ashes sent money, and, though Kitty was at the moment not fit to travel, prepared to come. Warington, who had just closed the eyes of his sister, went at once. He was now the last of his family, without any ties that he could not lawfully break. Within two days of his arrival in Paris, Madame d'Estrées had promised to marry him in three months, to break off all her Paris associations, and to give her life henceforward into his somewhat stern hands. The visit to Venice was part of the price that he had had to pay for her decision. Marguerite pleaded, with a shudder, that she must have a little amusement before she went to live in Dumfriesshire; and he had been obliged to acquiesce in her arrangement with Donna Laura--stipulating only that he should be their escort and guardian.

What had moved him to such an act? His reasons can only be guessed at. Warington was a man of religion, a Calvinist by education and inheritance, and of a silent and dreamy temperament. He had been intimate with very few women in his life. His sister had been a second mother to him, and both of them had been the guardians of their younger brother. When this adored brother fell shot through the lungs in the hopeless defence of Lady Blackwater's reputation, it would have been natural enough that Markham should hate the woman who had been the occasion of such a calamity. The sister, a pious and devoted Christian, had indeed hated her, properly and duly, thenceforward. Markham, on the contrary, accepted his brother's last commission without reluctance. In this matter at least Lady Blackwater had not been directly to blame; his mind acquitted her; and her soft, distressed beauty touched his heart. Before he knew where he was she had made an impression upon him that was to be life-long.

Then gradually he awoke to a full knowledge of her character. He suffered, but otherwise it made no difference. Finding it was then impossible to persuade her to marry him, he watched over her as best he could for some years, passing through phases of alternate hope and disgust. His sister's affection for him was clouded by his strange relation to the Jezebel who in her opinion had destroyed their brother. He could not help it; he could only do his best to meet both claims upon him. During her lingering passage to the grave, his sister had nearly severed him from Marguerite d'Estrées. She died, however, just in time, and now here he was in Venice, passing through what seemed to him one of the ante-rooms of life, leading to no very radiant beyond. But, radiant or no, his path lay thither. And at the same time he saw that although Marguerite felt him to be her only refuge from poverty and disgrace, she was painfully afraid of him, and afraid of the life into which he was leading her.

* * * * *

The first guest of the afternoon proved to be Louis Harman, the painter and dilettante, who had been in former days one of the _habitués_ of the house in St. James's Place. This perfectly correct yet tolerant gentleman was wintering in Venice in order to copy the Carpaccios in San Giorgio dei Schiavoni. His copies were not good, but they were all promised to artistic fair ladies, and the days which the painter spent upon them were happy and harmless.

He came in gayly, delighted to see Madame d'Estrées in flourishing circumstances again, delivered apparently from the abyss into which he had found her sliding on the occasion of various chance visits of his own to Paris. Warington's doing, apparently--queer fellow!

"Well!--I saw Lady Kitty in the Piazza this afternoon," he said, as he sat down beside his hostess. Donna Laura had not yet appeared. "Very thin and fragile! But, by Jove! how these English beauties hold their own."

"Irish, if you please," said Madame d'Estrées, smiling.

Harman bowed to her correction, admiring at the same time both the toilette and the good looks of his companion. Dropping his voice, he asked, with a gingerly and sympathetic air, whether all was now well with the Ashe ménage. He had been sorry to hear certain gossip of the year before.

Madame d'Estrées laughed. Yes, she understood that Kitty had behaved like a little goose with that _poseur_ Cliffe. But that was all over--long ago.

"Why, the silly child has everything she wants! William is devoted to her--and it can't be long before he succeeds."

"No need to go trifling with poets," said Harman, smiling. "By-the-way, do you know that Geoffrey Cliffe is in Venice?"

Madame d'Estrées opened her eyes. "Est-il possible? Oh! but Kitty has forgotten all about him."

"Of course," said Harman. "I am told he has been seen with the Ricci."

Madame d'Estrées raised her shoulders this time in addition to her eyes. Then her face clouded.

"I believe," she said, slowly, "that woman may come here this afternoon."

"Is she a friend of yours?" Harman's tone expressed his surprise.

"I knew her in Paris," said Madame d'Estrées, with some hesitation, "when she was a student at the Conservatoire. She and I had some common acquaintance. And now--frankly, I daren't offend her. She has the most appalling temper!--and she sticks at nothing."

Harman wondered what the exact truth of this might be, but did not inquire. And as guests--including Colonel Warington--began to arrive, and Donna Laura appeared and began to dispense tea, the _tête-à-tête_ was interrupted.

Donna Laura's _salon_ was soon well filled, and Harman watched the gathering with curiosity. As far as it concerned Madame d'Estrées--and she was clearly the main attraction which had brought it together--it represented, he saw, a phase of social recovery. A few prominent Englishmen, passing through Venice, came in without their wives, making perfunctory excuse for the absence of these ladies. But the cosmopolitans of all kinds, who crowded in--Anglo-Italians, foreign diplomats, travellers of many sorts, and a few restless Venetians, bearing the great names of old, to whom their own Venice was little more than a place of occasional sojourn--made satisfactory amends for these persons of too long memories. In all these travellers' towns, Venice, Rome, and Florence, there is indeed a society, and a very agreeable society, which is wholly irresponsible, and asks few or no questions. The elements of it meet as strangers, and as strangers they mostly part. But between the meeting and the parting there lies a moment, all the gayer, perhaps, because of its social uncertainty and freedom.

Madame d'Estrées was profiting by it to the full. She was in excellent spirits and talk; bright-rose carnations shone in the bosom of her dress; one white arm, bared to the elbow, lay stretched carelessly on the fine cut-velvet which covered the gilt sofa--part of a suite of Venetian Louis Quinze, clumsily gorgeous--on which she sat; the other hand pulled the ears of a toy spaniel. On the ceiling above her, Tiepolo had painted a headlong group of sensuous forms, alive with vulgar movement and passion; the _putti_ and the goddesses, peering through aërial balustrades, looked down complacently on Madame d'Estrées.

Meanwhile there stood behind her--a silent, distinguished figure--the man of whom Harman saw that she was always nervously and sometimes timidly conscious. Harman had been reading Molière's _Don Juan_. The sentinel figure of Warington mingled in his imagination with the statue of the Commander.

Or, again, he was tickled by a vision of Madame d'Estrées grown old, living in a Scotch house, turreted and severe, tended by servants of the "Auld Licht," or shivering under a faithful minister on Sundays. Had she any idea of the sort of fold towards which Warington--at once Covenanter and man of the world--was carrying his lost sheep?

The sheep, however, was still gambolling at large. Occasionally a guest appeared who proved it. For instance, at a certain tumultuous entrance, billowing skirts, vast hat, and high-pitched voice all combining in the effect, Madame d'Estrées flushed violently, and Warington's stiffness redoubled. On the threshold stood the young actress, Mademoiselle Ricci, a Marseillaise, half French, half Italian, who was at the moment the talk of Venice. Why, would take too long to tell. It was by no means mostly due to her talent, which, however, was displayed at the Apollo theatre two or three times a week, and was no doubt considerable. She was a flamboyant lady, with astonishing black eyes, a too transparent white dress, over which was slung a small black mantilla, a scarlet hat and parasol, and a startling fan of the same color. Both before and after her greeting of Madame d'Estrées--whom she called her "chérie" and her "belle Marguerite"--she created a whirlwind in the _salon_. She was noisy, rude, and false; it could only be said on the other side that she was handsome--for those who admired the kind of thing; and famous--more or less. The intimacy of the party was broken up by her, for wherever she was she brought uproar, and it was impossible to forget her. And this uneasy attention which she compelled was at its height when the door was once more thrown open for the entrance of Lady Kitty Ashe.

"Ah, my darling Kitty!" cried Madame d'Estrées, rising in a soft enthusiasm.

Kitty came in slowly, holding herself very erect, a delicate and distinguished figure, in her deep mourning. She frowned as she saw the crowd in the room.

"I'll come another time!" she said, hastily, to her mother, beginning to retreat.

"Oh, Kitty!" cried Madame d'Estrées, in distress, holding her fast.

At that moment Harman, who was watching them both with keenness, saw that Kitty had perceived Mademoiselle Ricci. The actress had paused in her chatter to stare at the new-comer. She sat fronting the entrance, her head insolently thrown back, knees crossed, a cigarette poised in the plump and dimpled hand.

A start ran through Kitty's small person. She allowed her mother to lead her in and introduce her to Donna Laura.

"Ah-ha, my lady!" said Harman, to himself. "Are you, perhaps, interested in the Ricci? Is it possible even that you have seen her before?"

Kitty, however, betrayed herself to no one else. To other people it was only evident that she did not mean to be introduced to the actress. She pointedly and sharply avoided it. This was interpreted as aristocratic _hauteur_, and did her no harm. On the contrary, she was soon chattering French with a group of diplomats, and the centre of the most animated group in the room. All the new-comers who could attached themselves to it, and the actress found herself presently almost deserted. She put up her eye-glass, studied Kitty impertinently, and asked a man sitting near her for the name of the strange lady.

"Isn't she lovely, my little Kitty!" said Madame d'Estrées, in the ears of a Bavarian baron, who was also much occupied in staring at the small beauty in black. "I may say it, though I am her mother. And my son-in-law, too. Have you seen him? Such a handsome fellow!--and _such_ a dear!--so kind to me. They _say_, you know, that he will be Prime Minister."

The baron bowed, ironically, and inquired who the gentleman might be. He had not caught Kitty's name, and Madame d'Estrées had been for some time labelled in his mind as something very near to an adventuress.

Madame d'Estrées eagerly explained, and he bowed again, with a difference. He was a man of great intelligence, acquainted with English politics. So that was _really_ the wife of the man to whose personality and future the London correspondent of the _Allgemeine Zeitung_ had within the preceding week devoted a particularly interesting article, which he had read with attention. His estimate of Madame d'Estrées' place in the world altered at once. Yet it was strange that she--or, rather, Donna Laura--should admit such a person as Mademoiselle Ricci to their _salon_.

The mother, indeed, that afternoon had much reason to be socially grateful to the daughter. Curious contrast with the days when Kitty had been the mere troublesome appendage of her mother's life! It was clear to Marguerite d'Estrées now that if she was to accept restraint and virtuous living, if she was to submit to this marriage she dreaded, yet saw no way to escape, her best link with the gay world in the future might well be through the Ashes. Kitty could do a great deal for her; let her cultivate Kitty; and begin, perhaps, by convincing William Ashe on this present occasion that for once she was not going to ask him for money.

In the height of the party, Lord Magellan appeared. Madame d'Estrées at first looked at him with bewilderment, till Kitty, shaking herself free, came hastily forward to introduce him. At the name the mother's face flashed into smiles. The ramifications of two or three aristocracies represented the only subject she might be said to know. Dear Kitty!

Lord Magellan, after Madame d'Estrées had talked to him about his family in a few light and skilful phrases, which suggested knowledge, while avoiding flattery, was introduced to the Bavarian baron and a French naval officer. But he was not interesting to them, nor they to him; Kitty was surrounded and unapproachable; and a flood of new arrivals distracted Madame d'Estrées' attention. The Ricci, who had noticed the restrained _empressement_ of his reception, pounced on the young man, taming her ways and gestures to what she supposed to be his English prudery, and produced an immediate effect upon him. Lord Magellan, who was only dumb with English marriageable girls, allowed himself to be amused, and threw himself into a low chair by the actress--a capture apparently for the afternoon.

Louis Harman was sitting behind Kitty, a little to her right. He saw her watching the actress and her companion; noticed a compression of the lip, a flash in the eye. She sprang up, said she must go home, and practically dissolved the party.

Mademoiselle Ricci, who had also risen, proposed to Lord Magellan that she should take him in her gondola to the shop of a famous dealer on the Canal.

"Thank you very much," said Lord Magellan, irresolute, and he looked at Kitty. The look apparently decided him, for he immediately added that he had unfortunately an engagement in the opposite direction. The actress angrily drew herself up, and proposed a later appointment. Then Kitty carelessly intervened.

