e set her foot on the Vanderlyn threshold.

The short summer night was already growing transparent: a new born
breeze stirred the soiled surface of the water and sent it lapping
freshly against the old palace doorways. Nearly two o'clock! Nick had no
doubt come back long ago. Susy hurried up the stairs, reassured by the
mere thought of his nearness. She knew that when their eyes and their
lips met it would be impossible for anything to keep them apart.

The gondolier dozing on the landing roused himself to receive her, and
to proffer two envelopes. The upper one was a telegram for Strefford:
she threw it down again and paused under the lantern hanging from the
painted vault, the other envelope in her hand. The address it bore was
in Nick's writing. "When did the signore leave this for me? Has he gone
out again?"

Gone out again? But the signore had not come in since dinner: of that
the gondolier was positive, as he had been on duty all the evening.
A boy had brought the letter--an unknown boy: he had left it without
waiting. It must have been about half an hour after the signora had
herself gone out with her guests.

Susy, hardly hearing him, fled on to her own room, and there, beside the
very lamp which, two months before, had illuminated Ellie Vanderlyn's
fatal letter, she opened Nick's.

"Don't think me hard on you, dear; but I've got to work this thing out
by myself. The sooner the better-don't you agree? So I'm taking the
express to Milan presently. You'll get a proper letter in a day or two.
I wish I could think, now, of something to say that would show you I'm
not a brute--but I can't. N. L."

There was not much of the night left in which to sleep, even had a
semblance of sleep been achievable. The letter fell from Susy's hands,
and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered there, her forehead
pressed against the balustrade, the dawn wind stirring in her thin
laces. Through her closed eyelids and the tightly-clenched fingers
pressed against them, she felt the penetration of the growing light,
the relentless advance of another day--a day without purpose and without
meaning--a day without Nick. At length she dropped her hands, and
staring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the Grand
Canal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavy
curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the darkness to the
lounge and fell among its pillows-face downward--groping, delving for