let 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 <i>very</i> 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 <i>dame de
compagnie</i>. Kitty understood this young lady perfectly, and after
luncheon, over her cigarette, her little, sharp, probing questions gave
the beauty twenty minutes' annoy