Her arms were folded on her sunken breast. A black silk shawl glossed the sharp shoulders and was caught in an old breast-pin, garnet and enamel. Her throat was bare. And from a face, ashen and chiseled close by all the steels of fate, her eyes now turned on me. Their heaviness made the brow almost a girl’s, made the mouth a gash with blood dry for lips. The hair lay a black coil over the brow: hair and eyes burned in an ashen desert face. “Why did you come here?” came her voice again. “You who have found my name must find that, too.” “Oh, that is a mere ... surface. I have not gone into you, sir. I am not sure that I care to.” “Mrs. Landsdowne, you must!” Her eyes began to focus far behind my own, so that their traversing mine took on an imperturbable coldness. “Why have I come here? Surely it was not chance: this zigzag route.” “You know there is no chance. I have no name for it: I see your mind tracing a design out of a swarm of myriad living gray things. Strange! They are like cells of our flesh, but they have space about them. They swing like stars! You are the sort who knows ... why have _you_ come here?” I clasped my hands together. I was very tired. Yet as I looked on this woman life seemed more bearable to me, than it had been for long. My clasped hands cupped my falling head. I was very sleepy, and there were tears in my eyes. I looked up at last from my sweet indulgence, and a horror in the face of the woman dried my tears. “Will you speak, Mrs. Landsdowne, will you speak to me?” She shook her head. “Coward!” I cried. “Coward!” Her hands hollowed and passed over her eyes. “I am not a coward,” she said. “I want to know.” “I am not a coward. But I am afraid.” “Are you afraid of a murderer, Mrs. Landsdowne?” She smiled. Her eyes resumed their distant focus and she smiled. She shook her head. I leaned forward, then: “Mrs. Landsdowne,” I whispered, “am I that?” Her lips stirred: the hand above her brow twitched: she was trying to speak. “No ... and worse....” “Mrs. Landsdowne, I must know!” “You want to know?” And now she was laughing with her blood dark lips: and her eyes were stiff in amaze. “What horror is this I have done? How could I?... Have you merely caught my madness?” ... Her stiff eyes on me. “How could I murder him with my body absent, with my mind innocent? Are we both mad, Mrs. Landsdowne? I want to know! God, have I not crucified myself to know? What have I done?” “_What are you doing now?_” The words were terrible to me. They came low and calm, it was as if her eyes were speaking in their stiff amaze. But her words released a chaos in my flesh. My nerves in panic rushed in myriad ways, so that my flesh seemed a delirium of motion. “_What are you doing now?_” I arose. Faintness spread like a death from my heart, and I sank back in my chair. “What am I doing now?... Will you help me to know? Will you help me to save me?” I pleaded: my shred of energy forced into voice.