“I know you’ll leave me the L500 a year that was settled on me.  It’ll be so good for me to be poor—­and dressed in serge—­and trying to do something else with these useless hands than writing books that break your heart.  I am giving away all my smart clothes.  Blanche is going home.  Oh, William, William!  I’m going to shut this, and it’s like the good-bye of death—­a mean and ugly—­death.

“...  Later.  They have just brought me a note from Danieli’s.  So Margaret did write to you, and your mother has come.  Why did you send her, William?  She doesn’t love me—­and I shall only stab and hurt her.  Though I’ll try not—­for your sake.”

Two days later Ashe received almost by the same post which brought him the letter from Kitty, just quoted, the following letter from his mother: 

     “My DEAREST WILLIAM,—­I have seen Kitty.  With some difficulty she
     consented to let me go and see her yesterday evening about nine
     o’clock.

“I arrived between six and seven, having travelled straight through without a break, except for an hour or two at Milan, and immediately on arriving I sent a note to Margaret French.  She came in great distress, having just had a fresh scene with Kitty.  Oh, my dear William, her report could not well be worse.  Since she wrote to us Kitty seems to have thrown over all precautions.  They used to meet in churches or galleries, and go out for long days in the gondola or a fishing-boat together, and Kitty would come home alone and lie on the sofa through the evening, almost without speaking or moving.  But lately he comes in with her, and stays hours, reading to her, or holding her hand, or talking to her in a low voice, and Margaret cannot stop it.

“Yet she has done her best, poor girl!  Knowing what we all knew last year, it filled her with terror when she first discovered that he was in Venice and that they had met.  But it was not till it had gone on about a week, with the strangest results on Kitty’s spirits and nerves, that she felt she must interfere.  She not only spoke to Kitty, but she spoke and wrote to him in a very firm, dignified way.  Kitty took no notice—­only became very silent and secretive.  And he treated poor Margaret with a kind of courteous irony which made her blood boil, and against which she could do nothing.  She says that Kitty seems to her sometimes like a person moving in sleep—­only half conscious of what she is doing; and at others she is wildly excitable, irritable with everybody, and only calming down and becoming reasonable when this man appears.

“There is much talk in Venice.  They seem to have been seen together by various London friends who knew—­about the difficulties last year.  And then, of course, everybody is aware that you are not here—­and the whole story of the book goes from mouth to mouth—­and people say that a separation has been arranged—­and so on.  These are the kind of rumors that