“Dear Lady Kitty!” said the Dean, tenderly—­“God forgives—­and with Him there is always hope, and fresh beginning.”

Kitty shook her head.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said.  “I wonder whether”—­she looked at him with a certain piteous and yet affectionate malice—­“if you’d been as deep as I, whether you’d know.”

The Dean flushed.  The hidden wound stung again.  Had he, then, no right to speak?  He felt himself the elder son of the parable—­and hated himself anew.

But he was a Christian, on his Master’s business.  He must obey orders, even though he could feel no satisfaction, or belief in himself—­though he seem to himself such a shallow and perfunctory person.  So he did his tender best for Kitty.  He spent his loving, enthusiastic, pitiful soul upon her; and while he talked to her she sat with her hands crossed on her lap, and her eyes wandering through the open window to the forests of masts outside and the dancing wavelets of the lagoon.  When at last he spoke of the further provision Ashe wished to make for her, when he implored her to summon Margaret French, she shook her head.  “I must think what I shall do,” she said, quietly; and a minute afterwards, with a flash of her old revolt—­“He cannot prevent my going to Harry’s grave!”

* * * * *

Early the following morning the murdered man was carried to the cemetery at San Michele.  In spite of some attempt on the part of the police to keep the hour secret, half Venice followed the black-draped barca, which bore that flawed poet and dubious hero to his rest.

It was a morning of exceeding beauty.  On the mean and solitary front of the Casa dei Spiriti there shone a splendor of light; the lagoon was azure and gold; the main-land a mist of trees in their spring leaf; while far away the cypresses of San Francesco, the slender tower of Torcello, and the long line of Murano—­and farther still the majestic wall of silver Alps—­greeted the eyes that loved them, as the ear is soothed by the notes of a glorious and yet familiar music.

Amid the crowd of gondolas that covered the shallow stretch of lagoon between the northernmost houses of Venice and the island graveyard, there was one which held two ladies.  Alice Wensleydale was there against her will, and her pinched and tragic face showed her repulsion and irritation.  She had endeavored in vain to dissuade Kitty from coming; but in the end she had insisted on accompanying her.  Possibly, as the boat glided over the water amid a crowd of laughing, chattering Italians, the silent Englishwoman was asking herself what was to be the future of the trust she had taken on herself.  Kitty in her extremity had remembered her half-sister’s promise, and had thrown herself upon it.  But a few weeks’ experience had shown that they were strange and uncongenial to each other.  There was no true affection between them—­only a certain haunting instinct of kindred.  And even this was weakened or embittered by those memories in Alice’s mind which Kitty could never approach and Alice never forget.  What was she to do with her half-sister, stranded and dishonored as she was?—­How content or comfort her?—­How live her own life beside her?