“Effort, and expectation and desire—­
     And something evermore about to be!”

He flung the words upon the wind, which scattered them as soon as they were uttered, merely that he might give them a bitter denial, reject for himself, now and always, the temper they expressed.  He had known it well, none better!—­gone to bed, and risen up with it—­the mere joy in the “mere living.”  It had seasoned everything, twined round everything, great and small—­a day’s trout-fishing or deer-stalking; a new book, a friend, a famous place; then politics, and the joys of power.

Gone!  Here he was, hurrying back to England, to take perhaps in his still young hand the helm of her vast fortunes; and of all the old “expectation and desire,” the old passion of hope, the old sense of the magic that lies in things unknown and ways untrodden, he seemed to himself now incapable.  He would do his best, and without the political wrestle life would be too trifling to be borne; but the relish and the savor were gone, and all was gray.

* * * * *

Ah!—­he remembered one or two storm-walks with Kitty in their engaged or early married days—­in Scotland chiefly.  As he trudged up this Swiss pass he could see stretches of Scotch heather under drifting mist, and feel a little figure in its tweed dress flung suddenly by the wind and its own soft will against his arm.  And then, the sudden embrace, and the wet, fragrant cheek, and her Voice—­mocking and sweet!

Oh, God! where was she now?  The shock of her disappearance from Venice had left in some ways a deeper mark upon him than even the original catastrophe.  For who that had known her could think of such a being, alone, in a world of strangers, without a peculiar dread and anguish?  That she was alive he knew, for her five hundred a year—­and she had never accepted another penny from him since her flight—­was still drawn on her behalf by a banking firm in Paris.  His solicitors, since the failure of their first efforts to trace her after Cliffe’s death, had made repeated inquiries; Ashe had himself gone to Paris to see the bankers in question.  But he was met by their solemn promise to Kitty to keep her secret inviolate.  Madame d’Estrees supplied him with the name of the convent in which Kitty had been brought up; but the mother superior denied all knowledge of her.  Meanwhile no course of action on Kitty’s part could have restored her so effectually to her place in Ashe’s imagination.  She haunted his days and nights.  So also did his memory of the Dean’s petition.  Insensibly, without argument, the whole attitude of his mind thereto had broken down; since he had been out of office, and his days and nights were no longer absorbed in the detail of administration and Parliamentary leadership, he had been the defenceless prey of grief; yearning and pity and agonized regret, rising from the deep subconscious self, had overpowered his first recoil and determination; and in the absence of all other passionate hope, the one desire and dream which still lived warm and throbbing at his heart was the dream that still in some crowd, or loneliness, he might again, before it was too late, see Kitty’s face and the wildness of Kitty’s eyes.