Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/349

1885.] even that Hal should be miserable; better anything and everything should happen, rather than that any hint of such a stain should visit their escutcheon. She would have cut off her own right hand before she put it to any such work; and without her aid, morally and physically unsustained by her, she felt absolutely certain he would never, never achieve his own deliverance. She knew him too well.

Meanwhile the days were passing steadily on, each with its invisible rivet rendering it more and more impossible to do anything at all. Gradually, very gradually, Lady Frances made up her mind. The thing, she told herself again, was done, was irrevocable; and there is a great deal of dreary satisfaction in a sense of the utterly irrevocable. If her home was doomed, well then, it was doomed, and she was not going to make more fuss about the matter than could be helped. What right, after all, had she to do so? Was she the first sister that had been left alone when her brother made up his mind to marry? Was it not, on the contrary, the invariable end to such arrangements as theirs, the sting which lay at the root of all such temporary unions? Happily she had a good deal to do too, and that helped to fill up her thoughts and the days. They were giving up their apartment, had already given notice to that effect to its owner. Its bigness had always been a fault, and under these changed circumstances, was of course more of a fault than ever. What the Colonel's future plans would be remained to be seen, but his sister had quite made up her mind that she at least was not going to live on in Venice. Further than this she did not see her way. The world was all before her where to choose, but it cannot be said that she found any particular elation from that prospect!

Madame Facchino was also leaving; she was going, she said, to pay some visits to her relations in Belgium, and would then adjourn to England to meet her fiancé, and make the acquaintance of his relations. Everything was being taken down, put into big boxes, and corded up ready to be sent for whenever their destination was decided upon. The familiar rooms already wore an air of dismantled misery; the trail of the despoiler had passed over them all, and the sooner they were away now, Lady Frances felt, the better.

A few mornings before their final departure she happened to awake early, just as the first glow of dawn was beginning to play over the convolutions of the Canal. She found it impossible to get to sleep again, so put on a dressing-gown, and went out upon the balcony which communicated both with her own bedroom and the sitting-room. The weather within the last few days had become hot, and already, early as it was, the air which came to meet her was almost like the breath of a green-house. Venice looked like a city created for delight, but left vacant. Up and down in all the sinuous silvery reaches of the Canal, not a sound; in all the shut or open multitudes of windows not a face, not a sign of life. Only down at the traghetto, a man sat sleepily up in a gondola, and rubbed his eyes wearily for a moment before rolling heavily back again, face downwards, upon the cushions.

Lady Frances drew a camp-stool towards her, and sat down, leaning her elbows upon the stone balustrade, and looking out towards the satiny clearness of the lagune. A big India-bound steamer, lying nearly opposite the Piazzetta, began to