"Do you remember that you promised to see me home?" she said to the young man. "Don't if it bores you!"

Lord Magellan eagerly protested. Kitty moved away, and he followed her.

"Chère madame, will you present me to your daughter?" said the Ricci, in an unnecessarily loud voice.

Madame d'Estrées, with a flurried gesture, touched Kitty on the arm.

"Kitty, Mademoiselle Ricci."

Kitty took no notice. Madame d'Estrées said, quickly, in a low, imploring voice:

"Please, dear Kitty. I'll explain."

Kitty turned abruptly, looked at her mother, and at the woman to whom she was to be introduced.

"Ah! comme elle est charmante!" cried the actress, with an inflection of irony in her strident voice. "Miladi, il faut absolument que nous nous connaissions. Je connais votre chère mère depuis si longtemps! À Paris, l'hiver passé c'était une amitié des plus tendres!"

The nasal drag she gave to the words was partly natural, partly insolent. Madame d'Estrées bit her lip.

"Oui?" said Kitty, indifferently. "Je n'en avais jamais entendu parler."

Her brilliant eyes studied the woman before her. "She has some hold on maman," she said to herself, in disgust. "She knows of something shady that maman has done." Then another thought stung her; and with the most indifferent bow, triumphing in the evident offence that she was giving, she turned to Lord Magellan.

"You'd like to see the Palazzo?"

Warington at once offered himself as a guide.

But Kitty declared she knew the way, would just show Lord Magellan the _piano nobile_, dismiss him at the grand staircase, and return. Lord Magellan made his farewells.

As Kitty passed through the door of the _salon_, while the young man held back the velvet _portière_ which hung over it, she was aware that Mademoiselle Ricci was watching her. The Marseillaise was leaning heavily on a _fauteuil_, supported by a hand behind her. A slow, disdainful smile played about her lips, some evil threatening thought expressed itself through every feature of her rounded, coarsened beauty. Kitty's sharp look met hers, and the curtain dropped.

* * * * *

"Don't, please, let that woman take you anywhere--to see anything!" said Kitty, with energy, to her companion, as they walked through the rooms of the _mezzanino_.

Lord Magellan laughed. "What's the matter with her?"

"Oh, nothing!" said Kitty, impatiently, "except that she's wicked--and common--and a snake--and your mother would have a fit if she knew you had anything to do with her."

The red-haired youth looked grave.

"Thank you, Lady Kitty," he said, quietly. "I'll take your advice."

"Oh, I say, what a nice boy you are!" cried Kitty, impulsively, laying a hand a moment on his shoulder. And then, as though his filial instinct had awakened hers, she added, with hasty falsehood: "Maman, of course, knows nothing about her. That was just bluff what she said. But Donna Laura oughtn't to ask such people. There--that's the way."

And she pointed to a small staircase in the wall, whereof the trap-door at the top was open. They climbed it, and found themselves at once in one of the great rooms of the _piano nobile_, to which this quick and easy access from the inhabited _entresol_ had been but recently contrived.

"What a marvellous place!" cried Lord Magellan, looking round him.

They were in the principal apartment of the famous Vercelli palace, a legacy from one of those classical architects whose work may be seen in the late seventeenth-century buildings of Venice. The rooms, enormously high, panelled here and there in tattered velvets and brocades, or frescoed in fast-fading scenes of old Venetian life, stretched in bewildering succession on either side of a central passage or broad corridor, all of them leading at last on the northern side to a vast hall painted in architectural perspective by the pupils of Tiepolo, and overarched by a ceiling in which the master himself had massed a multitude of forms equal to Rubens in variety and facility of design, expressed in a thin trenchancy of style. Figures recalling the ancient triumphs and possessions of Venice, in days when she sat dishonored and despoiled, crowded the coved roof, the painted cornices and pediments. Gayly colored birds hovered in blue skies; philosophers and poets in grisaille made a strange background for large-limbed beauties couched on roses, or young warriors amid trophies of shining arms; and while all this garrulous commonplace lived and breathed above, the walls below, cold in color and academic in treatment, maintained as best they could the dignity of the vast place, thus given up to one of the greatest of artists and emptiest of minds.

On the floor of this magnificent hall stood a few old and broken chairs. But the candelabra of glass and ormolu, hanging from the ceiling, were very nearly of the date of the palace, and superb. Meanwhile, through a faded taffeta of a golden-brown shade, the afternoon light from the high windows to the southwest poured into the stately room.

"How it dwarfs us!" said Lord Magellan, looking at his companion. "One feels the merest pygmy! From the age of decadence indeed!" He glanced at the guide-book in his hand. "Good Heavens!--if this was their decay, what was their bloom?"

"Yes--it's big--and jolly. I like it," said Kitty, absently. Then she recollected herself. "This is your way out. Federigo!" she called to an old man, the _custode_ of the palace, who appeared at the magnificent door leading to the grand staircase.

"Commanda, eccellenza!" The old man, bent and feeble, approached. He carried a watering-pot wherewith he was about to minister to some straggling flowers in the windows fronting the Grand Canal. A thin cat rubbed itself against his legs. As he stood in his shabbiness under the high, carved door, the only permanent denizen of the building, he seemed an embodiment of the old shrunken Venetian life, still haunting a city it was no longer strong enough to use.

"Will you show this signor the way out?" said Kitty, in tourists' Italian. "Are you soon shutting up?"

For the main palazzo, which during the day was often shown to sightseers, was locked at half-past five, only the two _entresols_--one tenanted by Donna Laura, the other by the _custode_--remaining accessible.

The old man murmured something which Kitty did not understand, pointing at the same time to a door leading to the interior of the _piano nobile_. Kitty thought that he asked her to be quick, if she wished still to go round the palace. She tried to explain that he might lock up if he pleased; her way of retreat to the _mezzanino_, down the small staircase, was always open. Federigo looked puzzled, again said something in unintelligible Venetian, and led the way to the grand staircase followed by Lord Magellan.

* * * * *

A heavy door clanged below. Kitty was alone. She looked round her, at the stretches of marble floor, and the streaks of pale sunshine that lay upon its black and white, at the lofty walls painted with a dim superb architecture, at the crowded ceiling, the gorgeous candelabra. With its costly decoration, the great room suggested a rich and festal life; thronging groups below answering to the Tiepolo groups above; beauties patched and masked; gallants in brocaded coats; splendid senators, robed like William at the fancy ball.

Suddenly she caught sight of herself in one of the high and narrow mirrors that filled the spaces between the windows. In her mourning dress, with the light behind her, she made a tiny spectre in the immense hall. The image of her present self--frail, black-robed--recalled the two figures in the glass of her Hill Street room--the sparkling white of her goddess dress, and William's smiling face above hers, his arm round her waist.

How happy she had been that night! Even her wild fury with Mary Lyster seemed to her now a kind of happiness. How gladly would she have exchanged for it either of the two terrors that now possessed her!

With a shiver she crossed the hall, and pushed her way into the suite of rooms on the northern side. She felt herself in absolute possession of the palace. Federigo no doubt had locked up; her mother and a few guests were still talking in the _salon_ of the _mezzanine_, expecting her to return. She would return--soon; but the solitariness and wildness of this deserted place drew her on.

Room after room opened before her--bare, save for a few worm-eaten chairs, a fragment of tapestry on the wall, or some tattered portraits in the Longhi manner, indifferent to begin with, and long since ruined by neglect. Yet here and there a young face looked out, roses in the hair and at the breast; or a Doge's cap--and beneath it phantom features still breathing even in the last decay of canvas and paint the violence and intrigue of the living man--the ghost of character held there by the ghost of art. Or a lad in slashed brocade, for whom even in this silent palace, and in spite of the gaping crack across his face, life was still young; a cardinal; a nun; a man of letters in clerical dress, the Abbé Prévost of his day....

Presently she found herself in a wide corridor, before a high, closed door. She tried it, and saw a staircase mounting and descending. A passion of curiosity that was half romance, half restlessness, drove her on. She began to ascend the marble steps, hearing only the echo of her own movements, a little afraid of the cold spaces of the vast house, and yet delighting in the fancies that crowded upon her. At the top of the flight she found, of course, another apartment, on the same plan as the one below, but smaller and less stately. The central hall entered from a door supported by marble caryatids, was flagged in yellow marble, and frescoed freely with faded eighteenth-century scenes--cardinals walking in stiff gardens, a pope alighting from his coach, surrounded by peasants on their knees, and behind him fountains and obelisk and the towering façade of St. Peter's. At the moment, thanks to a last glow of light coming in through a west window at the farther end, it was a place beautiful though forlorn. But the rooms into which she looked on either side were wreck and desolation itself, crowded with broken furniture, many of them shuttered and dark.

As she closed the last door, her attention was caught by a strange bust placed on a pedestal above the entrance. What was wrong with it? An accident? An injury? She went nearer, straining her eyes to see. No!--there was no injury. The face indeed was gone. Or, rather, where the face should have been there now descended a marble veil from brow to breast, of the most singular and sinister effect. Otherwise the bust was that of a young and beautiful woman. A pleasing horror seized on Kitty as she looked. Her fancy hunted for the clew. A faithless wife, blotted from her place?--made infamous forever by the veil which hid from human eye the beauty she had dishonored? Or a beloved mistress, on whom the mourning lover could no longer bear to look--the veil an emblem of undying and irremediable grief?

Kitty stood enthralled, striving to pierce the ghastly meaning of the bust, when a sound--a distant sound--a shock through her. She heard a step overhead, in the topmost apartment, or _mansarde_ of the palace, a step that presently traversed the whole length of the floor immediately above her head and began to descend the stair.

Strange! Federigo must have shut the great gates by this time--as she had bade him? He himself inhabited the smaller _entresol_ on the farther side of the palace, far away. Other inhabitants there were none; so Donna Laura had assured her.

The step approached, resonant in the silence. Kitty, seized with nervous fright, turned and ran down the broad staircase by which she had come, through the series of deserted rooms in the _piano nobile_, till she reached the great hall.

There she paused, panting, curiosity and daring once more getting the upperhand. The door she had just passed through, which gave access to the staircase, opened again and shut. The stranger who had entered came leisurely towards the hall, lingering apparently now and then to look at objects on the way. Presently a voice--an exclamation.

Kitty retreated, caught at the arm of a chair for support, clung to it trembling. A man entered, holding his hat in one hand and a small white glove in the other.

At sight of the lady in black, standing on the other side of the hall, he started violently--and stopped. Then, just as Kitty, who had so far made neither sound nor movement, took the first hurried step towards the staircase by which she had entered, Geoffrey Cliffe came forward.

"How do you do, Lady Kitty? Do not, I beg of you, let me disturb you. I had half an hour to spare, and I gave the old man down-stairs a franc or two, that he might let me wander over this magnificent old place by myself for a bit. I have always had a fancy for deserted houses. You, I gather, have it, too. I will not interfere with you for a moment. Before I go, however, let me return what I believe to be your property."

He came nearer, with a studied, deliberate air, and held out the white glove. She saw it was her own and accepted it.

"Thank you."

She bowed with all the haughtiness she could muster, though her limbs shook under her. Then as she walked quickly towards the door of exit, Cliffe, who was nearer to it than she, also moved towards it, and threw it open for her. As she approached him he said, quietly:

"This is not the first time we have met in Venice, Lady Kitty."

She wavered, could not avoid looking at him, and stood arrested. That almost white head!--that furrowed brow!--those haggard eyes! A slight, involuntary cry broke from her lips.

Cliffe smiled. Then he straightened his tall figure.

"You see, perhaps, that I have not grown younger. You are quite right. I have left my youth--what remained of it--among those splendid fellows whom the Turks have been harrying and torturing. Well!--they were worth it. I would give it them again."

There was a short silence.

The eyes of each perused the other's face. Kitty began some words, and left them unfinished. Cliffe resumed--in another tone--while the door he held swung gently backward, his hand following it.

