‘Heaven bless you, my dearest one!’ she murmured as the door closed. Then she sank on to a seat and wept silently to herself for several minutes. After a time she proceeded to dry her eyes. ‘What bundles of contradictions we women are! We cry when we are in trouble, and we cry when we are glad.’ Nanette came in, carrying a lighted lamp. She was about to close the windows and draw the curtains, but her mistress stopped her. After the hot day, the evening seemed too fresh and beautiful to be shut out. Nanette turned down the flame of the lamp till it seemed little more than a glowworm in the dusk, and then left the room. ‘How lonely I feel, now that he has gone,’ said Mora; ‘but to-morrow will bring him again—to-morrow!’ She crossed to the piano and struck a few notes in a minor key. Then she rose and went to the window. ‘Music has no charms for me to-night,’ she said. ‘I cannot read—I cannot work—I cannot do anything. What strange restlessness is this that possesses me?’ There was a canary in a cage hanging near the window. It chirruped to her as if wishful of being noticed. ‘Ah, my pretty Dick,’ she said, ‘you are always happy so long as you have plenty of seed and water. I can whisper my secret to you, and you will never tell it again, will you? Dick—he loves me—he loves me—he loves me! And I love him, oh, so dearly, Dick!’ She went back to the piano and played a few bars; but being still beset by the same feeling of restlessness, she presently found her way again to the window. On the lawn outside, the dusk was deepening. The trees stood out massive and solemn against the evening sky, but the more distant features of the landscape were lost in obscurity. How lonely it seemed! There was not a sound anywhere. Doubtless, several windows of the hotel were lighted up, but from where Mora was standing they were not visible. Dinner was still in progress; as soon as it should be over, the lawn would become alive with figures, idling, flirting, smoking, seated under the trees, or promenading slowly to and fro. At present, however, the lady had the whole solemn, lovely scene to herself. She stood gazing out of the window for some minutes without moving, looking in her white dress in the evening dusk like a statue chiselled out of snowy marble. ‘My heart ought to beat with happiness,’ she inwardly communed; ‘but it is filled with a vague dread of something—I know not what—a fear that has no name. Yet what have I to fear? Nothing—nothing! My secret is still my own, and the grave tells no tales.’