, throwing up his hands. "Her health, of course, is irreparably
injured. But that she did not die a dozen times over, of hardship and
misery, is the most astonishing thing! They were in a wretched village,
nearly four thousand feet up, a village of wooden huts, with a wooden
hospital. All the winter nearly they were deep in snow, and Lady Kitty
worked as a nurse. Cliffe seems to have been away fighting, very often,
and at other times came back to rest and see to supplies."

"I understand she passed as his wife?" said Ashe.

The Dean made a sign of reluctant assent.

"They lived in a little house near the hospital. She tells me that after
the first two months she began to loathe him, and she moved into the
hospital to escape him. He tried at first to melt and propitiate her;
but when he found that it was no use, and that she was practically lost
to him, he changed his temper, and he might have behaved to her like the
tyrant he is but that her hold over the people among whom they were
living, both on the fighting-men and the women, had become by this time
greater than his own. They adored her, and Cliffe dared not ill-treat
her. And so it went on through the winter. Sometimes they were on more
friendly terms than at others. I gather that when he showed his
dare-devil, heroic side she would relent to him, and talk as though she
loved him. But she would never go back--to live with him; and that after
a time alienated him completely. He was away more and more; and at last
she tells me there was a handsome Bosnian girl, and--well, you can
imagine the rest. Lady Kitty was so ill in March that they thought her
dying, but she managed to write to this consul you spoke of at Trieste,
and he sent up a doctor and a nurse. But this you probably know?"

"Yes," said Ashe, hoarsely. "I heard that she was apparently very ill
when she reached Treviso, but that she had rallied under Alice's
nursing. Lady Alice wrote to my mother."

"Did she tell Lady Tranmore anything of Lady Kitty's state of mind?"
said the Dean, after a pause.

Ashe also was slow in answering. At last he said:

"I understand there has been great regret for the past."

"Regret!" cried the Dean. "If ever there was a terrible case of the
dealings of God with a human soul--"

He began to walk up and down impetuously, wrestling with emotion.

"Did she give you any explanation," said Ashe, presently, in a voice
scarcely audible--"of their meeting at Verona? You know