On the night following her interview with Lady Tranmore, Kitty went from one restless, tormented dream into another, but towards morning she fell into one of a different kind.  She dreamed she was in a country of great mountains.  The peaks were snow-crowned, vast glaciers filled the chasms on their flanks, forests of pines clothed the lower sides of the hills, and the fields below were full of spring flowers.  She saw a little Alpine village, and a church with an old and slender campanile.  A plain stone building stood by—­it seemed to be an inn of the old-fashioned sort—­and she entered it.  The dinner-table was ready in the low-roofed salle-a-manger, and as she sat down to eat she saw that two other guests were at the same table.  She glanced at them, and perceived that one was William and the other her child, Harry, grown older—­and transfigured.  Instead of the dull and clouded look which had wrung her heart in the old days, against which she had striven, patiently and impatiently, in vain, the blue eyes were alive with mind and affection.  It was as if the child beheld his mother for the first time and she him.  As he recognized her he gave a cry of joy, waving one hand towards her while with the other he touched his father on the arm.  William raised his head.  But when he saw his wife his face changed.  He rose from his seat, and drawing the little boy into his arms he walked away.  Kitty saw them disappear into a long passage, indeterminate and dark.  The child’s face over his father’s shoulder was turned in longing towards his mother, and as he was carried away he stretched out his little hands to her in lamentation.

Kitty woke up bathed in tears.  She sprang out of bed and threw the window nearest to her open to the night.  The winter night was mild, and a full moon sailed the southern sky.  Not a sound on the water, not a light in the palaces; a city of ebony and silver, Venice slept in the moonlight.  Kitty gathered a cloak and some shawls round her, and sank into a low chair, still crying and half conscious.  At his inn, some few hundred yards away, between her and the Piazzetta, was Geoffrey Cliffe waking too?—­making his last preparations?  She knew that all his stores were ready, and that he proposed to ship them and the twenty young fellows, Italians and Dalmatians, who were going with him to join the insurgents, that morning, by a boat leaving for Cattaro.  He himself was to follow twenty-four hours later, and it was his firm and confident expectation that Kitty would go with him—­passing as his wife.  And, indeed, Kitty’s own arrangements were almost complete, her money in her purse, the clothes she meant to take with her packed in one small trunk, some of the Tranmore jewels which she had been recently wearing ready to be returned on the morrow to Lady Tranmore’s keeping, other jewels, which she regarded as her own, together with the remainder of her clothes, put aside, in order to be left in the custody of the landlord of the apartment till Kitty should claim them again.