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 <i>did</i> 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'Estrees, 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 <i>force majeure</i> arrayed against her. And now the
magnate who had played Providence slumbered in the family