"I spent last winter, as perhaps you know, with the Bosnian insurgents in the mountains. It was a tough business--hardships I should never have had the pluck to face if I had known what was before me. Then, in July, I got fever. I had to come away, to find a doctor, and I was a long time at Cattaro pulling round. And, meanwhile, the Turks--God blast them!--have been at their fiends' work. Half my particular friends, with whom I spent the winter, have been hacked to pieces since I left them."

She wavered, held by his look, by the coercion of that mingled passion and indifference with which he spoke. There was in his manner no suggestion whatever of things behind, no reference to herself or to the past between them. His passion, it seemed, was for his comrades; his indifference for her. What had he to do with her any more? He had been among the realities of battle and death, while she had been mincing and ambling along the usual feminine path. That was the utterance, it seemed, of the man's whole manner and personality, and nothing could have more effectually recalled Kitty's wild nature to the lure.

"Are you going back?" She had turned from him and was pulling at the fingers of the glove he had picked up.

"Of course! I am only kicking my heels here till I can collect the money and stores--ay, and the _men_--I want. I give my orders in London, and I must be here to see to the transshipment of stores and the embarkation of my small force! Not meant for the newspapers, you see, Lady Kitty--these little details!"

He drew himself up smiling, his worn aspect expressing just that mingling of dare-devil adventure with subtler and more self-conscious things which gave edge and power to his personality.

"I heard you were wounded," said Kitty, abruptly.

"So I was--badly. We were defending a _polje_--one of their high mountain valleys, against a Beg and his troops. My left arm"--he pointed to the black sling in which it was still held--"was nearly cut to pieces. However, it is practically well."

He took it out of the sling and showed that he could use it. Then his expression changed. He stepped back to the door, and opened it ceremoniously.

"Don't, however, let me delay you, Lady Kitty--by my chatter."

Kitty's cheeks were crimson. Her momentary yielding vanished in a passion of scorn. What!--he knew that she had seen him before, seen him with that woman--and he dared to play the mere shattered hero, kept in Venice by these crusader's reasons!

"Have you another volume on the way?" she asked him, as she advanced. "I read your last."

Her smile was the smile of an enemy. He eyed her strangely.

"Did you? That was waste of time."

"I think you intended I should read it."

He hesitated.

"Lady Kitty, those things are very far away. I can't defend myself--for they seem wiped out." He had crossed his arms, and was leaning back against the open door, a fine, rugged figure, by no means repentant.

Kitty laughed.

"You overstate the difference!"

"Between the past and the present? What does that mean?"

She dropped her eyes a moment, then raised them.

"Do you often go to San Lazzaro?"

He bowed.

"I had a suspicion that the vision at the window--though it was there only an instant--was you! So you saw Mademoiselle Ricci?"

His tone was assurance itself. Kitty disdained to answer. Her slight gesture bade him let her pass through; but he ignored it.

"I find her kind, Lady Kitty. She listens to me--I get sympathy from her."

"And you want sympathy?"

Her tone stung him. "As a hungry man wants food --as an artist wants beauty. But I know where I shall _not_ get it."

"That is always a gain!" said Kitty, throwing back her little head. "Mr. Cliffe, pray let me bid you good-bye."

He suddenly made a step forward. "Lady Kitty!"--his deep-set, imperious eyes searched her face--"I can't restrain myself. Your look--your expression--go to my heart. Laugh at me if you like. It's true. What have you been doing with yourself?"

He bent towards her, scrutinizing every delicate feature, and, as it seemed, shaken with agitation. She breathed fast.

"Mr. Cliffe, you must know that any sympathy from you to me--is an insult! Kindly let me pass."

He, too, flushed deeply.

"Insult is a hard word, Lady Kitty. I regret that poem."

She swept forward in silence, but he still stood in the way.

"I wrote it--almost in delirium. Ah, well"--he shook his head impatiently--"if you don't believe me, let it be. I am not the man I was. The perspective of things is altered for me." His voice fell. "Women and children in their blood--heroic trust--and brute hate--the stars for candles--the high peaks for friends--those things have come between me and the past. But you are right; we had better not talk any more. I hear old Federigo coming up the stairs. Good-night, Lady Kitty--good-night!"

He opened the door. She passed him, and, to her own intense annoyance, a bunch of pale roses she carried at her belt brushed against the doorway, so that one broke and fell. She turned to pick it up, but it was already in Cliffe's hand. She held out hers, threateningly.

"I think not." He put it in his pocket. "Here is Federigo. Good-night."

It was quite dark when Kitty reached home. She groped her way up-stairs and opened the door of the _salon_. So weary was she that she dropped into the first chair, not seeing at first that any one was in the room. Then she caught sight of a brown-paper parcel, apparently just unfastened, on the table, and within it three books, of similar shape and size. A movement startled her.

"William!"

Ashe rose slowly from the deep chair in which he had been sitting. His aspect seemed to her terrified eyes utterly and wholly changed. In his hand he held a book like those on the table, and a paper-cutter. His face expressed the remote abstraction of a man who has been wrestling his way through some hard contest of the mind.

She ran to him. She wound her arms round him.

"William, William! I didn't mean any harm! I didn't! Oh, I have been so miserable! I tried to stop it--I did all I could. I have hardly slept at all--since we talked--you remember? Oh, William, look at me! Don't be angry with me!"

Ashe disengaged himself.

"I have asked Blanche to pack for me to-night, Kitty. I go home by the early train to-morrow."

"Home!"

She stood petrified; then a light flashed into her face.

"You'll buy it all up? You'll stop it, William?"

Ashe drew himself together.

"I am going home," he said, with slow decision, "to place my resignation in the hands of Lord Parham."

XXI

Kitty fell back in silence, staring at William. She loosened her mantle and threw it off, then she sat down in a chair near the wood fire, and bent over it, shivering.

"Of course you didn't mean that, William?" she said, at last.

Ashe turned.

"I should not have said it unless I had meant every word of it. It is, of course, the only thing to be done."

Kitty looked at him miserably. "But you _can't_ mean that--that you'll resign because of that book?"

She pulled it towards her and turned over the pages with a hand that trembled. "That would be too foolish!"

Ashe made no reply. He was standing before the fire, with his hands in his pockets, and a face half absent, half ironical, as though his mind followed the sequences of a far distant future.

"William!" She caught the sleeve of his coat with a little cry. "I wrote that book because I thought it would help you."

His attention came back to her.

"Yes, Kitty, I believe you did."

She gulped down a sob. His tone was so odd, so remote.

"Many people have done such things. I know they have. Why--why, it was only meant--as a skit--to make people laugh! There's _no_ harm in it, William."

Ashe, without speaking, took up the book and looked back at certain pages, which he seemed to have marked. Kitty's feeling as she watched him was the feeling of the condemned culprit, held dumb and strangled in the grip of his own sense of justice, and yet passionately conscious how much more he could say for himself than anybody is ever likely to say for him.

"When did you have the first idea of this book, Kitty?"

"About a year ago," she said, in a low voice.

"In October? At Haggart?"

Kitty nodded.

Ashe thought. Her admission took him back to the autumn weeks at Haggart, after the Cliffe crisis and the rearrangement of the ministry in the July of that year. He well remembered that those weeks had been weeks of special happiness for both of them. Afterwards, the winter had brought many renewed qualms and vexations. But in that period, between the storms of the session and Kitty's escapades in the hunting-field, memory recalled a tender, melting time--a time rich in hidden and exquisite hours, when with Kitty on his breast, lip to lip and heart to heart, he had reaped, as it seemed to him, the fruits of that indulgence which, as he knew, his mother scorned. And at that very moment, behind his back, out of his sight, she had begun this atrocious thing.

He looked at her again--the bitterness almost at his lips, almost beyond his control.

"I wish I knew what could have been your possible object in writing it?"

She sat up and confronted him. The color flamed back again into her pale cheeks.

"You know I told you--when we had that talk in London--that I wanted to write. I thought it would be good for me--would take my thoughts off--well, what had happened. And I began to write this--and it amused me to find I could do it--and I suppose I got carried away. I loved describing you, and glorifying you--and I loved making caricatures of Lady Parham--and all the people I hated. I used to work at it whenever you were away--or I was dull and there was nothing to do.

"Did it never occur to you," said Ashe, interrupting, "that it might get you--get us both--into trouble, and that you ought to tell me?"

She wavered.

"No!" she said, at last. "I never did mean to tell you, while I was writing it. You know I don't tell lies, William! The real fact is, I was afraid you'd stop it."

"Good God!" He threw up his hands with a sound of amazement, then thrust them again into his pockets and began to pace up and down.

"But then"--she resumed--"I thought you'd soon get over it, and that it was funny--and everybody would laugh--and you'd laugh--and there would be an end of it."

He turned and stared at her. "Frankly, Kitty--I don't understand what you can be made of! You imagined that that sketch of Lord Parham"--he struck the open page--"a sketch written by _my wife_, describing my official chief--when he was my guest--under my own roof--with all sorts of details of the most intimate and offensive kind--mocking his speech--his manners--his little personal ways--charging him with being the corrupt tool of Lady Parham, disloyal to his colleagues, a man not to be trusted--and justifying all this by a sort of evidence that you could only have got as my wife and Lord Parham's hostess--you actually supposed that you could write and publish _that!_--without in the first place its being plain to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that you had written it--and in the next, without making it impossible for your husband to remain a colleague of the man you had treated in such a way? Kitty!--you are not a stupid woman! Do you really mean to say that you could write and publish this book without _knowing_ that you were doing a wrong action--which, so far from serving me, could only damage my career irreparably? Did nothing--did no one warn you--if you were determined to keep such a secret from your husband, whom it most concerned?"

He had come to stand beside her, both hands on the back of a chair--stooping forward to emphasize his words--the lines of his fine face and noble brow contracted by anger and pain.

"Mr. Darrell warned me," said Kitty, in a low voice, as though those imperious eyes compelled the truth from her--"but of course I didn't believe him."

"Darrell!" cried Ashe, in amazement--"Darrell! You confided in him?"

"I told him all about it. It was he who took it to a publisher."

"Hound!" said Ashe, between his teeth. "So that was his revenge."

"Oh, you needn't blame him too much," said Kitty, proudly, not understanding the remark. "He wrote to me not long ago to say it was horribly unwise--and that he washed his hands of it."

"Ay--when he'd done the deed! When did you show it him?" said Ashe, impetuously.

"At Haggart--in August."

"_Et tu, Brute!_" said Ashe, turning away. "Well, that's done with. Now the only thing to do is to face the music. I go home. Whatever can be done to withdraw the book from circulation I shall, of course, do; but I gather from this precious letter"--he held up the note which had been enclosed in the parcel--"that some thousands of copies have already been ordered by the booksellers, and a few distributed to 'persons in high places.'"

"William," she said, in despair, catching his arm again--"listen! I offered the man two hundred pounds only yesterday to stop it."

Ashe laughed.

"What did he reply?"

"He said it was impossible. Fifty copies had been already issued."

"The review copies, no doubt. By next week there will be, I should say, five thousand in the shops. Your man understands his business, Kitty. This is the kind of puff preliminary he has been scattering about."

And with sparkling eyes he handed to her a printed slip containing an outline of the book for the information of the booksellers.

It drew attention to the extraordinary interest of the production as a painting of the upper class by the hand of one belonging to its inmost circle. "People of the highest social and political importance will be recognized at once; the writer handles cabinet ministers and their wives with equal freedom, and with a touch betraying the closest and most intimate knowledge. Details hitherto quite unknown to the public of ministerial combinations and intrigues--especially of the feminine influences involved--will be found here in their lightest and most amusing form. A certain famous fancy ball will be identified without difficulty. Scathing as some of the portraits are, the writer is by no means merely cynical. The central figure of the book is a young and rising statesman, whose aim and hopes are touched with a loving hand--the charm of the portrait being only equalled by the venom with which the writer assails those who have thwarted or injured his hero. But our advice is simply--'Buy and Read!' Conjecture will run wild about the writer. All we can say is that the most romantic or interesting surmise that can possibly be formed will fall far short of the reality."

