pped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang
out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall
iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps
leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy
came to help Lady Holme out.

For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her
with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of
the falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into
the grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held
out his hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The
Italian man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built
up high above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the
house door. She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide
expanse of unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil
as if to keep it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the
house.

CHAPTER XVIII

DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that
the accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement
would be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But
then she had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She
felt that it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave
it then, in her home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds
connected with her former happiness. After the operation, and the
verdict of the doctors, that no more could be done than had been done,
she had had an access of almost crazy misery, in which all the secret
violence of her nature had rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut
up alone in her room, she had passed a day and a night without food. She
had lain upon the floor. She had torn her clothes into fragments. The
animal that surely dwells at the door of the soul of each human being
had had its way in her, had ravaged her, humiliated her, turned her to
savagery. Then at last she had slept, still lying upon the floor. And
she had waked feeling worn out but calm, desperately calm. She defied
the doctors. What did they know of women, of what women can do to
regain a vanished beauty? She would call in specialists, beauty doctors,
quacks, the people who fill the papers with their advertisements.

Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square
door--women, men, of a