Tears rushed into her eyes.  The wild emotions that were her being were roused beyond control.  Bending towards him she began to pour out, first brokenly, then in a torrent, the wretched, incoherent story, of which the mere telling, in such an ear, meant new treachery to William and new ruin for herself.

XXII

On a certain cloudy afternoon, some ten days later, a fishing-boat, with a patched orange sail, might have been seen scudding under a light northwesterly breeze through the channels which connect the island of San Francesco with the more easterly stretches of the Venetian lagoon.  The boat presently neared the shore of one of the cultivated lidi—­islands formed out of the silt of many rivers by the travail of centuries, some of them still mere sand or mud banks, others covered by vineyards and fruit orchards—­which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea.  On the lido along which the boat was coasting, the vintage was long since over and the fruit gathered; the last yellow and purple leaves in the orchards, “a pestilent-stricken multitude,” were to-day falling fast to earth, under the sighing, importunate wind.  The air was warm; November was at its mildest.  But all color and light were drowned in floating mists, and darkness lay over the distant city.  It was one of those drear and ghostly days which may well have breathed into the soul of Shelley that superb vision of the dead generations of Venice, rising, a phantom host from the bosom of the sunset, and sweeping in “a rapid mask of death” over the shadowed waters that saw the birth and may yet furnish the tomb of so vast a fame.

Two persons were in the boat—­Kitty, wrapped in sables, her straying hair held close by a cap of the same fur—­and Geoffrey Cliffe.  They had been wandering in the lagoons all day, in order to escape from Venice and observers—­first at Torcello, then at San Francesco, and now they were ostensibly coming home in a wide sweep along the northern lidi and murazzi, that Cliffe might show his companion, from near by, the Porto del Lido, that exit from the lagoons where the salt lakes grow into the sea.

A certain wildness and exaltation, drawn from the solitudes around them and from their tete-a-tete, could be read in both the man and the woman.  Cliffe watched his companion incessantly.  As he lay against the side of the boat at her feet, he saw her framed in the curving sides of the stern, and could read her changing expressions.  Not a happy face!—­that he knew!  A face haunted by shadows from an underworld of thought—­pursuing furies of remorse and fear.  Not the less did he triumph that he had it there, in his power; nor had the flashes of terror and wavering will which he discerned in any way diminished its beauty.

“How long have you known—­that woman?” Kitty asked him, suddenly, after a pause broken only by the playing of the wind with the sail.