"The beast is a shrewd beast!" said Ashe, as he raised himself from the stooping position in which he had been following the sentences over Kitty's shoulder. "He knows that the public will rush for his wares! How much money did he offer you, Kitty?"

He turned sharply on his heel to wait for her reply.

"A hundred pounds," said Kitty, almost inaudibly--"and a hundred more if five thousand sold." She had returned again to her crouching attitude over the fire.

"Generous!--upon my word!" said Ashe, scornfully turning over the two thick-leaved, loosely printed Mudie volumes. "A guinea to the public, I suppose--fifteen shillings to the trade. Darrell didn't exactly advise you to advantage, Kitty."

Kitty kept silence. The sarcastic violence of his tone fell on her like a blow. She seemed to shrink together; while Ashe resumed his walk to and fro.

Presently, however, she looked up, to ask, in a voice that tried for steadiness:

"What do you mean to do--exactly--William?"

"I shall, of course, buy up all I can; I shall employ some lawyer fellow, and appeal to the good feelings of the newspapers. There will be no trouble with the respectable ones. But some copies will get out, and some of the Opposition newspapers will make capital out of them. Naturally!--they'd be precious fools if they didn't."

A momentary hope sprang up in Kitty.

"But if you buy it up--and stop all the papers that matter," she faltered--"why should you resign, William? There won't be--such great harm done."

For answer he opened the book, and without speaking pointed to two passages--the first, an account full of point and malice of the negotiations between himself and Lord Parham at the time when he entered the cabinet, the conditions he himself had made, and the confidential comments of the Premier on the men and affairs of the moment.

"Do you remember the night when I told you those things, Kitty?"

Yes, Kitty remembered well. It was a night of intimate talk between man and wife, a night when she had shown him her sweetest, tenderest mood, and he--incorrigible optimist!--had persuaded himself that she was growing as wise as she was lovely.

Her lip trembled. Then he pointed to the second--to the pitiless picture of Lord Parham at Haggart.

"You wrote that--when he was under our roof--there by our pressing invitation! You couldn't have written it--unless he had so put himself in your power. A wandering Arab, Kitty, will do no harm to the man who has eaten and drunk in his tent!"

She looked up, and as she read his face she understood at last how what she had done had outraged in him all the natural and all the inherited instincts of a generous and fastidious nature. The "great gentleman," so strong in him as in all the best of English statesmen, whether they spring from the classes or the masses, was up in arms.

She sprang to her feet with a cry. "William, you can't give up politics! It would make you miserable."

"That can't be helped. And I couldn't go on like this, Kitty--even if this affair of the book could be patched up. The strain's too great."

They were but a yard apart, and yet she seemed to be looking at him across a gulf.

"You have been so happy in your work!" This time the sob escaped her.

"Oh, don't let's talk about that," he said, abruptly, as he walked away. "There'll be a certain relief in giving up the impossible. I'll go back to my books. We can travel, I suppose, and put politics out of our heads."

"But--you won't resign your seat?"

"No," he said, after a pause--"no. As far as I can see at present, I sha'n't resign my seat, though my constituents, of course, will be very sick. But I doubt whether I shall stand again."

Every phrase fell as though with a thud on Kitty's ear. It was the wreck of a man's life, and she had done it.

"Shall you--shall you go and see Lord Parham?" she asked, after a pause.

"I shall write to him first. I imagine"--he pointed to the letter lying on the table--"that creature has already sent him the book. Then later I daresay I shall see him."

She looked up.

"If I wrote and told him it was all my doing, William?--if I grovelled to him?"

"The responsibility is mine," he said, sternly. "I had no business to tell even you the things printed there. I told them at my own risk. If anything I say has any weight with you, Kitty, you will write nothing."

She spread out her hands to the fire again, and he heard her say, as though to herself:

"The thing is--the awful thing is, that I'm mad--I must be mad. I never thought of all this when I was writing it. I wrote it in a kind of dream. In the first place, I wanted to glorify you--"

He broke into an exclamation.

"Your _taste_, Kitty!--where was your taste? That a wife should praise a husband in public! You could only make us both laughing-stocks."

His handsome features quivered a little. He felt this part of it the most galling, the most humiliating of all; and she understood. In his eyes she had shown herself not only reckless and treacherous, but indelicate, vulgar, capable of besmirching the most sacred and intimate of relations.

She rose from her seat.

"I must go and take my things off," she said, in "a vague voice," and as she moved she tottered a little. He turned to look at her. Amid his own crushing sense of defeat and catastrophe, his natural and righteous indignation, he remembered that she had been ill--he remembered their child. But whether from the excitement, first of the meeting in the Vercelli palace, and now of this scene--or merely from the heat of the fire over which she had been hanging, her cheeks were flushed, her eyes blazed. Her beauty had never been more evident; but it made little appeal to him; it was the wild, ungovernable beauty from which he had suffered. He saw that she was excited, but there was an air also of returning physical vigor; and the nascent feeling which might have been strengthened by pallor and prostration died away.

Kitty moved as though to pass him and go to her room, which opened out of the _salon_. But as she neared him she suddenly caught him by the arm.

"William!--William! don't do it!--don't resign! Let me apologize!"

He was angered by her persistence, and merely said, coldly:

"I have given you my reasons, Kitty, why such a course is impossible."

"And--and you start to-morrow morning?"

"By the early train. Please let me go, Kitty. There are many things to arrange. I must order the gondola, and see if the people here can cash me a check."

"You mean--to leave me alone?" The words had a curious emphasis.

"I had a few words with Miss French before you came in. The packet arrived by the evening post, and seeing that it was books--for you--I opened it. After about an hour"--he turned and walked away again--"I saw my bearings. Then I called Miss French, told her I should have to go to-morrow, and asked her how long she could stay with you."

"William!" cried Kitty again, leaning heavily on the table beside her--"don't go!--don't leave me!"

His face darkened.

"So you would prevent me from taking the only honorable, the only decent way out of this thing that remains to me?"

She made no immediate reply. She stood--wrapped apparently in painful abstraction--a creature lovely and distraught. The masses of her fair hair loosened by the breeze on the canal had fallen about her cheeks and shoulders; her black hat framed the white brow and large, feverish eyes; and the sable cape she had worn in the gondola had slipped down over the thin, sloping shoulders, revealing the young figure and the slender waist. She might have been a child of seventeen, grieving over the death of her goldfinch.

Ashe gathered together his official letters and papers, found his check-book, and began to write. While he wrote he explained that Miss French could keep her company at least another fortnight, that he could leave with them four or five circular notes for immediate expenses, and would send more from home directly he arrived.

In the middle of his directions Kitty once more appealed to him in a passionate, muffled voice not to go. This time he lost his temper, and without answering her he hastily left the room to arrange his packing with his valet.

* * * * *

When he returned to the _salon_ Kitty was not there. He and Miss French--who knew only that something tragic had happened in which Kitty was concerned--kept up a fragmentary conversation till dinner was announced and Kitty entered. She had evidently been weeping, but with powder and rouge she had tried to conceal the traces of her tears; and at dinner she sat silent, hardly answering when Margaret French spoke to her.

After dinner Ashe went out with his cigar towards the Piazza. He was in a smarting, dazed state, beginning, however, to realize the blow more than he had done at first. He believed that Parham himself would not be at all sorry to be rid of him. He and his friends formed a powerful group both in the cabinet and out of it. But they were forcing the pace, and the elements of resistance and reaction were strong. He pictured the dismay of his friends, the possible breakdown of the reforming party. Of course they might so stand by him--and the suppression of the book might be so complete--

At this moment he caught sight of a newspaper contents bill displayed at the door of the only shop in the Piazza which sold English newspapers. One of the lines ran, "Anonymous attack on the Premier." He started, went in and bought the paper. There, in the "London Topics" column, was the following paragraph:

"A string of extracts from a forthcoming book, accompanied by a somewhat startling publisher's statement, has lately been sent round to the press. We are asked not to print them before the day of publication, but they have already roused much attention, if not excitement. They certainly contain a very gross attack on the Prime Minister, based apparently on first-hand information, and involving indiscretions personal and political of an unusually serious character. The wife of a cabinet minister is freely named as the writer, and even if no violation of cabinet secrecy is concerned, it is clear that the book outrages the confidential relations which ought to subsist between a Premier and his colleagues, if government on our English system is to be satisfactorily carried on. The statements it makes with every appearance of authority both as to the relations between Lord Parham and some of the most important members of his cabinet, and as to the Premier's intentions with regard to one or two of the most vital questions now before the country, are calculated seriously to embarrass the government. We fear the book will have a veritable _succès de scandale_."

"That fellow at least has done his best to kick the ball, damn him!" thought Ashe, with contempt, as he thrust the paper into his pocket.

It was no more than he expected; but it put an end to all thoughts of a more hopeful kind. He walked up and down the _Piazza_ smoking, till midnight, counting the hours till he could reach London, and revolving the phrases of a telegram to be sent to his solicitor before starting.

Kitty made no sign or sound when he entered her room. Her fair head was turned away from him, and all was dark. He could hardly believe that she was asleep; but it was a relief to him to accept her pretence of it, and to escape all further conversation. He himself slept but little. The mere profundity of the Venetian silence teased him; it reminded him how far he was from home.

Two images pursued him--of Kitty writing the book, while he was away electioneering or toiling at his new office--and then, of his returns to Haggart--tired or triumphant--on many a winter evening, of her glad rush into his arms, her sparkling face on his breast.

Or again, he conjured up the scene when the MS. had been shown to Darrell--his pretence of disapproval, his sham warnings, and the smile on his sallow face as he walked off with it. Ashe looked back to the early days of his friendship with Darrell, when he, Ashe, was one of the leaders at Eton, popular with the masters in spite of his incorrigible idleness, and popular with the boys because of his bodily prowess, and Darrell had been a small, sickly, bullied colleger. Scene after scene recurred to him, from their later relations at Oxford also. There was a kind of deliberation in the way in which he forced his thoughts into this channel; it made an outlet for a fierce bitterness of spirit, which some imperious instinct forbade him to spend on Kitty.

He dozed in the later hours of the night, and was roused by something touching his hand, which lay outside the bedclothes. Again the little head!--and the soft curls. Kitty was there--crouched beside him--weeping. There flashed into his mind an image of the night in London when she had come to him thus; and unwelcome as the whole remembrance was, he was conscious of a sudden swelling wave of pity and passion. What if he sprang up, caught her in his arms, forgave her, and bade the world go hang!

No! The impulse passed, and in his turn he feigned sleep. The thought of her long deceit, of the selfish wilfulness wherewith she had requited deep love and easy trust, was too much; it seared his heart. And there was another and a subtler influence. To have forgiven so easily would have seemed treachery to those high ambitions and ideals from which--as he thought, only too certainly--she had now cut him off. It was part of his surviving youth that the catastrophe seemed to him so absolute. Any thought of the fresh efforts which would be necessary for the reconquering of his position was no less sickening to him than that of the immediate discomforts and humiliations to be undergone. He would go back to books and amusement; and in the idling of the future there would be plenty of time for love-making.

* * * * *

In the morning, when all preparations were made, the gondoliers waiting below, Ashe's telegram sent, and the circular notes handed over to Margaret French, who had discreetly left the room, William approached his wife.

"Good-bye!" said Kitty, and gave him her hand, with a strange look and smile.

Ashe, however, drew her to him and kissed her--against her will. "I'll do my best, Kitty," he said, in a would-be cheery voice--"to pull us through. Perhaps--I don't know!--things may turn out better than I think. Good-bye. Take care of yourself. I'll write, of course. Don't hurry home. You'll want a fortnight or three weeks yet."

Kitty said not a word, and in another minute he was gone. The Italian servants congregated below at the water-gate sent laughing "A rivederlas" after the handsome, good-tempered Englishman, whom they liked and regretted; the gondola moved off; Kitty heard the plash of the water. But she held back from the window.

