“You wished, I think, to speak to me—­about my wife,” said Ashe, with difficulty.

Under his sheltering hand, his eyes looked straight before him into the fire.

The Dean fidgeted a moment, lifted a small Greek vase on the mantel-piece, and set it down—­then turned round.

“I heard from her ten days ago—­the most piteous letter.  As you know, I had always a great regard for her.  The news of last year was a sharp sorrow to me—­as though she had been a daughter.  I felt I must see her.  So I put myself into the train and went to Venice.”

Ashe started a little, but said nothing.

“Or, rather, to Treviso, for, as I think you know, she is there with Lady Alice.”

“Yes, that I had heard.”

The Dean paused again, then moved a little nearer to Ashe, looking down upon him.

“May I ask—­stop me if I seem impertinent—­how much you know of the history of the winter?”

“Very little!” said Ashe, in a low voice.  “My mother got some information from the English consul at Trieste, who is a friend of hers—­to whom, it seems, Lady Kitty applied; but it did not amount to much.”

The Dean drew a small note-book from a breast-pocket and looked at some entries in it.

“They seem to have reached Marinitza in November If I understood aright, Lady Kitty had no maid with her?”

“No.  The maid Blanche was sent home from Verona.”

“How Lady Kitty ever got through the journey!—­or the winter!” said the Dean, throwing up his hands.  “Her health, of course, is irreparably injured.  But that she did not die a dozen times over, of hardship and misery, is the most astonishing thing!  They were in a wretched village, nearly four thousand feet up, a village of wooden huts, with a wooden hospital.  All the winter nearly they were deep in snow, and Lady Kitty worked as a nurse.  Cliffe seems to have been away fighting, very often, and at other times came back to rest and see to supplies.”

“I understand she passed as his wife?” said Ashe.

The Dean made a sign of reluctant assent.

“They lived in a little house near the hospital.  She tells me that after the first two months she began to loathe him, and she moved into the hospital to escape him.  He tried at first to melt and propitiate her; but when he found that it was no use, and that she was practically lost to him, he changed his temper, and he might have behaved to her like the tyrant he is but that her hold over the people among whom they were living, both on the fighting-men and the women, had become by this time greater than his own.  They adored her, and Cliffe dared not ill-treat her.  And so it went on through the winter.  Sometimes they were on more friendly terms than at others.  I gather that when he showed his dare-devil, heroic side she would relent to him, and talk as though she loved him.  But she would never go back—­to live with him; and that after a time alienated him completely.  He was away more and more; and at last she tells me there was a handsome Bosnian girl, and—­well, you can imagine the rest.  Lady Kitty was so ill in March that they thought her dying, but she managed to write to this consul you spoke of at Trieste, and he sent up a doctor and a nurse.  But this you probably know?”