And then, when the houses to which she was going, and the clothes she was to wear, and her quarrels with her husband and her maid had been discussed at length, Susan began to talk about her friend. "Lady O. told me how ill you had been, _ma mie_, and of your curious whim about this house. She says Selwyn Tower would have liked you to go to the Transvaal, and told her that two or three months in that delicious climate would make you a strong woman; but finding you set upon stopping in your own house he gave way, as your illness is chiefly a question of nerves. It is a comfort to know that, _n'est-ce pas, mein Schatz?_" "Yes, of course it is a comfort. I suppose, with nothing amiss but one's nerves, one might live to be ninety." "True, dearest, quite ninety," Susan answered, shuddering. Susan Amphlett was out of her element in a sick room. The mere thought that the friend she was talking to was marked for death seemed to freeze her blood. Her own hand grew as cold as the cold hand she was holding. She could not be bright and pleasant with Death in sight. As she sat with Vera in the library that had been Provana's favourite room she felt as if there were someone standing behind the door of that inner room, a door that had been left ajar. There was someone waiting there whose unseen presence made her dumb. Someone! Not Provana--but another and more terrible shape. "Vera," she burst out at last, "why do you sit in this horrid room instead of in your sweet white den, with Byron and Browning and all your dear people?" "I like this room better, now that my thoughts have gone backward." "What can you mean by thoughts going backward?" "Now that I know time is measured for me, so much and no more; I like to live over the days that are gone. It spins out my life to live the dead years over again. This is the room Mario loved. His books are on those shelves, the books that opened a new world for me: the Italian historians, the Italian poets. In the first year of our life in this house, before I was the fashion, we used to sit here of an evening, long evenings, from nine till midnight, talking, talking, talking, or Mario reading to me. He was a banker, and a dealer in money; but he read poetry exquisitely." "Vera!" Susan ejaculated suddenly, and sat staring. "What's the matter?" "I believe you loved Provana better than ever you have loved Claude." "I don't know," Vera said dreamily. She had been talking in a dreamy way, as if she were hardly conscious that anyone was listening to her. "Perhaps you never were really in love with your second husband?" "Yes. I loved him too much--and," after a perceptible pause, "not enough." "Darling, I can't make you out." "I am not worth making out." "One thing I must tell you, Vera, even at the risk of agitating you. It is all over with that woman." "Which woman?" "Which? Mrs. Bellenden. There has never been so much as a whisper about any other since your marriage."