Regardless of Milbanke's monosyllabic answers, she kept up a stream of conversation; and at last, when she rose with the general company, she did not leave the room, but paused with her hand on the back of his chair. "I am going for my cloak, James," she said. "Mr. Barnard is to call for me. Shall we say good-night now?" Her face, as she bent forward, leaning over his shoulder, was filled with a bright preoccupation. The scene was no new one--nor was its lesson new. It merely expounded the eternal disparity between the present generation and the past. On the one hand, was the patient surrender of the being who has known life with its poor compensations and its tardy requitals; on the other, the impatience, the ardour, the egotism of the being who longs to understand, to tear the bandage from his blind, curious eyes, to shake the fetters from his eager, groping hands. It was a scene that is enacted every day of every year by fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. A scene in which, daily and yearly, a merciful nature mitigates the tragic truth by means of a blessed sanity--an instinctive renunciation. But this was no case for natural healing balm; this was no case of father and daughter, but of husband and wife. "Shall we say good-night?" Clodagh asked again. Milbanke started and looked up; and something in her warm beauty--something in her gracious youth affected him. "Clodagh," he said timidly. "Clodagh, are you--are you very anxious? Will you enjoy this party very much?" Clodagh looked down on him in frank surprise. "Why, of course!" she said. "Why do you ask?" His gaze wavered before her level glance. He looked round at the fast emptying room. "No reason, my dear!" he murmured--"no reason, I assure you! Go to your party. Enjoy yourself!" At his words she bent quickly and brushed his forehead with her lips, but so lightly, so unthinkingly that the act was valueless. "Good-night!" she said--"good-night, James! And thank you!" She straightened herself quickly; and with a mind already speeding feverishly forward towards the night's amusement, she turned and walked out of the room. It was nine o'clock when she and Barnard arrived at the Palazzo Ugochini, and already the deep purple of the Venetian night was wrapping the waterways in mysterious shade. But to-night she was less absorbed in outward things. An engrossing idea occupied her mind. She felt at once surer--and less sure--of herself than she had felt the night before. The time occupied in reaching the palace and mounting the marble steps seemed to her very brief; and almost before she realised that the moment had come, she heard her own and Barnard's names announced by Lady Frances Hope's English servant.