* * * * *

In the morning, when all preparations were made, the gondoliers waiting below, Ashe’s telegram sent, and the circular notes handed over to Margaret French, who had discreetly left the room, William approached his wife.

“Good-bye!” said Kitty, and gave him her hand, with a strange look and smile.

Ashe, however, drew her to him and kissed her—­against her will.  “I’ll do my best, Kitty,” he said, in a would-be cheery voice—­“to pull us through.  Perhaps—­I don’t know!—­things may turn out better than I think.  Good-bye.  Take care of yourself.  I’ll write, of course.  Don’t hurry home.  You’ll want a fortnight or three weeks yet.”

Kitty said not a word, and in another minute he was gone.  The Italian servants congregated below at the water-gate sent laughing “A rivederlas” after the handsome, good-tempered Englishman, whom they liked and regretted; the gondola moved off; Kitty heard the plash of the water.  But she held back from the window.

Half-way to the bend of the canal beyond the Accademia, Ashe turned and gave a long look at the balcony.  No one was there.  But just as the gondola was passing out of sight, Kitty slipped onto the balcony.  She could see only the figure of Piero, the gondolier, and in another second the boat was gone.  She stayed there for many minutes, clinging to the balustrade and staring, as it seemed, at the sparkle of autumnal sun which danced on the green water and on the red palace to her right.

* * * * *

All the morning Kitty on her sofa pretended to write letters.  Margaret French, working or reading behind her, knew that she scarcely got through a single note, that her pen lay idle on the paper, while her eyes absently watched the palace windows on the other side of the canal.  Miss French was quite certain that some tragic cause of difference between the husband and wife had arisen.  Kitty, the indiscreet, had for once kept her own counsel about the book, and Ashe had with his own hands packed away the volumes which had arrived the night before; so that she could only guess, and from that delicacy of feeling restrained her as much as possible.

Once or twice Kitty seemed on the point of unburdening herself.  Then overmastering tears would threaten; she would break off and begin to write.  At luncheon her look alarmed Miss French, so white was the little face, so large and restless the eyes.  Ought Mr. Ashe to have left her, and left her apparently in anger?  No doubt he thought her much better.  But Margaret remembered the worst days of her illness, the anxious looks of the doctors, and the anguish that Kitty had suffered in the first weeks after her child’s death.  She seemed now, indeed, to have forgotten little Harry, so far as outward expression went; but who could tell what was passing in her strange, unstable mind?  And it often seemed to Margaret that the signs of the past summer were stamped on her indelibly, for those who had eyes to see.