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340 whole face, was too tragically manifest to be overlooked, and she found herself creeping out of the room almost like one who has been detected in some piece of petty larceny!

So the days went on. The engagement was not formally announced, but everybody in Venice knew about it more or less, and much wit was expended over the event. The indirect cause of it had meantime left Venice, and was holding her court elsewhere. Another member of that court – some people said two – had in the interim put his fate to the touch and had sustained the same fall. It was a way she had – so all who knew her declared. Each of the men who surrounded her believed that he himself was the chosen and favoured one, that he had received unmistakable marks of encouragement until his hour of disillusion came, and as her manner was outwardly equally little encouraging to all, her victims had not even the poor satisfaction of claiming sympathy in their discomfiture. The Colonel made no allusion whatsoever to his – in fact, so far as his sister was aware, never mentioned Mrs Markham's name at all. It was as if a sponge had been passed over the whole episode, and no traces whatsoever of it remained. Its indirect effects, on the other hand, were sufficiently permanent, although, after her first visit, Madame Facchino seldom came to the house. Neither, so far as his sister could observe, did the Colonel spend much time with his fiancée, though, when they happened to be together, she kept him amused and in good-humour as much as ever. At other times he was restless, visibly uncomfortable and uneasy. His first self-satisfactions, it was clear, had evaporated; he no longer neglected her own society, if that were any comfort on the contrary, would come a dozen times in the day into the room where she was sitting, wandering about, uttering some trivial remark, and then walking out again. Sometimes she caught his eye fixed intently, for minutes at a time, upon her own, as if there was something, some comfort which he was anxious, if possible, to extract out of them – something he wanted her to say or to do, she did not know what. It worried much more than it gratified her, seeing that there was obviously nothing that she could say or do that would have the smallest effect. Was not everything done, settled, finished?

"You – you think, I suppose, Fan, that I've been in – er – rather too great a hurry about all this, don't you?" he said abruptly one afternoon when they had been sitting for nearly an hour upon the balcony, he smoking, she laboriously telling up the columns of an account-book which had somehow got wrong. She would not go halfway to meet him, so merely laid down the account-book upon her knee, and waited with an interrogative glance for him to speak. "About this engagement of mine, I mean, of course," he added impatiently. "What else should I mean?"

"I don't know, dear. How can I tell? You are the best judge as to whether you have or not," she said dispiritedly. Then as he was beginning again – "Oh, don't speak to me, Hal; don't ask me about it; don't talk of it at all!" she suddenly burst out, with a gesture which sent the account-book flying off her knee on to the floor. "How can I tell? how can I judge fairly, or honestly, or rightly? How can a woman be trusted in such a matter, when it is her life, her home,