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."