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 <i>salon</i> of the <i>mezzanine</i>, 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 Abbe Prevost 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
f