By Jove! the women could do most things, if they chose.  He recalled Kitty’s triumph in the great party gathered to welcome Lord Parham, contrasting it with her wilful and absurd behavior to the man himself.  There was something bewildering in such power—­combined with such folly.  In a sense, it was perfectly true that she had insulted her husband’s chief, and jeopardized her husband’s policy, because she could not put up with Lord Parham’s white eyelashes.

Well, let him make his account with it!  How to love her, tend her, make her happy—­and yet carry on himself the life of high office—­there was the problem!  Meanwhile he recognized, fully and humorously, that she had married a political sceptic—­and that it was hard for her to know what to do with the enthusiast who had taken his place.

Poor, pretty, incalculable darling!  He would coax her to stay abroad part of the Parliamentary season—­and then, perhaps, lure her into the country, with the rebuilding and refurnishing of Haggart.  She must be managed and kept from harm—­and afterwards indulged and spoiled and feted to her heart’s content.

If only the fates would give them another child!—­a child brilliant and lovely like herself, then surely this melancholy which overshadowed her would disperse.  That look—­that tragic look—­she had given him on the day of the fete, when she spoke of “separation”!  The wild adventure with the lamp had been her revenge—­her despair.  He shuddered as he thought of it.

He fell asleep, still pondering restlessly over her future and his own.  Amid all his anxieties he never stooped to recollect the man who had endangered her name and peace.  His optimism, his pride, the sanguine perfunctoriness of much of his character were all shown in the omission.

* * * * *

Kitty, however, was not asleep while Ashe was beside her.  And she slept but little through the hours that followed.  Between three and four she was finally roused by the sounds of storm in the canal.  It was as though a fleet of gigantic steamers—­in days when Venice knew but the gondola—­were passing outside, sending a mountainous “wash” against the walls of the old palace in which they lodged.  In this languid autumnal Venice the sudden noise and crash were startling.  Kitty sprang softly out of bed, flung on a dressing-gown and fur cloak, and slipped through the open window to the balcony.

A strange sight!  Beneath, livid waves, lashing the marble walls; above, a pale moonlight, obscured by scudding clouds.  Not a sign of life on the water or in the dark palaces opposite.  Venice looked precisely as she might have looked on some wild sixteenth-century night in the years of her glorious decay, when her palaces were still building and her state tottering.  Opposite, at the Traghetto of the Accademia, there were lamps, and a few lights in the gondolas; and through the storm-noises one could hear the tossed boats grinding on their posts.