Kitty sat silent, her eyes fixed upon the barca which held the coffin under its pall.  Her mind was the scene of an infinite number of floating and fragmentary recollections; of the day when she and Cliffe had followed the murazzi towards the open sea; of the meeting at Verona; of the long winter, with its hardship and its horror; and that hatred and contempt which had sprung up between them.  Could she love no one, cling faithfully to no one?  And now the restless brain, the vast projects, the mixed nature, the half-greatness of the man had been silenced—­crushed—­in a moment, by the stroke of a knife.  He had been killed by a jealous woman—­because of his supposed love for another woman, whose abhorrence, in truth, he had earned in a few short weeks.  There was something absurd mingled with the horror—­as though one watched the prank of a demon.

Her sensuous nature was tormented by the thought of the last moment.  Had he had time to feel despair—­the thirst for life?  She prayed not.  She thought of the Sunday afternoon at Grosville Park when they had tried to play billiards, and Lord Grosville had come down on them; or she saw him sitting opposite to her, at supper, on the night of the fancy ball, in the splendid Titian dress, while she gloated over the thoughts of the trick she had played on Mary Lyster—­or bending over her when she woke from her swoon at Verona.  Had she ever really loved him for one hour?—­and if not, what possible excuse, before gods or men, was there for this ugly, self-woven tragedy into which she had brought herself and him, merely because her vanity could not bear that William had not been able to love her, for long, far above all her deserts?

William!  Her heart leaped in her breast.  He was thirty-six—­and she not twenty-four.  A strange and desolate wonder overtook her as the thought seized her of the years they might still spend on the same earth—­members of the same country, breathing the same air—­and yet forever separate.  Never to see him—­or speak to him again!—­the thought stirred her imagination, as it were, while it tortured her; there was in it a certain luxury and romance of pain.

Thus, as she followed Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her mind sink in dreams of Ashe—­and in the dismal reckoning up of all that she had so lightly and inconceivably lost.  Sometimes she found herself absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of the old moral commonplaces.

It had been so easy and so exciting to defy them.  Stones which the builders of life reject—­do they still avenge themselves in the old way?  There was a kind of rage in the thought.

On the way home Kitty expressed a wish to go into St. Mark’s alone.  Lady Alice left her there, and in the shadow of the atrium Kitty looked at her strangely, and kissed her.

An hour after Lady Alice had reached the hotel a letter was brought to her.  In it Kitty bade her—­and the Dean—­farewell, and asked that no effort should be made to track her.  “I am going to friends—­where I shall be safe and at peace.  Thank you both with all my heart.  Let no one think about me any more.”