Kitty asked a few more questions, then led the way in a hasty return to the garden door, the entrance-hall, and the steps where their gondola was waiting.  Nothing was to be seen of the second party.  They had passed on into the cloisters.

* * * * *

Animation, oddity, inconsequence, all these things Margaret observed in Kitty during luncheon in a restaurant of the Merceria, and various incidents connected with it; animation above all.  The Ashes fell in with acquaintance—­a fashionable and harassed mother, on the fringe of the Archangels, accompanied by two daughters, one pretty and one plain, and sore pressed by their demands, real or supposed.  The parents were not rich, but the girls had to be dressed, taken abroad, produced at country-houses, at Ascot, and the opera, like all other girls.  The eldest girl, a considerable beauty, was an accomplished egotist at nineteen, and regarded her mother as a rather inefficient dame de compagnie.  Kitty understood this young lady perfectly, and after luncheon, over her cigarette, her little, sharp, probing questions gave the beauty twenty minutes’ annoyance.  Then appeared a young man, ill-dressed, red-haired, and shy.  Carelessly as he greeted the mother and daughters, his entrance, however, transformed them.  The mother forgot fatigue; the beauty ceased to yawn; the younger girl, who had been making surreptitious notes of Kitty’s costume in the last leaf of her guide-book, developed a charming gush.  He was the owner of the Magellan estates and the historic Magellan Castle; a professed hater of “absurd womankind,” and, in general, a hunted and self-conscious person.  Kitty gave him one finger, looked him up and down, asked him whether he was yet engaged, and when he laughed an embarrassed “No,” told him that he would certainly die in the arms of the Magellan housekeeper.

This got a smile out of him.  He sat down beside her, and the two laughed and talked with a freedom which presently drew the attention of the neighboring tables, and made Ashe uncomfortable.  He rose, paid the bill, and succeeded in carrying the whole party off to the Piazza, in search of coffee.  But here again Kitty’s extravagances, the provocation of her light loveliness, as she sat toying with a fresh cigarette and “chaffing” Lord Magellan, drew a disagreeable amount of notice from the Italians passing by.

“Mother, let’s go!” said the angry beauty, imperiously, in her mother’s ear.  “I don’t like to be seen with Lady Kitty!  She’s impossible!”

And with cold farewells the three ladies departed.  Then Kitty sprang up and threw away her cigarette.

“How those girls bully their mother!” she said, with scorn.  “However, it serves her right.  I’m sure she bullied hers.  Well, now we must go and do something.  Ta-ta!”

Lord Magellan, to whom she offered another casual finger, wanted to know why he was dismissed.  If they were going sight-seeing, might he not come with them?”