time in Venice."

Her hostess flicked the ash from her cigarette.

"Some new influence?"

Clodagh was taken unawares.

"I--I have got to know myself better since that time in Venice," she
said below her breath. "Some one--something--has made me see that it
was not my true self that showed then. I was foolish in those days. I
was carried away----"

A very faint smile flitted across Lady Frances's lips.

"That idea belongs to the some one else?" she said in a quiet, cordial
tone that invited confidence.

Moved by a sudden impulse, Clodagh leant forward in her seat and
clasped her hands. As on the day in Florence--the day when she had
written her letter to Laurence Asshlin--her soul thirsted for
confession. After two long years of silent thought, the temptation to
open her heart in speech was overmastering. The room was comfortable,
dimly lighted, almost homelike; the hour was propitious; her hostess's
voice was extraordinarily kind. She stole one half-shy, half-eager
glance at the averted face.

"Lady Frances," she said suddenly, "I was very childish, very foolish,
that time in Venice. I knew it even before I--before I left."

With extreme tact, Lady Frances refrained from looking at her. Smoking
quietly, she made her next remark in a low, reassuring voice.

"Then that was why you left so suddenly?"

"That was why."

"Walter Gore must have been very eloquent!"

Lady Frances spoke in the same even tone; but, as she felt the thrill
of surprise with which Clodagh received her words, she turned quickly
and decisively, and met her startled eyes.

"I always knew that Walter Gore went back with you to your hotel on
that last night," she said. "I always knew that he read you a very
moral lecture."

Clodagh drew a quick breath.

"But how did you know?"

Lady Frances studied her face for a moment; then she gave a direct
answer to the question put to her.

"Walter himself told me," she said.

After she had spoken there was silence in the room. On her part it was
the silence of the experimenter, who has taken a step in a new
direction and is waiting for results; on Clodagh's, it was the silence
of incredulity, of doubt, of dread. That Gore should have spoken of
that last night in Venice to any third person was a circumstance that,
at very least, needed explanation. She sat breathlessly waiting that
explanation.

During the moment of fruitful silence Lady Frances Hope remained very
still, fingering her ciga