had been seen of her brother. There was an air about the party which put her sisterly pride upon its mettle, and forbade her to utter a word.
They returned to the landing-place, and had already taken their places in the gondolas when the Colonel appeared. He had been, it seemed, to inspect the monastery. What had they all been thinking of, he wanted to know, not to do so? The ladies, it is true, would only have been allowed to go as far as the cloisters, but the men were free to go over it all, and it was well worth seeing, really uncommonly worth seeing; he didn't know when he had spent a pleasanter half-hour. The monks, too, were capital fellows – he should not mind spending a month with them himself in the least. When he heard of Madame Facchino's intention of returning by the steamer, he at once volunteered to accompany her. He, too, had an appointment, it seemed, at Venice; and going back by the gondola, delightful as it was, really took up such a deuced amount of time. Accordingly the two were left upon the shore at Burano, and the gondolas, with their diminished load, proceeded on their homeward way.
It was not a particularly cheerful home-coming, less so if anything than the outgoing had been. There was no attempt made this time to sail, and the gondolas were not therefore linked together, but followed one another at a little distance, with all the regularity, and not a little of the solemnity, of a pair of mourning-coaches. Lady Frances was in the first one, Mrs Markham in the second; had both been together, it is possible that some more interesting topic might have been mooted in the other; as it was, every one seemed tongue-tied, listless, "dull as the fat weed," which swung its slimy tresses around every projecting point of land, or floated, a mass of brown or yellow putrescence, towards the sea. When, hours as it seemed after they had started, the familiar line of roofs and campanile rose greyly above the face of the lagune, had the party formed some portion of the great Dandola fleet, returning after its famous but toilsome conquest of the Turks, it could hardly have been hailed by them with a much warmer measure of satisfaction.
CHAPTER IV.
What precisely had taken place at San Francesco in Deserto? That was what Lady Frances desired, but apparently was not destined, to learn. So far from becoming more approachable, the Colonel, in the days that immediately followed their expedition to that shrine, was less visible, less companionable than ever. It seemed to her as if he had registered a vow never to be in the house; or if for a short while they were together, the servants or some one else happened to be always present to hinder them from being tête-à-tête – they who hitherto had been almost always tête-à-tête. That this attitude of his was a real and a very great grief to her, there was no possibility of concealing from herself. Her brother's friendship counted for so much, so very, very much in her life. Take it away and what remained to her? She had no other intimate friendship, not even in her own family. Her father and Hal – they had always been the two – her two, – and now there was only one of them left.
