VIII.--SHE TRAVELS IN PURSUIT

April 16. Evening, Paris, Hotel ---.--There is no overtaking her at this
place; but she has been here, as I thought, no other hotel in Paris being
known to her. We go on to-morrow morning.

April 18. Venice.--A morning of adventures and emotions which leave me
sick and weary, and yet unable to sleep, though I have lain down on the
sofa of my room for more than an hour in the attempt. I therefore make
up my diary to date in a hurried fashion, for the sake of the riddance it
affords to ideas which otherwise remain suspended hotly in the brain.

We arrived here this morning in broad sunlight, which lit up the sea-girt
buildings as we approached so that they seemed like a city of cork
floating raft-like on the smooth, blue deep. But I only glanced from the
carriage window at the lovely scene, and we were soon across the
intervening water and inside the railway station. When we got to the
front steps the row of black gondolas and the shouts of the gondoliers so
bewildered my father that he was understood to require two gondolas
instead of one with two oars, and so I found him in one and myself in
another. We got this righted after a while, and were rowed at once to
the hotel on the Riva degli Schiavoni where M. de la Feste had been
staying when we last heard from him, the way being down the Grand Canal
for some distance, under the Rialto, and then by narrow canals which
eventually brought us under the Bridge of Sighs--harmonious to our
moods!--and out again into open water. The scene was purity itself as to
colour, but it was cruel that I should behold it for the first time under
such circumstances.

As soon as I entered the hotel, which is an old-fashioned place, like
most places here, where people are taken en pension as well as the
ordinary way, I rushed to the framed list of visitors hanging in the
hall, and in a moment I saw Charles's name upon it among the rest. But
she was our chief thought. I turned to the hall porter, and--knowing
that she would have travelled as 'Madame de la Feste'--I asked for her
under that name, without my father hearing. (He, poor soul, was making
confused inquiries outside the door about 'an English lady,' as if there
were not a score of English ladies at hand.)

'She has just come,' said the porter. 'Madame came by the very early
train this morning, when Monsieur was asleep, and she requested us not to
disturb him. She is now in her room.'