into which she had brought herself and
him, merely because her vanity could not bear that William had not been
able to love her, for long, far above all her deserts?

William! Her heart leaped in her breast. He was thirty-six--and she not
twenty-four. A strange and desolate wonder overtook her as the thought
seized her of the years they might still spend on the same
earth--members of the same country, breathing the same air--and yet
forever separate. Never to see him--or speak to him again!--the thought
stirred her imagination, as it were, while it tortured her; there was in
it a certain luxury and romance of pain.

Thus, as she followed Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her
mind sink in dreams of Ashe--and in the dismal reckoning up of all that
she had so lightly and inconceivably lost. Sometimes she found herself
absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of the old moral
commonplaces.

It had been so easy and so exciting to defy them. Stones which the
builders of life reject--do they still avenge themselves in the old way?
There was a kind of rage in the thought.

On the way home Kitty expressed a wish to go into St. Mark's alone. Lady
Alice left her there, and in the shadow of the atrium Kitty looked at
her strangely, and kissed her.

An hour after Lady Alice had reached the hotel a letter was brought to
her. In it Kitty bade her--and the Dean--farewell, and asked that no
effort should be made to track her. "I am going to friends--where I
shall be safe and at peace. Thank you both with all my heart. Let no one
think about me any more."

Of course they disobeyed her. They made what search in Venice they
could, without rousing a scandal, and Ashe rushed out to join it, using
the special means at a minister's disposal. But it was fruitless. Kitty
vanished like a wraith in the dawn; and the living world of action and
affairs knew her no more.

XXIV

"Well, I must have a carriage!" said William Ashe to the landlord of one
of the coaching inns of Domo Dossola--"and if you can't give me one for
less, I suppose I shall have to pay this most ridiculous charge. Tell
the man to put to at once."

The landlord who owned the carriages, and would be sitting snugly at
home while the peasant on the box faced the elements in consideration of
a large number of extra francs to his master, retired with a deferential
smile, and told Emilio to bring the horses.

Meanwhile Ashe finished an indiffe