"May we go back into the garden a little?" she said, hurriedly, to the monk who was talking to William. "I should like to see the view towards Venice." William held up a watch, to show that there was but just time to get back to the Piazza, for lunch. Kitty persisted, and the monk, understanding what the impetuous young lady wished, good-naturedly turned to obey her. "We must be _very_ quick!" said Kitty. "Take us please, to the edge, beyond the trees." And she herself hurried through the garden to its farther side, where it was bounded by the lagoon. The others followed her, rather puzzled by her caprice. "Not much to be seen, darling!" said Ashe, as they reached the water--"and I think this good man wants to get rid of us!" And, indeed, the monk was looking backward across the intervening trees at a party which had just entered the garden. "Ah, they have found another brother!" he said, politely, and he began to point out to Kitty the various landmarks visible, the arsenal, the two asylums, San Pietro di Castello. The new-comers just glanced at the garden apparently, as the Ashes had done on arrival, and promptly followed their guide back into the convent. Kitty asked a few more questions, then led the way in a hasty return to the garden door, the entrance-hall, and the steps where their gondola was waiting. Nothing was to be seen of the second party. They had passed on into the cloisters. * * * * * Animation, oddity, inconsequence, all these things Margaret observed in Kitty during luncheon in a restaurant of the Merceria, and various incidents connected with it; animation above all. The Ashes fell in with acquaintance--a fashionable and harassed mother, on the fringe of the Archangels, accompanied by two daughters, one pretty and one plain, and sore pressed by their demands, real or supposed. The parents were not rich, but the girls had to be dressed, taken abroad, produced at country-houses, at Ascot, and the opera, like all other girls. The eldest girl, a considerable beauty, was an accomplished egotist at nineteen, and regarded her mother as a rather inefficient _dame de compagnie_. Kitty understood this young lady perfectly, and after luncheon, over her cigarette, her little, sharp, probing questions gave the beauty twenty minutes' annoyance. Then appeared a young man, ill-dressed, red-haired, and shy. Carelessly as he greeted the mother and daughters, his entrance, however, transformed them. The mother forgot fatigue; the beauty ceased to yawn; the younger girl, who had been making surreptitious notes of Kitty's costume in the last leaf of her guide-book, developed a charming gush. He was the owner of the Magellan estates and the historic Magellan Castle; a professed hater of "absurd womankind," and, in general, a hunted and self-conscious person. Kitty gave him one finger, looked him up and down, asked him whether he was yet engaged, and when he laughed an embarrassed "No," told him that