Two persons were in the boat--Kitty, wrapped in sables, her straying
hair held close by a cap of the same fur--and Geoffrey Cliffe. They had
been wandering in the lagoons all day, in order to escape from Venice
and observers--first at Torcello, then at San Francesco, and now they
were ostensibly coming home in a wide sweep along the northern
lidiand
murazzi, that Cliffe might show his companion, from near by, the
Porto del Lido, that exit from the lagoons where the salt lakes grow
into the sea.
A certain wildness and exaltation, drawn from the solitudes around them
and from their
tete-a-tete, could be read in both the man and the
woman. Cliffe watched his companion incessantly. As he lay against the
side of the boat at her feet, he saw her framed in the curving sides of
the stern, and could read her changing expressions. Not a happy
face!--that he knew! A face haunted by shadows from an underworld of
thought--pursuing furies of remorse and fear. Not the less did he
triumph that he had it
there, in his power; nor had the flashes of
terror and wavering will which he discerned in any way diminished its
beauty.
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