“Go at once!” Kitty repeated, with a peremptory gesture.  She herself rose from her seat, and with one hand resting on the table awaited the new-comer.  Blanche looked at her—­hesitated—­and went.

Geoffrey Cliffe came to Kitty’s side.  As he approached her his eyes fastened on the loveliness of her attitude, her fair head.  In his own expression there was a visionary, fantastic joy; it was the look of the dreamer who, for once, finds in circumstance and the real, poetry adequate and overflowing.

“Kitty!—­why did you do this?” he said to her, passionately, as he caught her hand.

Kitty snatched it away, trembling under his look.  She began the answer she had devised while he was crossing the flagged quay towards her.  But Cliffe paid no heed.  He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she sank back powerless into her chair as he bent over her.

“Cruel—­cruel child, to play with me so!  Did you mean to put me to a last test?—­or did your hard little heart misgive you at the last moment?  I cross-examined your landlady—­I bribed the servants—­the gondoliers.  Not a word!  They were loyal—­or you had paid them better.  I went back to my hotel in black despair.  Oh, you artist!—­you plotter!  Kitty—­you shall pay me this some day!  And there—­there on my table—­all the time—­lay your little crumpled note!”

“What note?” she gasped—­“what note?”

“Actress!” he said, with an amused laugh.

And cautiously, playfully, lest she should snatch it from him, he unfolded it before her.

Without signature and without date, the soiled half-sheet contained this message, written in Italian and in a disguised handwriting: 

* * * * *

“Too many spectators.  Come to Verona to-night. 
                                       “K.”

Kitty looked at it, and then at the face beside her—­infused with a triumphant power and passion.  She seemed to shrink upon herself, and her head fell back against one of the supports of the pergola.  One of the blue lights from above fell with ghastly effect upon the delicate tilted face and closed eyes.  Cliffe bent over her in a sharp alarm, and saw that she had fainted away.

PART V

REQUIESCAT

     “Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens,
     Dusk the hall with yew!”

XXIII

“How strange!” thought the Dean, as he once more stepped back into the street to look at the front of the Home Secretary’s house in Hill Street.  “He is certainly in town.”

For, according to the Times, William Ashe the night before had been hotly engaged in the House of Commons fighting an important bill, of which he was in charge, through committee.  Yet the blinds of the house in Hill Street were all drawn, and the Dean had not yet succeeded in getting any one to answer the bell.