Had he gone for ever? Was it indeed the end? Could love that had begun in ecstasy close in this grey calm? She felt neither sorrow nor anger. Everything was dead. She stood among the ruins of her life, feeling as a child might feel when the house she has built of cards shatters suddenly and falls at her feet. Everything was over. She had no thought of building another house; no desire to patch up a broken life and begin again. Perhaps her husband loved her still, and it was the gloom of this haunted house that had driven him to seek distraction in a baser love. It was her fault, perhaps, and she ought to be sorry for him. Poor Claude! She remembered his gaiety. The airy mockery that had enchanted her, the quick wit that had struck fire and light out of dull things. She remembered the joyous nature, the light laughter, the inexhaustible energy which made difficult things--in the way of sport--seem easy. Yes, they had been happy, utterly happy in the life of the moment, shutting out every thought that was irksome, every memory that hurt. And it was all over and dead, and she had nothing left but the shadows in this room, the dead faces, the words of those who were not. That scriptural phrase had always moved her. "He was not." Her afternoons in Mr. Symeon's library had been all she had cared for in the season that was ending. She had gone wherever her husband asked her to go, and had given the entertainments he wanted her to give; but through all that brilliant summer she had gone about like "a corpse alive." That dreary simile had been in her mind sometimes when she thought of herself, sitting in her victoria, dressed as only the well-bred English woman with unlimited money can be dressed, lovely in her fragile fairness, admired and talked about. She had gone about, and held her own, in a quiet way, among crowds of clever men and women, and her life had seemed to her like the end of a long dream. Her only vital interest had been in the voices she heard in Francis Symeon's shadowy room. Those voices were of living men and women; but the words were the words of the dead. She was not utterly unhappy. The past was past, and she had left off grieving over it, for now she had a transcendent hope in the near future--the hope of death. She would soon have passed the river that they had passed, Giulia and her father. The gate through which they had gone to a higher stage in the upward path of life would open for her; and no matter by what slow ascent, no matter with what feeble steps, she would climb the mountain up which they had gone, those emancipated spirits.