Milbanke paled.
"But, my dear," he said helplessly, "I thought—I believed——"
Clodagh turned to him again.
"So did I!" she cried—"so did I! I thought I loved it. I thought I loved it all—the music and the gaiety and—and the people. But I don't. I hate it!—I hate it!—I hate it!"
In a strangled sob, her voice gave way; and, with it, her strength and her self-control. She took a few steps forward; then, like a mechanical figure in which the mechanism has suddenly been suspended, she stopped, swayed a little and, dropping into the nearest chair, broke into a flood of tears—such tears as had shaken her four years ago, when she drove out of Carrigmore on the day of her wedding.
PART IV
CHAPTER I
The penetrating Florentine sunshine was enveloping the villa that stood upon the hill above San Domenico; but it was not the full, warm sunshine of late April that had opened the roses in the garden and deepened the shadows of the cypress trees nearly two years earlier, when Clodagh had dreamed of her visit to Venice. It was the cool sunlight of February, and it fell across the polished floors, and threw into prominence the many antique and curious objects that filled the rooms, with a searching clearness that almost seemed like a human scrutiny.
In a small salon that opened upon the terrace Clodagh sat at a bureau. In front of her was a formidable array of letters and business papers, neatly bound into packets by elastic bands, and under her hand was spread a sheaf of unused, black-bordered note-paper.
Whether it was the multitude of her own thoughts that retarded the task she had in hand, or a certain air of absolute stillness that seemed to brood over the villa, one could not say; but certain it is that for nearly half an hour she sat in an attitude of abstraction, her fingers poised above the note-paper, the tip of her pen held against her lips.