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Updated: June 26, 2025
"Walk quickly!" he said in her ear, hurrying her past. When they had reached one of the narrow streets behind the Piazza, Kitty looked at him white and haughtily tremulous. "What did that mean?" "Why should you deign to ask?" was Cliffe's impatient reply. "I have ceased to go and see her. I suppose she guesses why." "I will have no rivalry with Mademoiselle Ricci!" cried Kitty.
It would be too absurd to suppose that he was here by mere coincidence. Mary believed that nothing but the intervention of Cliffe's mighty kinsman from the north had saved the situation the year before. Kitty would certainly have betrayed her husband but for the force majeure arrayed against her. And now the magnate who had played Providence slumbered in the family vault.
In her abstraction she saw that she had nearly come into collision with a woman sitting at a café table and surrounded by a noisy group of men. With a painful start Kitty perceived the mocking eyes of Mademoiselle Ricci. The Ricci said something in Italian, staring the while at the English lady; and the men near her laughed, some furtively, some loudly. Cliffe's face set.
I turned on him wrathfully. "What the dickens is that?" "Dr. Cliffe's orders, sir." "When did he order it?" "When I told him what you looked like after interviewing Mister Daniel Gedge. And he said, if you was to look like that again I was to give you this. So I'm giving it to you, sir." There was no arguing with Marigold in front of a thousand people. I swallowed the stuff quickly.
After months of depression and humiliation, her success with him had somehow restored those illusions on which cheerfulness depends. How ill Kitty looked and how conscious! Mary was impetuously certain that Kitty had betrayed her knowledge of Cliffe's presence in Venice; and equally certain that William knew nothing. Poor William! Well, what can you expect of such a temperament such a race?
Cliffe had just returned from an arduous winter in the Balkans, where he had rendered superb service to the cause of the Bosnian insurgents. He was well known in Venice, and the terrible event had caused a profound sensation there. No clew to the outrage had yet been obtained. But Mr. Cliffe's purse and watch had not been removed.
"Geoffrey Cliffe's arrived," he said to Ashe, as they reached him. "Has he?" said Ashe, and turned to go up-stairs. But Kershaw showed a lively interest. "You mean the traveller?" he asked of his host. "I do. As mad as usual," said the old man. "He and my niece Kitty make a pair." When Ashe returned to the drawing-room he found it filled with the sound of talk and laughter.
She passed him, and, to her own intense annoyance, a bunch of pale roses she carried at her belt brushed against the doorway, so that one broke and fell. She turned to pick it up, but it was already in Cliffe's hand. She held out hers, threateningly. "I think not." He put it in his pocket. "Here is Federigo. Good-night." It was quite dark when Kitty reached home.
A fatal fusion of their two natures imaginations sympathies had come about. Each was interpenetrated by the other; and retreat was impossible. A kind of sombre power, indeed the power of the poet and the dreamer seemed to have spoken from Cliffe's strange wooing. He had taken no particular pains to flatter her, or to conceal his original hesitation.
Darrell, Mr. Louis Harman, and Mr. Geoffrey Cliffe? She laid an emphasis on the last name, which made Ashe say, carelessly: "You want to meet him so much?" "Of course. Doesn't all the world?" Ashe replied that he could only answer for himself, and as far as he was concerned he could do very well without Cliffe's company at all times.
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