She rose from her seat.

“I must go and take my things off,” she said, in “a vague voice,” and as she moved she tottered a little.  He turned to look at her.  Amid his own crushing sense of defeat and catastrophe, his natural and righteous indignation, he remembered that she had been ill—­he remembered their child.  But whether from the excitement, first of the meeting in the Vercelli palace, and now of this scene—­or merely from the heat of the fire over which she had been hanging, her cheeks were flushed, her eyes blazed.  Her beauty had never been more evident; but it made little appeal to him; it was the wild, ungovernable beauty from which he had suffered.  He saw that she was excited, but there was an air also of returning physical vigor; and the nascent feeling which might have been strengthened by pallor and prostration died away.

Kitty moved as though to pass him and go to her room, which opened out of the salon.  But as she neared him she suddenly caught him by the arm.

“William!—­William! don’t do it!—­don’t resign!  Let me apologize!”

He was angered by her persistence, and merely said, coldly: 

“I have given you my reasons, Kitty, why such a course is impossible.”

“And—­and you start to-morrow morning?”

“By the early train.  Please let me go, Kitty.  There are many things to arrange.  I must order the gondola, and see if the people here can cash me a check.”

“You mean—­to leave me alone?” The words had a curious emphasis.

“I had a few words with Miss French before you came in.  The packet arrived by the evening post, and seeing that it was books—­for you—­I opened it.  After about an hour”—­he turned and walked away again—­“I saw my bearings.  Then I called Miss French, told her I should have to go to-morrow, and asked her how long she could stay with you.”

“William!” cried Kitty again, leaning heavily on the table beside her—­“don’t go!—­don’t leave me!”

His face darkened.

“So you would prevent me from taking the only honorable, the only decent way out of this thing that remains to me?”

She made no immediate reply.  She stood—­wrapped apparently in painful abstraction—­a creature lovely and distraught.  The masses of her fair hair loosened by the breeze on the canal had fallen about her cheeks and shoulders; her black hat framed the white brow and large, feverish eyes; and the sable cape she had worn in the gondola had slipped down over the thin, sloping shoulders, revealing the young figure and the slender waist.  She might have been a child of seventeen, grieving over the death of her goldfinch.

Ashe gathered together his official letters and papers, found his check-book, and began to write.  While he wrote he explained that Miss French could keep her company at least another fortnight, that he could leave with them four or five circular notes for immediate expenses, and would send more from home directly he arrived.