There was a short silence.

The eyes of each perused the other’s face.  Kitty began some words, and left them unfinished.  Cliffe resumed—­in another tone—­while the door he held swung gently backward, his hand following it.

“I spent last winter, as perhaps you know, with the Bosnian insurgents in the mountains.  It was a tough business—­hardships I should never have had the pluck to face if I had known what was before me.  Then, in July, I got fever.  I had to come away, to find a doctor, and I was a long time at Cattaro pulling round.  And, meanwhile, the Turks—­God blast them!—­have been at their fiends’ work.  Half my particular friends, with whom I spent the winter, have been hacked to pieces since I left them.”

She wavered, held by his look, by the coercion of that mingled passion and indifference with which he spoke.  There was in his manner no suggestion whatever of things behind, no reference to herself or to the past between them.  His passion, it seemed, was for his comrades; his indifference for her.  What had he to do with her any more?  He had been among the realities of battle and death, while she had been mincing and ambling along the usual feminine path.  That was the utterance, it seemed, of the man’s whole manner and personality, and nothing could have more effectually recalled Kitty’s wild nature to the lure.

“Are you going back?” She had turned from him and was pulling at the fingers of the glove he had picked up.

“Of course!  I am only kicking my heels here till I can collect the money and stores—­ay, and the men—­I want.  I give my orders in London, and I must be here to see to the transshipment of stores and the embarkation of my small force!  Not meant for the newspapers, you see, Lady Kitty—­these little details!”

He drew himself up smiling, his worn aspect expressing just that mingling of dare-devil adventure with subtler and more self-conscious things which gave edge and power to his personality.

“I heard you were wounded,” said Kitty, abruptly.

“So I was—­badly.  We were defending a polje—­one of their high mountain valleys, against a Beg and his troops.  My left arm”—­he pointed to the black sling in which it was still held—­“was nearly cut to pieces.  However, it is practically well.”

He took it out of the sling and showed that he could use it.  Then his expression changed.  He stepped back to the door, and opened it ceremoniously.

“Don’t, however, let me delay you, Lady Kitty—­by my chatter.”

Kitty’s cheeks were crimson.  Her momentary yielding vanished in a passion of scorn.  What!—­he knew that she had seen him before, seen him with that woman—­and he dared to play the mere shattered hero, kept in Venice by these crusader’s reasons!

“Have you another volume on the way?” she asked him, as she advanced.  “I read your last.”

Her smile was the smile of an enemy.  He eyed her strangely.