"I know!" she broke in--"I know it's awfully kind of Mr. Tomes! But I couldn't go to see an archway to-day. I couldn't. I really--really couldn't." Mr. Tomes relapsed into a state of pompous offence. Milbanke looked from one to the other in nervous misery. "Certainly not--certainly not, my dear!" he agreed. "You are tired; you have been doing too much." He peered at her through the softly falling twilight with a look of helpless concern. She felt, rather than saw the look; and that sensitive dread of being rendered conspicuous that attacks us all in early life, caused her to shrink into herself. "Nonsense!" she said a little coldly. "I am perfectly well. Please go and see Mr. Tomes's archway. I don't mind being left alone. I would like to be left alone." Milbanke stirred uneasily. "Of course, my dear, if you wish it!" he murmured. "Mr. Tomes, shall we---- Are you ready----" He waved his hand towards the canal. Mr. Tomes drew his loose limbs together, and bowed formally to Clodagh. "Certainly, if you wish it, Mr. Milbanke!" he said stiffly; and walked off along the terrace. Milbanke did not follow him at once. He stood looking at his wife in pained uncertainty. "Clodagh, my dear," he began at last, "if there is anything I can do----" But Clodagh turned away. "No," she said almost inaudibly; "no, there is nothing. I'd like to be alone. I want to be alone." And Milbanke--perplexed, embarrassed, vaguely unhappy--turned slowly, and walked across the terrace after his scientific friend. Clodagh waited until the last sound of Mr. Tomes's loud, rolling voice had melted into the distance with the departure of his gondola; then with a stiff, tired movement she rose, walked in her own turn across the terrace, and, leaning upon the stone parapet, gazed out into the purple twilight, as she had gazed on the evening of her first arrival. How long ago--how infinitely far away--that first arrival seemed to her! With the capacity for the assimilation of new emotions that belongs to all her race, she had lived more keenly during the last three days, than during the preceding four years. To one of her temperament, life is not a matter of time, but of experience. At eighteen she had been a child; on her twenty-second birthday she had been a girl; and now, when that birthday was past by but a few months, she was conscious of the stirring of her womanhood--roused into swift activity by the first approach of the world with its men and women, its laxities and prejudices, its infinite potentialities for good or evil. Some vague foreshadowing of this idea was casting itself across her mind, when the thread of her musings was suddenly broken by a quick step sounding across the deserted terrace, and with a slight, involuntary movement, she straightened herself, and brought her hands together upon the cold surface of the parapet.