“I am ready,” she answers quietly. “I was only waiting for you.” She is fighting tooth and nail with her agitation; telling herself what a Bedlamite thing it is, all the way across the tesselated marble of the pretentious sitting-hall, up the flights of the profoundly carpeted stairs, through the hot-water-warmed passages; and in outward appearance it is conquered by the time they reach and pause at a closed door. “You must understand that he is not to be agitated in any way; that you must not approach any painful subject,” says Féodorovna, in an exasperating whisper of command. “Wouldn’t it be better to put it off?” asks Miss Carew, in jarred recoiling from the just-opening portal; but her companion frowns her down. The bed is in a recess of the room, and the window-blind, partly drawn down in defence against the westering blaze, confuses Miss Carew’s sight; besides which her feet have halted near the threshold to allow time for her own introduction, so that she hears the voice before she sees the face of the wounded man. “Miss Carew has come to see you!” Féodorovna explains, in a tiresome _carneying_ voice, leaning over the pillows. “But you must send her away the moment you are tired of her; and you must not let her talk to you about anything that is not quite pleasant and cheerful.” Thus agreeably heralded by an implication of her own morose garrulity, Lavinia approaches the invalid, hearing his answer, “I am exceedingly grateful to her,” before she sees his face. Often and often, in after-days, the fact that his first words concerning her were an expression of gratitude recurs to her with a sense of the keenest irony. “Do you wish to be _tête-à-tête_?” asks Féodorovna, when the whole and the sick have silently touched each other’s hands; “or had you rather I would stay?” and the answer, courteous in its subtlety-- “I am sure that you ought to rest; I am ashamed to think of how much you have been doing for me to-day,” is divined by Lavinia to be not what the asker had expected. However, without flagrant breach of her own axiom, that a sick man is not to be thwarted, she cannot avoid compliance, and with an officious parting question, “Where shall she sit? Would you like her to be beside you, or where you can see her better?” and a final fussing over phials and drinks, takes her cap, her apron, and her cuffs away. A sense of relief at her departure, coupled with a strong, shy impulse to follow her, and that again with a far stronger one to snatch another look at the just-glanced-at face of him for whom Bill had died, join to silence Lavinia for the first moment or two. That the wish to be acquainted with each other’s features must be reciprocal, is proved by the sick man’s first words-- “Would you mind sitting in that chair?”