ved off; Kitty heard the plash of the
water. But she held back from the window.

Half-way to the bend of the canal beyond the Accademia, Ashe turned and
gave a long look at the balcony. No one was there. But just as the
gondola was passing out of sight, Kitty slipped onto the balcony. She
could see only the figure of Piero, the gondolier, and in another second
the boat was gone. She stayed there for many minutes, clinging to the
balustrade and staring, as it seemed, at the sparkle of autumnal sun
which danced on the green water and on the red palace to her right.

* * * * *

All the morning Kitty on her sofa pretended to write letters. Margaret
French, working or reading behind her, knew that she scarcely got
through a single note, that her pen lay idle on the paper, while her
eyes absently watched the palace windows on the other side of the canal.
Miss French was quite certain that some tragic cause of difference
between the husband and wife had arisen. Kitty, the indiscreet, had for
once kept her own counsel about the book, and Ashe had with his own
hands packed away the volumes which had arrived the night before; so
that she could only guess, and from that delicacy of feeling restrained
her as much as possible.

Once or twice Kitty seemed on the point of unburdening herself. Then
overmastering tears would threaten; she would break off and begin to
write. At luncheon her look alarmed Miss French, so white was the little
face, so large and restless the eyes. Ought Mr. Ashe to have left her,
and left her apparently in anger? No doubt he thought her much better.
But Margaret remembered the worst days of her illness, the anxious looks
of the doctors, and the anguish that Kitty had suffered in the first
weeks after her child's death. She seemed now, indeed, to have forgotten
little Harry, so far as outward expression went; but who could tell what
was passing in her strange, unstable mind? And it often seemed to
Margaret that the signs of the past summer were stamped on her
indelibly, for those who had eyes to see.

Was it the perception of this pity beside her that drove Kitty to
solitude and flight? At any rate, she said after luncheon that she would
go to Madame d'Estrees, and did not ask Miss French to accompany her.

She set out accordingly with the two gondoliers. But she had hardly
passed the Accademia before she bid her men take a cross-cut to the
Giudecca. On these wide waters,