ven imagine those steps
to death deliberately taken; and one did imagine those he left behind
him accepting his peace as theirs.

Peter said, "It wasn't your fault. It was his doing--poor chap."

The uncertain quaver in his voice brought Urquhart's eyes for a moment
upon his face, that was always pale and was now the colour of putty.

"You're ill, aren't you?... I met Stephen.... I was coming back anyhow;
I knew you weren't fit to walk."

He muttered it absently, frowning down on the other greyer face in the
grey dust. Again his hand unsteadily groped over the still heart, and lay
there for a moment.

Abruptly then he looked up, and met Peter's shadow-circled eyes.

"I was over-driving," he said. "I ought to have slowed down to pass him."
He stood up, frowning down on the two in the road.

"We've got to think now," he said, "what to do about it."

To that thinking Peter offered no help and no hindrance. He sat in the
road by the dead man and the bundle of wood, and looked vaguely on the
remote morning that death had dimmed. Denis and death: Peter would have
done a great deal to sever that incredible connection.

But it was, after all, for Denis to effect that severing, to cut himself
loose from that oppressing and impossible weight.

He did so.

"I don't see," said Denis, "that we need ... that we can ... do anything
about it."

Above the clear mountains the sun swung up triumphant, and the wide river
valley was bathed in radiant gold.

CHAPTER VI

HILARY, PEGGY, AND HER BOARDERS

When Leslie and Peter went to Venice to pick up Berovieri goblets and
other things, Leslie stayed at the Hotel Europa and Peter in the Palazzo
Amadeo. The Palazzo Amadeo is a dilapidated palace looking onto the Rio
delle Beccarie; it is let in flats to the poor; and in the sea-story
suite of the great, bare, dingy, gilded rooms lived Hilary and Peggy
Margerison, and three disreputable infants who insisted on bathing in the
canals, and the boarders. The boarders were at the moment six in number;
Peter made seven. The great difficulty with the boarders, Peggy told him,
was to make them pay. They had so little money, and such a constitutional
reluctance to spend that little on their board.

"The poor things," said Peggy, who had a sympathetic heart. "I'm sure I'm
sorry for them, and I hate to ask them for it. But one's got to try and
live."

She was drying Illuminato (baptized in that name by his father's
desire, but