With a shiver she crossed the hall, and pushed her way into the suite of rooms on the northern side.  She felt herself in absolute possession of the palace.  Federigo no doubt had locked up; her mother and a few guests were still talking in the salon of the mezzanine, expecting her to return.  She would return—­soon; but the solitariness and wildness of this deserted place drew her on.

Room after room opened before her—­bare, save for a few worm-eaten chairs, a fragment of tapestry on the wall, or some tattered portraits in the Longhi manner, indifferent to begin with, and long since ruined by neglect.  Yet here and there a young face looked out, roses in the hair and at the breast; or a Doge’s cap—­and beneath it phantom features still breathing even in the last decay of canvas and paint the violence and intrigue of the living man—­the ghost of character held there by the ghost of art.  Or a lad in slashed brocade, for whom even in this silent palace, and in spite of the gaping crack across his face, life was still young; a cardinal; a nun; a man of letters in clerical dress, the Abbe Prevost of his day....

Presently she found herself in a wide corridor, before a high, closed door.  She tried it, and saw a staircase mounting and descending.  A passion of curiosity that was half romance, half restlessness, drove her on.  She began to ascend the marble steps, hearing only the echo of her own movements, a little afraid of the cold spaces of the vast house, and yet delighting in the fancies that crowded upon her.  At the top of the flight she found, of course, another apartment, on the same plan as the one below, but smaller and less stately.  The central hall entered from a door supported by marble caryatids, was flagged in yellow marble, and frescoed freely with faded eighteenth-century scenes—­cardinals walking in stiff gardens, a pope alighting from his coach, surrounded by peasants on their knees, and behind him fountains and obelisk and the towering facade of St. Peter’s.  At the moment, thanks to a last glow of light coming in through a west window at the farther end, it was a place beautiful though forlorn.  But the rooms into which she looked on either side were wreck and desolation itself, crowded with broken furniture, many of them shuttered and dark.

As she closed the last door, her attention was caught by a strange bust placed on a pedestal above the entrance.  What was wrong with it?  An accident?  An injury?  She went nearer, straining her eyes to see.  No!—­there was no injury.  The face indeed was gone.  Or, rather, where the face should have been there now descended a marble veil from brow to breast, of the most singular and sinister effect.  Otherwise the bust was that of a young and beautiful woman.  A pleasing horror seized on Kitty as she looked.  Her fancy hunted for the clew.  A faithless wife, blotted from her place?—­made infamous forever by the veil which hid from human eye the beauty she had dishonored?  Or a beloved mistress, on whom the mourning lover could no longer bear to look—­the veil an emblem of undying and irremediable grief?