which it had shown when the engagement had been first announced.
Lady Frances accepted defeat. Had there been a possibility of continuing the struggle, she would have fought it out to the last; but there was none, and she could not shut her eyes to the fact. She collected her personal possessions, set her house in order, and one day in mid- June, when Venice had passed into that sleepy summer state in which it is her custom to doze away the dog-days, – when everything and everybody looked dreamy and ghost - like, and the air had a vapourish warmth like that of a well-kept fernhouse, – she and her maid were rowed down the oily-looking length of the Canal to the railway station, leaving Colonel Hal to follow a few days later. It was her last good-bye to Venice, she told herself, as she stood stiff, impassive, and British, keeping guard over her umbrellas and sandwich-basket, amongst a crowd of facchini and gondolieri who pushed, elbowed, shouted, perspired, gesticulated around her, – her last goodbye in all human probability for life.
In this she was, however, as it turned out, mistaken; for about the middle of the winter she received an urgent letter from the Princess Vasarhely, entreating, nay, desiring her to come out to her at once without a single moment's delay. She was bad, very bad indeed, she said; she had pains in both her legs, also a feeling of numbness down the middle of her back. The doctor said it was nothing in particular, but she herself knew better. Bauche was more useless than ever; she had had the rheumatism; her deafness had become worse; she was really too stupid for anything. She herself wanted Fanchon – wanted her badly. Whatever she was doing, she was to leave it all at once and come.
Lady Frances did not attempt to resist the call. She went back to Venice, and spent the whole of what remained of that winter and the following spring in the house near the Redentore. It was an unusually cold wet season, and the fogs were tremendous – phantom armies, with long white arms far outstretched parading unceasingly up and down the grey face of the Canal, enveloping the churches and the shipping, even the walks and alleys of the garden, which seemed filled with some sort of finely carded cotton-wool, which gave way before you as you advanced, and closed tightly in again upon you immediately afterwards.
Some months previous to this Colonel Hal's fate had been sealed, and he and Madame Facchino – whose maiden name, it appeared, had been Goppin – were duly married in a certain church in London. Lady Frances had attended the wedding, but had not seen much of the wedded pair since. To those who have followed the poor Colonel's struggles with his destiny with any interest, it may afford a certain satisfaction to know that that destiny turned out to be a very much less severe one than might have been expected from the fashion in which it had come about, and from his own feverish, if abortive, attempts to escape from it. For one thing, once the fatal day was past and the fatal noose tied, his own native and hereditary lightheartedness rose to the rescue. It was not in the nature of things that he should long continue to nourish an implacable grudge against his lot, particularly one which showed itself to be susceptible of so many and such really respectable alleviations. Never was there a conjugal coach driven