Half-way to the bend of the canal beyond the Accademia, Ashe turned and gave a long look at the balcony. No one was there. But just as the gondola was passing out of sight, Kitty slipped onto the balcony. She could see only the figure of Piero, the gondolier, and in another second the boat was gone. She stayed there for many minutes, clinging to the balustrade and staring, as it seemed, at the sparkle of autumnal sun which danced on the green water and on the red palace to her right.

* * * * *

All the morning Kitty on her sofa pretended to write letters. Margaret French, working or reading behind her, knew that she scarcely got through a single note, that her pen lay idle on the paper, while her eyes absently watched the palace windows on the other side of the canal. Miss French was quite certain that some tragic cause of difference between the husband and wife had arisen. Kitty, the indiscreet, had for once kept her own counsel about the book, and Ashe had with his own hands packed away the volumes which had arrived the night before; so that she could only guess, and from that delicacy of feeling restrained her as much as possible.

Once or twice Kitty seemed on the point of unburdening herself. Then overmastering tears would threaten; she would break off and begin to write. At luncheon her look alarmed Miss French, so white was the little face, so large and restless the eyes. Ought Mr. Ashe to have left her, and left her apparently in anger? No doubt he thought her much better. But Margaret remembered the worst days of her illness, the anxious looks of the doctors, and the anguish that Kitty had suffered in the first weeks after her child's death. She seemed now, indeed, to have forgotten little Harry, so far as outward expression went; but who could tell what was passing in her strange, unstable mind? And it often seemed to Margaret that the signs of the past summer were stamped on her indelibly, for those who had eyes to see.

Was it the perception of this pity beside her that drove Kitty to solitude and flight? At any rate, she said after luncheon that she would go to Madame d'Estrées, and did not ask Miss French to accompany her.

She set out accordingly with the two gondoliers. But she had hardly passed the Accademia before she bid her men take a cross-cut to the Giudecca. On these wide waters, with their fresher air and fuller sunshine, a certain physical comfort seemed to breathe upon her.

"Piero, it is not rough! Can we go to the Lido?" she asked the gondolier behind her.

Piero, who was all smiles and complaisance, as well he might be with a lady who scattered _lire_ as freely as Kitty did, turned the boat at once for that channel "Del Orfano" where the bones of the vanquished dead lie deep amid the ooze.

They passed San Giorgio, and were soon among the piles and sand-banks of the lagoon. Kitty sat in a dream which blotted the sunshine from the water. It seemed to her that she was a dead creature, floating in a dead world. William had ceased to love her. She had wrecked his career and destroyed her own happiness. Her child had been taken from her. Lady Tranmore's affection had been long since alienated. Her own mother was nothing to her; and her friends in society, like Madeleine Alcot, would only laugh and gloat over the scandal of the book.

No--everything was finished! As her fingers hanging over the side of the gondola felt the touch of the water, her morbid fancy, incredibly quick and keen, fancied herself drowned, or poisoned--lying somehow white and cold on a bed where William might see and forgive her.

Then with a start of memory which brought the blood rushing to her face, she thought of Cliffe standing beside the door of the great hall in the Vercelli palace--she seemed to be looking again into those deep, expressive eyes, held by the irony and the passion with which they were infused. Had the passion any reference to her?--or was it merely part of the man's nature, as inseparable from it as flame from the volcano? If William had cast her off, was there still one man--wild and bad, indeed, like herself, but poet and hero nevertheless--who loved her?

She did not much believe it; but still the possibility of it lured her, like some dark gulf that promised her oblivion from this pain--pain which tortured one so impatient of distress, so hungry for pleasure and praise.

* * * * *

In those days the Lido was still a noble and solitary shore, without the degradations of to-day.

Kitty walked fast and furiously across the sandy road, and over the shingles, turning, when she reached the firm sand, southward towards Malamocco. It was between four and five, and the autumn afternoon was fast declining. A fresh breeze was on the sea, and the short waves, intensely blue under a wide, clear heaven, broke in dazzling foam on the red-brown sand.

She seemed to be alone between sea and sky, save for two figures approaching from the south--a fisher-boy with a shrimping-net and a man walking bareheaded. She noticed them idly. A mirage of sun was between her and them, and the agony of remorse and despair which held her blunted all perceptions.

Thus it was that not till she was close upon him did her dazzled sight recognize Geoffrey Cliffe.

He saw her first, and stopped in motionless astonishment on the edge of the sand. She almost ran against him, when his voice arrested her.

"Lady Kitty!"

She put her hand to her breast, wavered, and came to a stand-still. He saw a little figure in black between him and those "gorgeous towers and cloud-capped palaces" of Alpine snow, which dimly closed in the north; and beneath the drooping hat a face even more changed and tragic than that which had haunted him since their meeting of the day before.

"How do you do?" she said, mechanically, and would have passed him. But he stood in her path. As he stared at her an impulse of rage ran through him, resenting the wreck of anything so beautiful--rage against Ashe, who must surely be somehow responsible.

"Aren't you wandering too far, Lady Kitty?" His voice shook under the restraint he put upon it. "You seem tired--very tired--and you are perhaps farther from your gondola than you think."

"I am not tired."

He hesitated.

"Might I walk with you a little, or do you forbid me?"

She said nothing, but walked on. He turned and accompanied her. One or two questions that he put to her--Had she companions?--Where had she left her gondola?--remained unanswered. He studied her face, and at last he laid a strong hand upon her arm.

"Sit down. You are not fit for any more walking."

He drew her towards some logs of driftwood on the upper sand, and she sank down upon them. He found a place beside her.

"What is the matter with you?" he said, abruptly, with a harsh authority. "You are in trouble."

A tremor shook her--as of the prisoner who feels on his limbs the first touch of the fetter.

"No, no!" she said, trying to rise; "it is nothing. I--I didn't know it was so far. I must go home."

His hand held her.

"Kitty!"

"Yes." Her voice was scarcely audible.

"Tell me what hurts you! Tell me why you are here, alone, with a face like that! Don't be afraid of me! Could I lift a finger to harm a mother that has lost her child? Give me your hands." He gathered both hers into the warm shelter of his own. "Look at me--trust me! My heart has grown, Kitty, since you knew me last. It has taken into itself so many griefs--so many deaths. Tell me your griefs, poor child!--tell me!"

He stooped and kissed her hands--most tenderly, most gravely.

Tears rushed into her eyes. The wild emotions that were her being were roused beyond control. Bending towards him she began to pour out, first brokenly, then in a torrent, the wretched, incoherent story, of which the mere telling, in such an ear, meant new treachery to William and new ruin for herself.

XXII

On a certain cloudy afternoon, some ten days later, a fishing-boat, with a patched orange sail, might have been seen scudding under a light northwesterly breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon. The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated _lidi_--islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards--which, with the _murazzi_ or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. On the _lido_ along which the boat was coasting, the vintage was long since over and the fruit gathered; the last yellow and purple leaves in the orchards, "a pestilent-stricken multitude," were to-day falling fast to earth, under the sighing, importunate wind. The air was warm; November was at its mildest. But all color and light were drowned in floating mists, and darkness lay over the distant city. It was one of those drear and ghostly days which may well have breathed into the soul of Shelley that superb vision of the dead generations of Venice, rising, a phantom host from the bosom of the sunset, and sweeping in "a rapid mask of death" over the shadowed waters that saw the birth and may yet furnish the tomb of so vast a fame.

Two persons were in the boat--Kitty, wrapped in sables, her straying hair held close by a cap of the same fur--and Geoffrey Cliffe. They had been wandering in the lagoons all day, in order to escape from Venice and observers--first at Torcello, then at San Francesco, and now they were ostensibly coming home in a wide sweep along the northern _lidi_ and _murazzi_, that Cliffe might show his companion, from near by, the Porto del Lido, that exit from the lagoons where the salt lakes grow into the sea.

A certain wildness and exaltation, drawn from the solitudes around them and from their _tête-à-tête_, could be read in both the man and the woman. Cliffe watched his companion incessantly. As he lay against the side of the boat at her feet, he saw her framed in the curving sides of the stern, and could read her changing expressions. Not a happy face!--that he knew! A face haunted by shadows from an underworld of thought--pursuing furies of remorse and fear. Not the less did he triumph that he had it _there_, in his power; nor had the flashes of terror and wavering will which he discerned in any way diminished its beauty.

"How long have you known--that woman?" Kitty asked him, suddenly, after a pause broken only by the playing of the wind with the sail.

Cliffe laughed.

"The Ricci? Why do you want to know, madame?"

She made a contemptuous lip.

"I knew her first," said Cliffe, "some years ago in Milan. She was then at La Scala--walking on--paid for her good looks. Then somebody sent her to Paris to the Conservatoire, which she only left this spring. This is her first Italian engagement. Her people are shopkeepers here--in the Merceria--which helped her. She is as vain as a peacock and as dangerous as a pet panther."

"Dangerous!" Kitty's scorn had passed into her voice.

"Well, Italy is still the country of the knife," said Cliffe, lightly--"and I could still hire a bravo or two--in Venice--if I wanted them."

"Does the Ricci hire them?"

Cliffe shrugged his shoulders.

"She'd do it without winking, if it suited her." Then, after a pause--"Do you still wonder why I should have chosen her society?"

"Oh no," said Kitty, hastily. "You told me."

"As much as a _friend_ cares to know?"

She nodded, flushing, and dropped the subject.

Cliffe's mouth still smiled, but his eyes studied her with a veiled and sinister intensity.

"I have not seen the lady for a week," he resumed. "She pesters me with notes. I promised to go and see her in a new play to-morrow night, but--"

"Oh, go!" said Kitty--"by all means go!"

"'Ruy Blas' in Italian? I think not. Ah! did you see that gleam on the Campanile?--marvellous!... Miladi, I have a question to ask you."

"_Dites!_" said Kitty.

"Did you put me into your book?"

"Certainly."

"What kind of things did you say?"

"The worst I could!"

"Ah! How shall I get a copy?" said Cliffe, musing.

She made no answer, but she was conscious of a sudden movement--was it of terror? At the bottom of her soul was she, indeed, afraid of the man beside her?

"By-the-way," he resumed, "you promised to tell me your news of this morning. But you haven't told me a word!"

She turned away. She had gathered her furs around her, and her face was almost hidden by them.

"Nothing is settled," she said, in a cold, reluctant voice.

"Which means that you won't tell me anything more?"

She was silent. Her lip had a proud line which piqued him.

"You think I am not worthy to know?"

Her eye gleamed.

"What does it matter to you?"

"Oh, nothing! I should have been glad to hear that all was well, and Ashe's mind at rest about his prospects."

"His prospects!" she repeated, with a scorn which stung. "How _dare_ we mention his name here at all?"

Cliffe reddened.

"I dare," he said, calmly.

Kitty looked at him--a quivering defiance in face and frame; then bent forward.

"Would you like to know--who is the best--the noblest--the handsomest--the most generous--the most delightful man I have ever met?"

Each word came out winged and charged with a strange intensity of passion.

"Do I?" said Cliffe, raising his eyebrows--"do I want to know?"

Her look held him.

"My husband, William Ashe!"

And she fell back, flushed and breathless, like one who throws out a rebel and challenging flag.

Cliffe was silent a moment, observing her.

"Strange!" he said, at last. "It is only when you are miserable you are kind. I could wish you miserable again, _chérie_."

Tone and look broke into a sombre wildness before which she shrank. Her own violence passed away. She leaned over the side of the boat, struggling with tears.

"Then you have your wish," was her muffled answer.

The three bronzed Venetians, a father and two sons, who were working the _bragozzo_ glanced curiously at the pair. They were persuaded that these charterers of their boat were lovers flying from observation, and the unknown tongue did but stimulate guessing.

Cliffe raised himself impatiently.

They were nearing a point where the line of _murazzi_ they had been following--low breakwaters of great strength--swept away from them outward and eastward towards a distant opening. On the other side of the channel was a low line of shore, broadening into the Lido proper, with its scattered houses and churches, and soon lost in the mist as it stretched towards the south.

"Ecco!--il Porto del Lido!" said the older boatman, pointing far away to a line of deeper color beneath a dark and lowering sky.

