“You needn’t suppose that I don’t get people to look after me!” she went on, smiling at him again, one shadowy hand propping her cheek.  And she prattled on about the kindness of the chambermaids at Vevey and Brieg, and how one of them had wanted to come with her as her maid.  “Oh!  I shall find one at Florence if I get there—­or a nurse.  But just for these few days I wanted to be free!  In the winter there were so many people about—­so many eyes!  I just pined to cheat them—­get quit of them.  A maid would have bothered me to stay in bed and see doctors—­and you know, William, with this illness of mine you’re so restless!”

“Where were you going to?” he said, without looking up.

“Oh! to Italy somewhere—­just to see some flowers again—­and the sun.  Only not to Venice!”

There was a silence, which she broke by a sudden cry as she drew him down to her.

“William! you know—­I was coming home to you, when that man—­found me.”

“I know.  If it had only been I who killed him!”

“I’m just—­Kitty!” she said, choking—­“as bad as bad can be.  But I couldn’t have done what Mary Lyster did.”

“Kitty—­for God’s sake!”

“Oh, I know it,” she said, almost with triumph—­“now I know it.  I determined to know—­and I got people in Venice to find out.  She sent the message—­that told him where I was—­and I know the man who took it.  I suppose it would be pathetic if I sent her word that I had forgiven her.  But I haven’t!”

Ashe cried out that it was wholly and utterly inconceivable.

[Illustration:  “HE DREW SOME CHAIRS TOGETHER BEFORE THE FIRE”]

“Oh no!—­she hated me because I had robbed her of Geoffrey.  I had killed her life, I suppose—­she killed mine.  It was what I deserved, of course; only just at that moment—­If there is a God, William, how could He have let it happen so?”

The tears choked her.  He left his seat, and, kneeling beside her, he raised her in his arms, while she murmured broken and anguished confessions.

“I was so weak—­and frightened.  And he said, it was no good trying to go back to you.  Everybody knew I had gone to Verona—­and he had followed me—­No one would ever believe—­And he wouldn’t go—­wouldn’t leave me.  It would be mere cruelty and desertion, he said.  My real life was—­with him.  And I seemed—­paralyzed.  Who had sent that message?  It never occurred to me—­I felt as if some demon held me—­and I couldn’t escape—­”

And again the sighs and tears, which wrung his heart—­with which his own mingled.  He tried to comfort her; but what comfort could there be?  They had been the victims of a crime as hideous as any murder; and yet—­behind the crime—­there stretched back into the past the preparations and antecedents by which they themselves, alack, had contributed to their own undoing.  Had they not both trifled with the mysterious test of life—­he no less than she?  And out of the dark had come the axe-stroke that ends weakness, and crushes the unsteeled, inconstant will.