"Thank you."
She bowed with all the haughtiness she could muster, though her limbs shook under her. Then as she walked quickly towards the door of exit, Cliffe, who was nearer to it than she, also moved towards it, and threw it open for her. As she approached him he said, quietly:
"This is not the first time we have met in Venice, Lady Kitty."
She wavered, could not avoid looking at him, and stood arrested. That almost white head!—that furrowed brow!—those haggard eyes! A slight, involuntary cry broke from her lips.
Cliffe smiled. Then he straightened his tall figure.
"You see, perhaps, that I have not grown younger. You are quite right. I have left my youth—what remained of it—among those splendid fellows whom the Turks have been harrying and torturing. Well!—they were worth it. I would give it them again."
There was a short silence.
The eyes of each perused the other's face. Kitty began some words, and left them unfinished. Cliffe resumed—in another tone—while the door he held swung gently backward, his hand following it.
"I spent last winter, as perhaps you know, with the Bosnian insurgents in the mountains. It was a tough business—hardships I should never have had the pluck to face if I had known what was before me. Then, in July, I got fever. I had to come away, to find a doctor, and I was a long time at Cattaro pulling round. And, meanwhile, the Turks—God blast them!—have been at their fiends' work. Half my particular friends, with whom I spent the winter, have been hacked to pieces since I left them."
She wavered, held by his look, by the coercion of that mingled passion and indifference with which he spoke. There was in his manner no suggestion whatever of things behind, no reference to herself or to the past between them. His passion, it seemed, was for his comrades; his indifference for her. What had he to do with her any more? He had been among the realities of battle and death, while she had been mincing and ambling along the usual feminine path. That was the utterance, it seemed, of the man's whole manner and personality, and nothing could have more effectually recalled Kitty's wild nature to the lure.