Kitty bent over the side of the boat staring towards the dim spot he showed her--where was the mouth of the sea.

"Kitty!" said Cliffe's voice beside her, hoarse and hurried--"one word, and I tell these fellows to set their helm for Trieste. This boat will carry us well--and the wind is with us."

She turned and looked him in the face.

"And then?"

"Then? We'll think it out together, Kitty--together!" He bent his lips to her hand, bending so as to conceal the action from the sailors. But she drew her hand away.

"You and I," she said, fiercely--"would tire of each other in a week!"

"Have the courage to try! No!--you should not tire of me in a week! I would find ways to keep you mine, Kitty--cradled, and comforted, and happy."

"Happy!" Her slight laugh was the forlornest thing. "Take me out to sea--and drop me there--with a stone round my neck. That might be worth doing--perhaps."

He surveyed her unmoved.

"Listen, Kitty! This kind of thing can't go on forever."

"What are you waiting for?" she said, tauntingly. "You ought to have gone last week."

"I am not going," he said, raising himself by a sudden movement--"till you come with me!"

Kitty started, her eyes riveted to his.

"And yet go I will! Not even you shall stop me, Kitty. I'll take the help I've gathered back to those poor devils--if I die for it. But you'll come with me--you'll come!"

She drew back--trembling under an impression she strove to conceal.

"If you will talk such madness, I can't help it," she said, with shortened breath.

"Yes--you'll come!" he said, nodding. "What have you to do with Ashe, Kitty, any longer? You and he are already divided. You have tried life together and what have you made of it? You're not fit for this mincing, tripping London life--nor am I? And as for morals--- I'll tell you a strange thing, Kitty." He bent forward and grasped her hands with a force which hurt--from which she could not release herself. "I believe--yes, by God, I believe!--that I am a better man than I was before I started on this adventure. It's been like drinking at last at the very source of life--living, not talking about it. One bitter night last February, for instance, I helped a man--one of the insurgents--who had taken to the mountains with his wife and children--to carry his wife, a dying woman, over a mountain-pass to the only place where she could possibly get help and shelter. We carried her on a litter, six men taking turns. The cold and the fatigue were such that I shudder now when I think of it. Yet at the end I seemed to myself a man reborn. I was happier than I had ever been in my life. Some mystic virtue had flowed into me. Among those men and women, instead of being the selfish beast I've been all these years, I can forget myself. Death seems nothing--brotherhood--liberty!--everything! And yet--"

His face relaxed, became ironical, reflective. But he held the hands close, his grasp of them hidden by the folds of fur which hung about her.

"And _yet_--I can say to you without a qualm--put this marriage which has already come to naught behind you--and come with me! Ashe cramps you. He blames you--you blame yourself. What _reality_ has all that? It makes you miserable--it wastes life. _I_ accept your nature--I don't ask you to be anything else than yourself--your wild, vain, adorable self! Ashe asks you to put restraint on yourself--to make painful efforts--to be good for his sake--the sake of something outside. _I_ say--come and look at the elemental things--death and battle--hatred, solitude, love. _They'll_ sweep us out of ourselves!--no need to strive and cry for it--into the great current of the world's being--bring us close to the forces at the root of things--the forces which create--and destroy. Dip your heart in that stream, Kitty, and feel it grow in your breast. Take a nurse's dress--put your hand in mine--and come! I can't promise you luxuries or ease. You've had enough of those. Come and open another door in the House of Life! Take starving women and hunted children into your arms--- feel with them--weep with them--look with them into the face of death! Make friends with nature--with rocks, forests, torrents--with night and dawn, which you've never seen, Kitty! They'll love you--they'll support you--the rough people--and the dark forests. They'll draw nature's glamour round you--they'll pour her balm into your soul. And I shall be with you--beside you!--your guardian--your lover--your _lover_, Kitty--till death do us part."

He looked at her with the smile which was his only but sufficient beauty; the violent, exciting words flowed in her ear, amid the sound of rising waves and the distant talk of the fishermen. His hand crushed hers; his mad, imploring eyes repelled and constrained her. The wild hungers and curiosities of her being rushed to meet him; she heard the echo of her own words to Ashe: "More life--more _life_!--even though it lead to pain--and agony--and tears!"

Then she wrenched herself away--suddenly, contemptuously.

"Of course, that's all nonsense--romantic nonsense. You've perhaps forgotten that I am one of the women who don't stir without their maid."

Cliffe's expression changed. He thrust his hands into his pockets.

"Oh, well, if you must have a maid," he said, dryly, "that settles it. A maid would be the deuce. And yet--I think I could find you a Bosnian girl--strong and faithful--"

Their eyes met--his already full of a kind of ownership, tender, confident, humorous even--hers alive with passionate anger and resistance.

"_Without a qualm_!" she repeated, in a low voice--"without a qualm! Mon Dieu!"

She turned and looked towards the Adriatic.

"Where are we?" she said, imperiously.

For a gesture of command on Cliffe's part, unseen by her, had sent the boat eastward, spinning before the wind. The lagoon was no longer tranquil. It was covered with small waves; and the roar of the outer sea, though still far off, was already in their ears. The mist lifting showed white, distant crests of foam on a tumbling field of water, and to the north, clothed in tempestuous purple, the dim shapes of mountains.

Kitty raised herself, and beckoned towards the captain of the _bragozzo_.

"Giuseppe!"

"Commanda, Eccellenza!"

The man came forward.

With a voice sharp and clear, she gave the order to return at once to Venice. Cliffe watched her, the veins on his forehead swelling. She knew that he debated with himself whether he should give a counter-order or no.

"A Venezia!" said Kitty, waving her hand towards the sailors, her eyes shining under the tangle of her hair.

The helm was put round, and beneath a tacking sail the boat swept southward.

With an awkward laugh Cliffe fell back into his seat, stretching his long limbs across the boat. He had spoken under a strong and genuine impulse. His passion for her had made enormous strides in these few wild days beside her. And yet the fantastic poet's sense responded at a touch to the new impression. He shook off the heroic mood as he had doffed his Bosnian cloak. In a few minutes, though the heightened color remained, he was chatting and laughing as though nothing had happened.

* * * * *

She, exhausted physically and morally by her conflict with him, hardly spoke on the way home. He entertained her, watching her all the time--a hundred speculations about her passing through his brain. He understood perfectly how the insight which she had allowed him into her grief and her remorse had broken down the barriers between them. Her incapacity for silence, and reticence, had undone her. Was he a villain to have taken advantage of it?

Why? With a strange, half-cynical clearness he saw her, as the obstacle that she was, in Ashe's life and career. For Ashe--supposing he, Cliffe, persuaded her--there would be no doubt a first shock of wrath and pain--then a sense of deliverance. For her, too, deliverance! It excited his artist's sense to think of all the further developments through which he might carry that eager, plastic nature. There would be a new Kitty, with new capacities and powers. Wasn't that justification enough? He felt himself a sculptor in the very substance of life, moulding a living creature afresh, disengaging it from harsh and hindering conditions. What was there vile in that?

The argument pursued itself.

"The modern judges for himself--makes his own laws, as a god, knowing good and evil. No doubt in time a new social law will emerge--with new sanctions. Meanwhile, here we are, in a moment of transition, manufacturing new types, exploring new combinations--by which let those who come after profit!"

Little delicate, distinguished thing!--every aspect of her, angry or sweet, sad or wilful, delighted his taste and sense. Moreover, she was _his_ deliverance, too--from an ugly and vulgar entanglement of which he was ashamed. He shrank impatiently from memories which every now and then pursued him of the Ricci's coarse beauty and exacting ways. Kitty had just appeared in time! He felt himself rehabilitated in his own eyes. Love may trifle as it pleases with what people call "law"; but there are certain æsthetic limits not to be transgressed.

The Ricci, of course, was wild and thirsting for revenge. Let her! Anxieties far more pressing disturbed him. What if he tempted Kitty to this escapade--and the rough life killed her? He saw clearly how frail she was.

But it was the artificiality of her life, the innumerable burdens of civilization, which had brought her to this! Women were not the weaklings they seemed, or believed themselves to be. For many of them, probably for Kitty, a rude and simple life would mean not only fresh mental but fresh physical strength. He had seen what women could endure, for love's or patriotism's sake! Make but appeal to the spirit--the proud and tameless spirit--and how the flesh answered! He knew that his power with Kitty came largely from a certain stoicism, a certain hardness, mingled, as he would prove to her, with a boundless devotion. Let him carry it through--without fears--and so enlarge her being and his own! And as to responsibilities beyond, as to their later lives--let time take care of its own births. For the modern determinist of Cliffe's type there _is_ no responsibility. He waits on life, following where it leads, rejoicing in each new feeling, each fresh reaction of consciousness on experience, and so links his fatalist belief to that Nietzsche doctrine of self-development at all costs, and the coming man, in which Cliffe's thought anticipated the years.

* * * * *

Kitty meanwhile listened to his intermittent talk of Venice, or Bosnia, with all its suggestions of new worlds and far horizons, and scarcely said a word.

But through the background of the brain there floated with her, as with him, a procession of unspoken thoughts. She had received three letters from William. Immediately on his arrival he had tendered his resignation. Lord Parham had asked him to suspend the matter for ten days. Only the pressure of his friends, it seemed, and the consternation of his party had wrung from Ashe a reluctant consent. Meanwhile, all copies of the book had been bought up; the important newspapers had readily lent themselves to the suppression of the affair; private wraths had been dealt with by conciliatory lawyers; and in general a far more complete hushing-up had been attained than Ashe had ever imagined possible. There was no doubt infinite gossip in the country-houses. But sympathy for Kitty in her grief, for Ashe himself, and Lady Tranmore, had done much to keep it within bounds. The little Dean especially, beloved of all the world, had been incessantly active on behalf of peace and oblivion.

All this Kitty read or guessed from William's letters. After all, then, the harm had not been so great! Why such a panic!--such a hurry to leave her!--when she was ill--and sorry? And now how curtly, how measuredly he wrote! Behind the hopefulness of his tone she read the humiliation and soreness of his mind--and said to herself, with a more headlong conviction than ever, that he would never forgive her.

No, _never!_--and especially now that she had added a thousandfold to the original offence. She had never written to him since his departure. Margaret French, too, was angry with her--had almost broken with her.

* * * * *

They left their boat on the Riva, and walked to the _Piazza_, through the now starry dusk. As they passed the great door of St. Mark's, two persons came out of the church. Kitty recognized Mary Lyster and Sir Richard. She bowed slightly; Sir Richard put his hand to his hat in a flurried way; but Mary, looking them both in the face, passed without the smallest sign, unless the scorn in face and bearing might pass for recognition.

Kitty gasped.

"She cut me!" she said, in a shaking voice.

"Oh no!" said Cliffe. "She didn't see you in the dark."

Kitty made no reply. She hurried along the northern side of the Piazza, avoiding the groups which were gathered in the sunset light round the flocks of feeding pigeons, brushing past the tables in front of the cafe's, still well filled on this mild evening.

"Take care!" said Cliffe, suddenly, in a low, imperative voice.

Kitty looked up. In her abstraction she saw that she had nearly come into collision with a woman sitting at a café table and surrounded by a noisy group of men.

With a painful start Kitty perceived the mocking eyes of Mademoiselle Ricci. The Ricci said something in Italian, staring the while at the English lady; and the men near her laughed, some furtively, some loudly.

Cliffe's face set. "Walk quickly!" he said in her ear, hurrying her past.

When they had reached one of the narrow streets behind the Piazza, Kitty looked at him--white and haughtily tremulous. "What did that mean?"

"Why should you deign to ask?" was Cliffe's impatient reply. "I have ceased to go and see her. I suppose she guesses why."

"I will have no rivalry with Mademoiselle Ricci!" cried Kitty.

"You can't help it," said Cliffe, calmly. "The powers of light are always in rivalry with the powers of darkness."

And without further pleading or excuse he stalked on, his gaunt form and striking head towering above the crowded pavement. Kitty followed him with difficulty, conscious of a magnetism and a force against which she struggled in vain.

