Was it the perception of this pity beside her that drove Kitty to solitude and flight?  At any rate, she said after luncheon that she would go to Madame d’Estrees, and did not ask Miss French to accompany her.

She set out accordingly with the two gondoliers.  But she had hardly passed the Accademia before she bid her men take a cross-cut to the Giudecca.  On these wide waters, with their fresher air and fuller sunshine, a certain physical comfort seemed to breathe upon her.

“Piero, it is not rough!  Can we go to the Lido?” she asked the gondolier behind her.

Piero, who was all smiles and complaisance, as well he might be with a lady who scattered lire as freely as Kitty did, turned the boat at once for that channel “Del Orfano” where the bones of the vanquished dead lie deep amid the ooze.

They passed San Giorgio, and were soon among the piles and sand-banks of the lagoon.  Kitty sat in a dream which blotted the sunshine from the water.  It seemed to her that she was a dead creature, floating in a dead world.  William had ceased to love her.  She had wrecked his career and destroyed her own happiness.  Her child had been taken from her.  Lady Tranmore’s affection had been long since alienated.  Her own mother was nothing to her; and her friends in society, like Madeleine Alcot, would only laugh and gloat over the scandal of the book.

No—­everything was finished!  As her fingers hanging over the side of the gondola felt the touch of the water, her morbid fancy, incredibly quick and keen, fancied herself drowned, or poisoned—­lying somehow white and cold on a bed where William might see and forgive her.

Then with a start of memory which brought the blood rushing to her face, she thought of Cliffe standing beside the door of the great hall in the Vercelli palace—­she seemed to be looking again into those deep, expressive eyes, held by the irony and the passion with which they were infused.  Had the passion any reference to her?—­or was it merely part of the man’s nature, as inseparable from it as flame from the volcano?  If William had cast her off, was there still one man—­wild and bad, indeed, like herself, but poet and hero nevertheless—­who loved her?

She did not much believe it; but still the possibility of it lured her, like some dark gulf that promised her oblivion from this pain—­pain which tortured one so impatient of distress, so hungry for pleasure and praise.

* * * * *

In those days the Lido was still a noble and solitary shore, without the degradations of to-day.

Kitty walked fast and furiously across the sandy road, and over the shingles, turning, when she reached the firm sand, southward towards Malamocco.  It was between four and five, and the autumn afternoon was fast declining.  A fresh breeze was on the sea, and the short waves, intensely blue under a wide, clear heaven, broke in dazzling foam on the red-brown sand.