insurgents, that morning, by a boat leaving for Cattaro. He himself was
to follow twenty-four hours later, and it was his firm and confident
expectation that Kitty would go with him--passing as his wife. And,
indeed, Kitty's own arrangements were almost complete, her money in her
purse, the clothes she meant to take with her packed in one small trunk,
some of the Tranmore jewels which she had been recently wearing ready
to be returned on the morrow to Lady Tranmore's keeping, other jewels,
which she regarded as her own, together with the remainder of her
clothes, put aside, in order to be left in the custody of the landlord
of the apartment till Kitty should claim them again.

One more day--which would probably see the departure of Margaret
French--one more wrestle with Lady Tranmore, and all the links with the
old life would be torn away. A bare, stripped soul, dependent henceforth
on Geoffrey Cliffe for every crumb of happiness, treading in unknown
paths, suffering unknown things, probing unknown passions and
excitements--it was so she saw herself; not without that corroding
double consciousness of the modern, that it was all very interesting,
and as such to be forgiven and admired.

Notwithstanding what she had said to Ashe, she did believe--with a
clinging and desperate faith--that Cliffe loved her. Had she really
doubted it, her conduct would have been inexplicable, even to herself,
and he must have seemed a madman. What else could have induced him to
burden himself with a woman on such an errand and at such a time? She
had promised, indeed, to be his lieutenant and comrade--and to return to
Venice if her health should be unequal to the common task. But in spite
of the sternness with which he put that task first--a sternness which
was one of his chief attractions for Kitty--she knew well that her
coming threw a glamour round it which it had never yet possessed, that
the passion she had aroused in him, and the triumph of binding her to
his fate, possessed him--for the moment at any rate--heart and soul. He
had the poet's resources, too, and a mind wherewith to organize and
govern. She shrank from him still, but she already envisaged the time
when her being would sink into and fuse with his, and like two colliding
stars they would flame together to one fiery death.

Thoughts like these ran in her mind. Yet all the time she saw the high
mountains of her dream, the old inn, the receding face of her child on
William's