Few of her own generation were alive, and with the younger race she concerned herself but little. Anne knew that she had a nephew, her sister’s child. She had occasionally spoken of him as her heir, generally with the dry comment that she grudged him the money. “He’s a great gaby,” she often declared, “and his vulgar wife will make ducks and drakes of my fortune. “But there, my dear, what does it matter? In the place where I go there’s neither knowledge nor understanding. It will be all the same to me.” * * * * * Anne left the sick-room, and from force of habit, wandered out into the garden. “How lonely! How desolate!” she found herself thinking. “And I shall be just as lonely, just as desolate when it comes to my turn.” She turned her face towards the quiet evening sky, in which, despite one or two trembling stars, the flush of sunset still lingered, and again despair fell like a cold hand upon her heart. All the afternoon she had felt so gay. She had been amused, interested, almost flattered. Now the words she had just heard, recurred to her. “Tell them to come. You are quite old enough to look after them.” A sudden miserable sensation of shame assailed her, to remember how young she had felt. In welcoming her visitors, she had not thought of her age at all. She had accepted them as equals and contemporaries. The blinding tears which made her stumble on the path already dim with twilight, caused her to bow her head with the instinct of hiding them even from herself. “I’m quite old--quite old,” she repeated with something that was partly a sob, partly a shiver. “They didn’t make me feel it, because they are kind, and they have charming manners. But they are young, and life is all before them. It’s all over for me--and I’ve never had it.” The bats skimmed noiselessly past her, in the dusk. All the birds had ceased singing. It was nearly dark, but with a horror of returning to the house, of being shut within four walls, Anne sat at the foot of the sundial, and in the darkness her tears fell. * * * * * Yet next morning, in the sunshine, when René Dampierre came to ask her to the “studio,” it seemed not only easy, but natural, to smile, and be well pleased. When she found herself with her new friends, depressing thoughts fled like magic. They were so obviously glad to see her. They interested her so much with their discussions, their enthusiasm, their talk, fresh and new to her, of methods, and values and style, in painting, in writing, in music, in the whole world of art to which hitherto she had travelled alone; speechless, like a ghost amongst ghosts. From the outset, Anne saw that René Dampierre was regarded with a certain admiring respect by his companions. Already he was considered a great man; already they looked up to him as a leader, an authority.