She had known for a long time that she was marked for death. She had no specific ailment, but in this last season she had felt her vanishing life, felt the painless ebb of vitality, and had measured, by a flight of stairs, by a pathway in the Park, where she walked sometimes in the early morning, the waning strength of limbs and heart. The dreadful sleeplessness of the first year of her widowhood had returned; and her nights were almost entirely spent in thought and reading, her brain never resting, her heart seldom quiet. Although she looked forward to death as release, she could not escape the boredom of medical treatment. Lady Okehampton, whose daughters were all married, and wanted nothing from parental affection--except to be allowed to go their own way, and not to be obliged to invite Mummy to their choicest parties--devoted herself more and more to her favourite niece, who wasn't actually her niece, but only a first cousin once removed. Since, in those last days at Disbrowe, she had seen the mark of death on Vera's pale forehead, Aunt Mildred, who was really a warm-hearted woman, had interested herself keenly in the vanishing life, and had made unremitting efforts to combat the enemy. "She has simply wasted her life since her second marriage," she said. "She has wasted her life as recklessly as Claude has wasted her money; but she shan't die without my making an effort to save her, even if I have to take every specialist in London to Portland Place." "You'd better take her to the specialists," said his lordship. "It would save your time and her money." "As if money mattered!" "You could telephone for appointments, and do the whole of Grosvenor Street and Savile Row in a morning, with a good taxi." "A taxi--when my niece has two superb Daimlers--no. By the by, the last Claude showed me is an S.C.A.T." "Poor Provana!" sighed Okehampton. "To think that nothing could induce him to buy a motor car, although he was a man to whom moments are money. It was one of his few eccentricities to worship his horses." "He might have been here now if he had not been quite so fussy about his horses," sighed her ladyship. "What do you mean?" "He might not have used the door between the house and the stables--the door by which he and his murderer came into the house on that awful night." "True," assented her husband, "it was an infernally unlucky door, and I suppose if poor little Vera dies they'll carry her out that way to be cremated." "Okehampton, you are too bad! Whoever said she was to be cremated?" "Nobody. But it's the modern way, isn't it? And, of course, everything would be up-to-date." "How can you be so heartless, and how can you use that odious expression 'up-to-date'?" "Well, I hope the poor girl will be warned in time, and live to make old bones; but she didn't look like it at her last party. You'd better give her husband a good wigging. It will be more useful than calling in the specialists."