At the moment I found nothing to say. Of course I was glad—no use in denying that. Yet it was grievous in its way. The thing was dead—the thing that so long, through so much, had bound her to Arsenio Valdez. The thing which had begun with the kiss in the garden at Cragsfoot, years ago, was finished. “He put me to utter shame; he made me eat dirt,” she whispered with a sudden note of passion in her voice. She laid her arm on mine, and rose from her chair. “It spoils my meeting with you to think of it. Come back; I can do some work before it’s dark, and you can go and see him—he’ll be at the _palazzo_. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be friends with him still.” “I don’t quite know about that,” I observed cautiously. “I’m willing enough to be friendly with him, for that matter. But that’s—that’s not enough. Come along, we shall just about catch a boat, I think.” We began to walk along to the quay where we were to embark. “So he says he’s going to kill himself!” Lucinda added with a scornful laugh. CHAPTER XIX VIEWS AND WHIMS SUCH, then, was Lucinda’s state of mind with regard to the matter. Her encounter with Nina at Cimiez had opened her eyes; after that, no evasions or lies from Arsenio could avail to blind her. The keys of the fort had been sold behind her back. The one thing that she had preserved and cherished out of the wreck of her fortunes, out of the sordid tragedy of her relations with her husband, had been filched from her; her proud and fastidious independence had been bartered; Arsenio had sold it; Nina Dundrannan had bought it. It was in effect that wearing of Nina’s cast-off frocks which, long ago at Ste. Maxime, she had pictured, with a smile, as an inconceivable emblem of humiliation. Arsenio had brought her to it, tricked her into it by his “presents” out of his “winnings.”