For in the four years which had now elapsed since the Ashe’s marriage this lively lady had known adversity.  She had been forced to leave London, as we have seen, by the pressure of certain facts in her past history so ancient and far removed when their true punishment began that she no doubt felt it highly unjust that she should be punished for them at all.  Her London debts had swallowed up what then remained to her of fortune; and, afterwards, the allowance from the Ashes was all she had to depend on.  Banished to Paris, she fell into a lower stratum of life, at a moment when her faithful and mysterious friend, Markham Warington, was held in Scotland by the first painful symptoms of his sister’s last illness, and could do but little for her.  She had, in fact, known the sordid shifts and straits of poverty, though the smallest moral effort would have saved her from them.  She had kept disreputable company, she had been miserable, and base; and although shame is not easy to persons of her temperament, it may perhaps be said that she was ashamed of this period of her existence.  Appeals to the Ashes yielded less and less, and Warington seemed to have forsaken her.  She awoke at last to a panic-stricken fear of darker possibilities and more real suffering than any she had yet known, and under the stress of this fear she collapsed physically, writing both to Warington and to the Ashes in a tone of mingled reproach and despair.

The Ashes sent money, and, though Kitty was at the moment not fit to travel, prepared to come.  Warington, who had just closed the eyes of his sister, went at once.  He was now the last of his family, without any ties that he could not lawfully break.  Within two days of his arrival in Paris, Madame d’Estrees had promised to marry him in three months, to break off all her Paris associations, and to give her life henceforward into his somewhat stern hands.  The visit to Venice was part of the price that he had had to pay for her decision.  Marguerite pleaded, with a shudder, that she must have a little amusement before she went to live in Dumfriesshire; and he had been obliged to acquiesce in her arrangement with Donna Laura—­stipulating only that he should be their escort and guardian.

What had moved him to such an act?  His reasons can only be guessed at.  Warington was a man of religion, a Calvinist by education and inheritance, and of a silent and dreamy temperament.  He had been intimate with very few women in his life.  His sister had been a second mother to him, and both of them had been the guardians of their younger brother.  When this adored brother fell shot through the lungs in the hopeless defence of Lady Blackwater’s reputation, it would have been natural enough that Markham should hate the woman who had been the occasion of such a calamity.  The sister, a pious and devoted Christian, had indeed hated her, properly and duly, thenceforward.  Markham, on the contrary, accepted his brother’s last commission without reluctance.  In this matter at least Lady Blackwater had not been directly to blame; his mind acquitted her; and her soft, distressed beauty touched his heart.  Before he knew where he was she had made an impression upon him that was to be life-long.