* * * * *

About a week afterwards Kitty shut herself up one evening in her room to write to Ashe. She had just passed through an agitating conversation with Margaret French, who had announced her intention of returning to England at once, alone, if Kitty would not accompany her. Kitty's hands were trembling as she began to write.

* * * * *

"I am glad--oh! so glad, William--that you _have_ withdrawn your resignation--that people have come forward so splendidly, and _made_ you withdraw it--that Lord Parham is behaving decently--and that you have been able to get hold of all those copies of the book. I always hoped it would not be quite so bad as you thought. But I know you must have gone through an awful time--and I'm _sorry_.

"William, I want to tell you something--for I can't go on lying to you--or even just hiding the truth. I met Geoffrey Cliffe here--before you left--and I never told you. I saw him first in a gondola the night of the serenata--and then at the Armenian convent. Do you remember my hurrying you and Margaret into the garden? That was to escape meeting him. And that same afternoon when I was in the unused rooms of the Palazzo Vercelli--the rooms they show to tourists--he suddenly appeared--and somehow I spoke to him, though I had never meant to do so again.

"Then when you left me I met him again--that afternoon--and he found out I was very miserable and made me tell him everything. I know I had no right to do so--they were your secrets as well as mine. But you know how little I can control myself--it's wretched, but it's true.

"William, I don't know what will happen. I can't make out from Margaret whether she has written to you or not--she won't tell me. If she has, this letter will not be much news to you. But, mind, I write it of my own free will, and not because Margaret may have forced my hand. I should have written it anyway. Poor old darling!--she thinks me mad and bad, and to-night she tells me she can't take the responsibility of looking after me any longer. Women like her can never understand creatures like me--and I don't want her to. She's a dear saint, and as true as steel--not like your Mary Lysters! I could go on my knees to her. But she can't control or save me. Not even you could, William. You've tried your best, and in spite of you I'm going to perdition, and I can't stop myself.

"For, William, there's something broken forever between you and me. I know it was I who did the wrong, and that you had no choice but to leave me when you did. But yet you _did_ leave me, though I implored you not. And I know very well that you don't love me as you used to--why should you?--and that you never can love me in the same way again. Every letter you write tells me that. And though I have deserved it all, I can't bear it. When I think of coming home to England, and how you would try to be nice to me--how good and dear and magnanimous you would be, and what a beast I should feel--I want to drown myself and have done.

"It all seems to me so hopeless. It is my own nature--- the stuff out of which I am cut--that's all wrong. I may promise my breath away that I will be discreet and gentle and well behaved, that I'll behave properly to people like Lady Parham, that I'll keep secrets, and not make absurd friendships with absurd people, that I'll try and keep out of debt, and so on. But what's the use? It's the _will_ in me--the something that drives, or ought to drive--that won't work. And nobody ever taught me or showed me, that I can remember, till I met you. In Paris at the Place Vendôme, half the time I used to live with maman and papa, be hideously spoiled, dressed absurdly, eat off silver plate, and make myself sick with rich things--and then for days together maman would go out or away, forget all about me, and I used to storm the kitchen for food. She either neglected me or made a show of me; she was my worst enemy, and I hated and fought her--till I went to the convent at ten. When I was fourteen maman asked a doctor about me. He said I should probably go mad--and at the convent they thought the same. Maman used to throw this at me when she was cross with me.

"Well, I don't repeat this to make you excuse me and think better of me--- it's all too late for that--but because I am such a puzzle to myself, and I try to explain things. I _did_ love you, William--I believe I do still--but when I think of our living together again, my arms drop by my side and I feel like a dead creature. Your life is too great a thing for me. Why should I spoil or hamper it? If you loved me, as you did once--if you still thought _everything_ worth while, then, if I had a spark of decency left, I might kill myself to free you, but I should never do--what I may do now. But, William, you'll forget me soon. You'll pass great laws, and make great speeches, and the years when I tormented you--and all my wretched ways--will seem such a small, small thing.

"Geoffrey says he loves me. And I think he does, though how long it will last, or may be worth, no one can tell. As for me, I don't know whether I love him. I have no illusion about him. But there are moments when he absolutely holds me--when my will is like wax in his hands. It is because, I think, of a certain grandness--_grandeur_ seems too strong--in his character. It was always there; because no one could write such poems as his without it. But now it's more marked, though I don't know that it makes him a better man. He thinks it does; but we all deceive ourselves. At any rate, he is often superb, and I feel that I could die, if not for him, at least with him. And he is not unlikely to die in some heroic way. He went out as you know simply as correspondent and to distribute relief, but lately he has been fighting for these people--of course he has!--and when he goes back he is to be one of their regular leaders. When he talks of it he is noble, transformed. It reminds me of Byron--his wicked life here--and then his death at Missolonghi. Geoffrey can do such base, cruel things--and yet--

"But I haven't yet told you. He asks me to go with him, back to the fighting-lines in upper Bosnia. There seems to be a great deal that women can do. I shall wear a nurse's uniform, and probably nurse at a little hospital he founded--high up in one of the mountain valleys. I know this will almost make you laugh. You will think of me, not knowing how to put on a button without Blanche--and wanting to be waited on every moment. But you'll see; there'll be nothing of that sort. I wonder whether it's hardship I've been thirsting for all my life--even when I seemed such a selfish, luxurious little ape?

"At the same time, I think it will kill me--and that would be the best end of all. To have some great, heroic experience, and then--'cease upon the midnight with no pain!...'

"Oh, if I thought you'd care very, _very_ much, I should have pain--horrible pain. But I know you won't. Politics have taken my place. Think of me sometimes, as I was when we were first married--and of Harry--my little, little fellow!

"--Maman and I have had a ghastly scene. She came to scold me for my behavior--to say I was the talk of Venice. _She!_ Of course I know what she means. She thinks if I am divorced she will lose her allowance--and she can't bear the thought of that, though Markham Warington is quite rich. My heart just _boiled_ within me. I told her it is the poison of her life that works in me, and that whatever I do, _she_ has no right to reproach me. Then she cried--and I was like ice--and at last she went. Warington, good fellow, has written to me, and asked to see me. But what is the use?

"I know you'll leave me the £500 a year that was settled on me. It'll be so good for me to be poor--and dressed in serge--and trying to do something else with these useless hands than writing books that break your heart. I am giving away all my smart clothes. Blanche is going home. Oh, William, William! I'm going to shut this, and it's like the good-bye of death--a mean and ugly--_death_.

"... Later. They have just brought me a note from Danieli's. So Margaret did write to you, and your mother has come. Why did you send her, William? She doesn't love me--and I shall only stab and hurt her. Though I'll try not--for your sake."

Two days later Ashe received almost by the same post which brought him the letter from Kitty, just quoted, the following letter from his mother:

"My DEAREST WILLIAM,--I have seen Kitty. With some difficulty she consented to let me go and see her yesterday evening about nine o'clock.

"I arrived between six and seven, having travelled straight through without a break, except for an hour or two at Milan, and immediately on arriving I sent a note to Margaret French. She came in great distress, having just had a fresh scene with Kitty. Oh, my dear William, her report could not well be worse. Since she wrote to us Kitty seems to have thrown over all precautions. They used to meet in churches or galleries, and go out for long days in the gondola or a fishing-boat together, and Kitty would come home alone and lie on the sofa through the evening, almost without speaking or moving. But lately he comes in with her, and stays hours, reading to her, or holding her hand, or talking to her in a low voice, and Margaret cannot stop it.

"Yet she has done her best, poor girl! Knowing what we all knew last year, it filled her with terror when she first discovered that he was in Venice and that they had met. But it was not till it had gone on about a week, with the strangest results on Kitty's spirits and nerves, that she felt she must interfere. She not only spoke to Kitty, but she spoke and wrote to him in a very firm, dignified way. Kitty took no notice--only became very silent and secretive. And he treated poor Margaret with a kind of courteous irony which made her blood boil, and against which she could do nothing. She says that Kitty seems to her sometimes like a person moving in sleep--only half conscious of what she is doing; and at others she is wildly excitable, irritable with everybody, and only calming down and becoming reasonable when this man appears.

"There is much talk in Venice. They seem to have been seen together by various London friends who knew--about the difficulties last year. And then, of course, everybody is aware that you are not here--and the whole story of the book goes from mouth to mouth--and people say that a separation has been arranged--and so on. These are the kind of rumors that Margaret hears, especially from Mary Lyster, who is staying in this hotel with her father, and seems to have a good many friends here.

"Dearest William--I have been lingering on these things because it is so hard to have to tell you what passed between me and Kitty. Oh! my dear, dear son, take courage. Even now everything is not lost. Her conscience may awaken at the last moment; this bad man may abandon his pursuit of her; I may still succeed in bringing her back to you. But I am in terrible fear--and I must tell you the whole truth.

"Kitty received me alone. The room was very dark--only one lamp that gave a bad light--so that I saw her very indistinctly. She was in black, and, as far as I could see, extremely pale and weary. And what struck me painfully was her haggard, careless look. All the little details of her dress and hair seemed so neglected. Blanche says she is far too irritable and impatient in the mornings to let her hair be done as usual. She just rolls it into one big knot herself and puts a comb in it. She wears the simplest clothes, and changes as little as possible. She says she is soon going to have done with all that kind of thing, and she must get used to it. My own impression is that she is going through great agony of mind--above all, that she is ill--ill in body and soul.

"She told me quite calmly, however, that she had made up her mind to leave you; she said that she had written to you to tell you so. I asked her if it was because she had ceased to love you. After a pause she said 'No.' Was it because some one else had come between you? She threw up her head proudly, and said it was best to be quite plain and frank. She had met Geoffrey Cliffe again, and she meant henceforward to share his life. Then she went into the wildest dreams about going back with him to the Balkans, and nursing in a hospital, and dying--she hopes!--of hard work and privations. And all this in a torrent of words--and her eyes blazing, with that look in them as though she saw nothing but the scenes of her own imagination. She talked of devotion--and of forgetting herself in other people. I could only tell her, of course, that all this sounded to me the most grotesque sophistry and perversion. She was forgetting her first duty, breaking her marriage vow, and tearing your life asunder. She shook her head, and said you would soon forget her. 'If he had loved me he would never have left me!' she said, again and again, with a passion I shall never forget.

"Of course that made me very angry, and I described what the situation had been when you reached London--Lord Parham's state of mind--and the consternation caused everywhere by the wretched book. I tried to make her understand what there was at stake--the hopes of all who follow you in the House and the country--the great reforms of which you are the life and soul--your personal and political honor. I impressed on her the endless trouble and correspondence in which you had been involved--and how meanwhile all your Home Office and cabinet work had to be carried on as usual, till it was decided whether your resignation should be withdrawn or no. She listened with her head on her hands. I think with regard to the book she is most genuinely ashamed and miserable. And yet all the time there is this unreasonable, this monstrous feeling that you should not have left her!

"As to the scandalous references to private persons, she said that Madeleine Alcot had written to her about the country-house gossip. That wretched being, Mr. Darrell, seems also to have written to her, trying to save himself through her. And the only time I saw her laugh was when she spoke of having had a furious letter from Lady Grosville about the references to Grosville Park. It was like the laugh of a mischievous, unhappy child.

"Then we came back to the main matter, and I implored her to let me take her home. First I gave her your letter. She read it, flushed up, and threw it away from her. 'He commands me!' she said, fiercely. 'But I am no one's chattel.' I replied that you had only summoned her back to her duty and her home, and I asked her if she could really mean to repay your unfailing love by bringing anguish and dishonor upon you? She sat dumb, and her stubbornness moved me so that I fear I lost my self-control and said more, much more--in denunciation of her conduct--than I had meant to do. She heard me out, and then she got up and looked at me very bitterly and strangely. I had never loved her, she said, and so I could not judge her. Always from the beginning I had thought her unfit to be your wife, and she had known it, and my dislike of her, especially during the past year, had made her hard and reckless. It had seemed no use trying. I just wanted her dead, that you might marry a wife who would be a help and not a stumbling-block. Well, I should have my wish, for she would soon be as good as dead, both to you and to me.

