pposite. 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, <i>that</i> 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. <i>A lui
la parole!</i> No doubt he was preparing it, the bloody, exciting story
which would bring him before the f