Otherwise the bust was
that of a young and beautiful woman. A pleasing horror seized on Kitty
as she looked. Her fancy hunted for the clew. A faithless wife, blotted
from her place?--made infamous forever by the veil which hid from human
eye the beauty she had dishonored? Or a beloved mistress, on whom the
mourning lover could no longer bear to look--the veil an emblem of
undying and irremediable grief?
Kitty stood enthralled, striving to pierce the ghastly meaning of the
bust, when a sound--a distant sound--a shock through her. She heard a
step overhead, in the topmost apartment, or
mansarde of the palace, a
step that presently traversed the whole length of the floor immediately
above her head and began to descend the stair.
Strange! Federigo must have shut the great gates by this time--as she
had bade him? He himself inhabited the smaller
entresol on the farther
side of the palace, far away. Other inhabitants there were none; so
Donna Laura had assured her.
The step approached, resonant in the silence. Kitty, seized with nervous
fright, turned and ran down the broad staircase by which she had come,
through the series of deserted rooms in the
piano nobile, till she
reached the great hall.
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