"All this hurt me deeply, and I could not restrain myself from crying. I felt so helpless, and so doubtful whether I had not done more harm than good. Then she softened a little, and asked me to let her go to bed--she would think it all over and write to me in the morning....

"So, my dear William, I can only pray and wait. I am afraid there is but little hope, but God is merciful and strong. He may yet save us all.

"But whatever happens, remember that you have nothing to reproach yourself with--that you have done all that man could do. I should telegraph to you in the morning to say, 'Come, at all hazards,' but that I feel sure all will be settled to-morrow one way or the other. Either Kitty will start with me--or she will go with Geoffrey Cliffe. You could do nothing--absolutely nothing. God help us! She seems to have some money, and she told me that she counted on retaining her jointure."

* * * * *

On the night following her interview with Lady Tranmore, Kitty went from one restless, tormented dream into another, but towards morning she fell into one of a different kind. She dreamed she was in a country of great mountains. The peaks were snow-crowned, vast glaciers filled the chasms on their flanks, forests of pines clothed the lower sides of the hills, and the fields below were full of spring flowers. She saw a little Alpine village, and a church with an old and slender campanile. A plain stone building stood by--it seemed to be an inn of the old-fashioned sort--and she entered it. The dinner-table was ready in the low-roofed _salle-à-manger_, and as she sat down to eat she saw that two other guests were at the same table. She glanced at them, and perceived that one was William and the other her child, Harry, grown older--and transfigured. Instead of the dull and clouded look which had wrung her heart in the old days, against which she had striven, patiently and impatiently, in vain, the blue eyes were alive with mind and affection. It was as if the child beheld his mother for the first time and she him. As he recognized her he gave a cry of joy, waving one hand towards her while with the other he touched his father on the arm. William raised his head. But when he saw his wife his face changed. He rose from his seat, and drawing the little boy into his arms he walked away. Kitty saw them disappear into a long passage, indeterminate and dark. The child's face over his father's shoulder was turned in longing towards his mother, and as he was carried away he stretched out his little hands to her in lamentation.

Kitty woke up bathed in tears. She sprang out of bed and threw the window nearest to her open to the night. The winter night was mild, and a full moon sailed the southern sky. Not a sound on the water, not a light in the palaces; a city of ebony and silver, Venice slept in the moonlight. Kitty gathered a cloak and some shawls round her, and sank into a low chair, still crying and half conscious. At his inn, some few hundred yards away, between her and the Piazzetta, was Geoffrey Cliffe waking too?--making his last preparations? She knew that all his stores were ready, and that he proposed to ship them and the twenty young fellows, Italians and Dalmatians, who were going with him to join the insurgents, that morning, by a boat leaving for Cattaro. He himself was to follow twenty-four hours later, and it was his firm and confident expectation that Kitty would go with him--passing as his wife. And, indeed, Kitty's own arrangements were almost complete, her money in her purse, the clothes she meant to take with her packed in one small trunk, some of the Tranmore jewels which she had been recently wearing ready to be returned on the morrow to Lady Tranmore's keeping, other jewels, which she regarded as her own, together with the remainder of her clothes, put aside, in order to be left in the custody of the landlord of the apartment till Kitty should claim them again.

One more day--which would probably see the departure of Margaret French--one more wrestle with Lady Tranmore, and all the links with the old life would be torn away. A bare, stripped soul, dependent henceforth on Geoffrey Cliffe for every crumb of happiness, treading in unknown paths, suffering unknown things, probing unknown passions and excitements--it was so she saw herself; not without that corroding double consciousness of the modern, that it was all very interesting, and as such to be forgiven and admired.

Notwithstanding what she had said to Ashe, she did believe--with a clinging and desperate faith--that Cliffe loved her. Had she really doubted it, her conduct would have been inexplicable, even to herself, and he must have seemed a madman. What else could have induced him to burden himself with a woman on such an errand and at such a time? She had promised, indeed, to be his lieutenant and comrade--and to return to Venice if her health should be unequal to the common task. But in spite of the sternness with which he put that task first--a sternness which was one of his chief attractions for Kitty--she knew well that her coming threw a glamour round it which it had never yet possessed, that the passion she had aroused in him, and the triumph of binding her to his fate, possessed him--for the moment at any rate--heart and soul. He had the poet's resources, too, and a mind wherewith to organize and govern. She shrank from him still, but she already envisaged the time when her being would sink into and fuse with his, and like two colliding stars they would flame together to one fiery death.

Thoughts like these ran in her mind. Yet all the time she saw the high mountains of her dream, the old inn, the receding face of her child on William's shoulder; and the tears ran down her cheeks. The letter from William that Lady Tranmore had given her lay on a table near. She took it up, and lit a candle to read it.

* * * * *

"Kitty--I bid you come home. I should have started for Venice an hour ago, after reading Miss French's letter, but that honor and public duty keep me here. But mother is going, and I implore and command you, as your husband, to return with her. Oh, Kitty, have I ever failed you?--have I ever been hard with you?--that you should betray our love like this? Was I hard when we parted--a month ago? If I was, forgive me, I was sore pressed. Come home, you poor child, and you shall hear no reproaches from me. I think I have nearly succeeded in undoing your rash work. But what good will that be to me if you are to use my absence for that purpose to bring us both to ruin? Kitty, the grass is not yet green on our child's grave. I was at Haggart last Sunday, and I went over in the dusk to put some flowers upon it. I thought of you without a moment's bitterness, and prayed for us both, if such as I may pray. Then next morning came Miss French's letter. Kitty, have you no heart--and no conscience? Will you bring disgrace on that little grave? Will you dig between us the gulf which is irreparable, across which your hand and mine can never touch each other any more? I cannot and I will not believe it. Come back to me--come back!"

* * * * *

She reread it with a melting heart--with deep, shaking sobs. When she first glanced through it the word "command" had burned into her proud sense; the rest passed almost unnoticed. Now the very strangeness in it as coming from William--the strangeness of its grave and deep emotion--held and grappled with her.

Suddenly--some tension of the whole being seemed to give way. Her head sank back on the chair, she felt herself weak and trembling, yet happy as a soul new-born into a world of light. Waking dreams passed through her brain in a feverish succession, reversing the dream of the night--images of peace and goodness and reunion.

Minutes--hours--passed. With the first light she got up feebly, found ink and paper, and began to write.

* * * * *

_From Lady Tranmore to William Ashe_:

"Oh! my dearest William--at last a gleam of hope.

"No letter this morning. I was in despair. Margaret reported that Kitty refused to see any one--had locked her door, and was writing. Yet no letter came. I made an attempt to see Geoffrey Cliffe, who is staying at the 'Germania,' but he refused. He wrote me the most audacious letter to say that an interview could only be very painful, that he and Kitty must decide for themselves, that he was waiting every hour for a final word from Kitty. It rested with her, and with her only. Coercion in these matters was no longer possible, and he did not suppose that either you or I would attempt it.

"And now comes this blessed note--a respite at least! '_I am going to Verona to-night with Blanche. Please let no one attempt to follow me. I wish to have two days alone--absolutely alone. Wait here. I will write. K_.'

"... Margaret French, too, has just been here. She was almost hysterical with relief and joy--and you know what a calm, self-controlled person she is. But her dear, round face has grown white, and her eyes behind her spectacles look as though she had not slept for nights. She says that Kitty will not see her. She sent her a note by Blanche to ask her to settle all the accounts, and told her that she should not say good-bye--it would be too agitating for them both. In two days she should hear. Meanwhile the maid Blanche is certainly going with Kitty; and the gondola is ordered for the Milan train this evening.

"Two P.M. There is one thing that troubles me, and I must confess it. I did not see that across Kitty's letter in the corner was written 'Tell _nobody_ about this letter.' And Polly Lyster happened to be with me when it came. She has been _au courant_ of the whole affair for the last fortnight--that is, as an on-looker. She and Kitty have only met once or twice since Mary reached Venice; but in one way or another she has been extraordinarily well informed. And, as I told you, she came to see me directly I arrived and told me all she knew. You know her old friendship for us, William? She has many weaknesses, and of late I have thought her much changed, grown very hard and bitter. But she is always _very_ loyal to you and me--and I could not help betraying my feeling when Kitty's note reached me. Mary came and put her arms round me, and I said to her, 'Oh, Mary, thank God!--she's broken with him! She's going to Verona to-night on the way home!' And she kissed me and seemed so glad. And I was very grateful to her for her sympathy, for I am beginning to feel my age, and this has been rather a strain. But I oughtn't to have told her!--or anybody! I see, of course, what Kitty meant. It is incredible that Mary should breathe a word--or if she did that it should reach that man. But I have just sent her a note to Danieli's to warn her in the strongest way.

"Beloved son--if, indeed, we save her--we will be very good to her, you and I. We will remember her bringing up and her inheritance. I will be more loving--more like Christ. I hope He will forgive me for my harshness in the past.... My William!--I love you so! God be merciful to you and to your poor Kitty!"

* * * * *

"Will the signora have her dinner outside or in the _salle-à-manger?"_

The question was addressed to Kitty by a little Italian waiter belonging to the Albergo San Zeno at Verona, who stood bent before her, his white napkin under his arm.

"Out here, please--and for my maid also."

The speaker moved wearily towards the low wall which bounded the foaming Adige, and looked across the river. Far away the Alps that look down on Garda glistened under the stars; the citadel on its hill, the houses across the river were alive with lights; to the left the great mediæval bridge rose, a dark, ponderous mass, above the torrents of the Adige. Overhead, the little outside restaurant was roofed with twining vine-stems from which the leaves had fallen; colored lights twinkled among them and on the white tables underneath. The night was mild and still, and a veiled moon was just rising over the town of Juliet.

"Blanche!"

"Yes, my lady?"

"Bring a chair, Blanchie, and come and sit by me."

The little maid did as she was told, and Kitty slipped her hand into hers with a long sigh.

"Are you very tired, my lady?"

"Yes--but don't talk!"

The two sat silent, clinging to each other.

A step on the cobble-stones disturbed them. Blanche looked up, and saw a gentleman issuing from a lane which connected the narrow quay whereon stood the old Albergo San Zeno with one of the main streets of Verona.

There was a cry from Kitty. The stranger paused--looked--advanced. The little maid rose, half fierce, half frightened.

"Go, Blanche, go!" said Kitty, panting; "go back into the hotel."

"Not unless your ladyship wishes me to leave you," said the girl, firmly.

"Go at once!" Kitty repeated, with a peremptory gesture. She herself rose from her seat, and with one hand resting on the table awaited the new-comer. Blanche looked at her--hesitated--and went.

Geoffrey Cliffe came to Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the real, poetry adequate and overflowing.

"Kitty!--why did you do this?" he said to her, passionately, as he caught her hand.

Kitty snatched it away, trembling under his look. She began the answer she had devised while he was crossing the flagged quay towards her. But Cliffe paid no heed. He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she sank back powerless into her chair as he bent over her.

"Cruel--cruel child, to play with me so! Did you mean to put me to a last test?--or did your hard little heart misgive you at the last moment? I cross-examined your landlady--I bribed the servants--the gondoliers. Not a word! They were loyal--or you had paid them better. I went back to my hotel in black despair. Oh, you artist!--you plotter! Kitty--you shall pay me this some day! And there--there on my table--all the time--lay your little crumpled note!"

"What note?" she gasped--"what note?"

"Actress!" he said, with an amused laugh.

And cautiously, playfully, lest she should snatch it from him, he unfolded it before her.

Without signature and without date, the soiled half-sheet contained this message, written in Italian and in a disguised handwriting:

* * * * *

"Too many spectators. Come to Verona to-night. "K."

Kitty looked at it, and then at the face beside her--infused with a triumphant power and passion. She seemed to shrink upon herself, and her head fell back against one of the supports of the _pergola_. One of the blue lights from above fell with ghastly effect upon the delicate tilted face and closed eyes. Cliffe bent over her in a sharp alarm, and saw that she had fainted away.