the
new-comer. Blanche looked at her--hesitated--and went.

Geoffrey Cliffe came to Kitty's side. As he approached her his eyes
fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head. In his own
expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the
dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the real, poetry
adequate and overflowing.

"Kitty!--why did you do this?" he said to her, passionately, as he
caught her hand.

Kitty snatched it away, trembling under his look. She began the answer
she had devised while he was crossing the flagged quay towards her. But
Cliffe paid no heed. He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she sank back
powerless into her chair as he bent over her.

"Cruel--cruel child, to play with me so! Did you mean to put me to a
last test?--or did your hard little heart misgive you at the last
moment? I cross-examined your landlady--I bribed the servants--the
gondoliers. Not a word! They were loyal--or you had paid them better. I
went back to my hotel in black despair. Oh, you artist!--you plotter!
Kitty--you shall pay me this some day! And there--there on my table--all
the time--lay your little crumpled note!"

"What note?" she gasped--"what note?"

"Actress!" he said, with an amused laugh.

And cautiously, playfully, lest she should snatch it from him, he
unfolded it before her.

Without signature and without date, the soiled half-sheet contained this
message, written in Italian and in a disguised handwriting:

* * * * *

"Too many spectators. Come to Verona to-night.
"K."

Kitty looked at it, and then at the face beside her--infused with a
triumphant power and passion. She seemed to shrink upon herself, and her
head fell back against one of the supports of the <i>pergola</i>. One of the
blue lights from above fell with ghastly effect upon the delicate tilted
face and closed eyes. Cliffe bent over her in a sharp alarm, and saw
that she had fainted away.

PART V

REQUIESCAT

"Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens,
Dusk the hall with yew!"

XXIII

"How strange!" thought the Dean, as he once more stepped back into the
street to look at the front of the Home Secretary's house in Hill
Street. "He is certainly in town."

For, according to the <i>Times</i>, William Ashe the night before had been
hotly engaged in the House of Commons fighting an important bill, of
which