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 a deeper night….
She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun on the floor at her feet. She had slept, then— was it possible?—it must be eight or nine o’clock already! She had slept—slept like a drunkard—with that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now she remembered—she had dreamed that the letter was a dream! But there, inexorably, it lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read it. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling before the empty hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite, she burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that some day!
After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of feeling younger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that he was going away for “a day or two.” And the letter was not cruel: there were tender things in it, showing through the curt words. She smiled at herself a little stiffly in the glass, put a dash of red on her colourless lips, and rang for the maid.
“Coffee, Giovanna, please; and will you tell Mr. Strefford that I should like to see him presently.”
If Nick really kept to his intention of staying away for a few days she must trump up some explanation of his absence; but her mind refused to work, and the only thing she could think of was to take Strefford into her confidence. She knew that he could be trusted in a real difficulty; his impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful ingenuity when his friends required it.
The maid stood looking at her with a puzzled gaze, and Susy somewhat sharply repeated her order. “But don’t wake him on purpose,” she added, foreseeing the probable effect on Strefford’s temper.
“But, signora, the gentleman is already out.”
“Already out?” Strefford, who could hardly be routed from his bed before luncheon-time! “Is it so late?” Susy cried, incredulous.
“After nine. And the gentleman took the eight o’clock train for England. Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left word that he would write to the signora.”
The door closed upon the maid, and Susy continued to gaze at her painted image in the glass, as if she had been trying to outstare an importunate stranger. There was no one left for her to take counsel of, then—no one but poor Fred Gillow! She made a grimace at the idea.
But what on earth could have summoned Strefford back to England?
XII
NICK LANSING, in the Milan express, was roused by the same bar of sunshine lying across his knees. He yawned, looked with disgust at his stolidly sleeping neighbours, and wondered why he had decided to go to Milan, and what on earth he should do when he got there. The difficulty about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left one facing a void….
When the train drew into the station at Milan, he scrambled out, got some coffee, and having drunk it decided to continue his journey to Genoa. The state of being carried passively onward postponed action and dulled thought; and after twelve hours of furious mental activity that was exactly what he wanted.
He fell into a doze again, waking now and then to haggard intervals of more thinking, and then dropping off to the clank and rattle of the train. Inside his head, in his waking intervals, the same clanking and grinding of wheels and chains went on unremittingly. He had done all his lucid thinking within an hour of leaving the Palazzo Vanderlyn the night before; since then, his brain had simply continued to revolve indefatigably about the same old problem. His cup of coffee, instead of clearing his thoughts, had merely accelerated their pace.
At Genoa he wandered about in the hot streets, bought a cheap suitcase and some underclothes, and then went down to the port in search of a little hotel he remembered there. An hour later he was sitting in the coffee- room, smoking and glancing vacantly over the papers while he waited for dinner, when he became aware of being timidly but intently examined by a small round-faced gentleman with eyeglasses who sat alone at the adjoining table.
“Hullo—Buttles!” Lansing exclaimed, recognising with surprise the recalcitrant secretary who had resisted Miss Hicks’s endeavour to convert him to Tiepolo.
Mr. Buttles, blushing to the roots of his scant hair, half rose and bowed ceremoniously.
Nick Lansing’s first feeling was of annoyance at being disturbed in his solitary broodings; his next, of relief at having to postpone them even to converse with Mr. Buttles.
“No idea you were here: is the yacht in harbour?” he asked, remembering that the Ibis must be just about to spread her wings.
Mr. Buttles, at salute behind his chair, signed a mute negation: for the moment he seemed too embarrassed to speak.
“Ah—you’re here as an advance guard? I remember now—I saw Miss Hicks in Venice the day before yesterday,” Lansing continued, dazed at the thought that hardly forty-eight hours had passed since his encounter
