The Dean arrived in Venice by the midnight train, and went to the hotel on the Riva whither Lady Alice had directed him.  She was still up, waiting to see him, and in the dark passage outside Kitty’s door she told him what she knew of the murder.  It appeared that late that night a startling arrest had been made—­of no less a person than the Signorina Ricci, the well-known actress of the Apollo Theatre, and of two men supposed to have been hired by her for the deed.  This news was still unknown to Kitty—­she was in bed, and her companion had kept it from her.

“How is she?” asked the Dean.

“Frightfully excited—­or else dumb.  She let me give her something to make her sleep.  Strangely enough, she said to me this morning on the way from Treviso:  ‘It is a woman—­and I know her!’”

The following day, when the Dean entered the dingy hotel sitting-room, a thin figure in black came hurriedly out of the bedroom beside it, and Kitty caught him by the hand.

“Isn’t it horrible?” she said, staring at him with her changed, dark-rimmed eyes.  “She tried once, in Bosnia.  One of the Italians who came out with us—­she had got hold of him.  Do you think—­he suffered?”

Her voice was quite quiet.  The Dean shuddered.

“One of the stabs was in the heart,” he said.  “But try and put it from you, Lady Kitty.  Sit down.”  He touched her gently on the shoulder.

Kitty nodded.

“Ah, then,” she said—­“then he couldn’t have suffered—­could he?  I’m glad.”

She let the Dean put her in a chair, and, clasping her hands round her knees, she seemed to pursue her own thoughts.

Her aspect affected him almost beyond bearing.  Ashe’s brilliant wife?—­London’s spoiled child?—­this withered, tragic little creature, of whom it was impossible to believe that, in years, she was not yet twenty-four?  So bewildered in mind, so broken in nerve was she, that it was not till he had sat with her some time, now entering perforce into the cloud of horror that brooded over her, now striving to drag her from it, that she asked him about his visit to England.

He told her in a faltering voice.

She received it very quietly, even with a little, queer, twisting laugh.

“I thought he wouldn’t.  Was Lady Tranmore there?”

The Dean replied that Lady Tranmore had been there.

“Ah, then, of course there was no chance,” said Kitty.  “When one is as good as that, one never forgives.”

She looked up quickly.  “Did William say he forgave me?”

The Dean hesitated.

“He said a great deal that was kind and generous.”

A slight spasm passed over Kitty’s face.

“I suppose he thought it ridiculous to talk of forgiving.  So did I—­once.”

She covered her eyes with her hands—­removing them to say, impatiently: 

“One can’t go on being sorry every moment of the day.  No, one can’t!  Why are we made so?  William would agree with me there.”