‘My dearest, I don’t think he has any idea of amusing himself without you in Switzerland. How tired you look, my poor pet! Go and lie down and get a nice refreshing sleep after your walk. You shall not be disturbed till I come myself to bring you some tea. That will be better for you than coming down to luncheon.’ ‘I don’t feel much inclined for sleep, though I confess to being tired. I should like you to come and sit with me for a little, Lina, soon after luncheon, if you don’t mind.’ ‘Mind! My darling, as if I were not always glad to be with you.’ Daphne went slowly up to her room, very slowly, with automatic steps, as one who walks in his sleep. The dark gray eyes looked straight into space, fixed and heavy with despair. ‘He is mad, and I am mad,’ she said to herself. ‘How can it end—except——’ Her room was bright and pretty, gaily furnished in that bright foreign style which studies scenic effect rather than solid comfort; French windows opening upon a balcony, shaded with a striped awning. The windows looked on to the lake, across the bright blue water to the opposite shore, with its grand and solitary hills, its villages few and far apart. Daphne stood for a long while looking dreamily at the expanse of bright water, and the bold and rugged shore beyond; at Chillon in its rocky corner; at the deep dark gorge whence the yellow Rhone comes rushing in, staining Lake Loman’s azure floor. How lovely it all was—how lovely, and yet of how little account in the sum of man’s destiny! All Nature’s loveliness was powerless to mend one broken heart. ‘What was it that he read on my hand that day at Fontainebleau?’ she asked herself. ‘Was it this? was it this?’ A steamer went by laden with people, a band playing a waltz tune. The world seemed full of thoughtless souls, for whom life meant only idle empty pleasures. Daphne turned away from that sunlit scene sick at heart, wishing that she were lying quietly in one of those green dells through which they had passed to-day, a leafy hollow hidden in the hillside, and that life were ebbing away without an effort. ‘Seneca was a wise and learned man,’ she thought; ‘but with all his wisdom he found it difficult to die. Cleopatra’s death sounds easier—a basket of fruit and a little gliding snake a bright pretty creature that a child might have played with, and been stung to death unawares.’ She threw herself on the bed, not tired from her walk, which seemed as nothing to the lithe active limbs, but weary of life and its perplexities. Oh, how he loved her, and how she loved him! And what a glorious godlike thing life would be in his company! Glorious, but it must not be; godlike, but honour barred the way. ‘Oh God! let me never forget what she has been to me,’ she prayed, with clasped hands, with all her soul in that prayer—‘sister, mother, all the world of love, and protection, and comfort—teach me to be true to her; teach me to be loyal.’