‘Well, I will give orders that all is to be ready for him. I shall dine with him, and talk to him, in that awful room, which is just like a sepulchre. The servants will be about, behind our chairs, waiting upon us, just as usual. The doctor will think me a very charming woman, and will be quite pleased to talk to me. We shall not mention him’--she cast a side-glance towards Marchmont, who, under the influence of a morphia injection, was now lying still, with eyes closed and yellowish, waxy-looking face, like a dead man. ‘We shall both know that there is no need to say anything; talking about unpleasant subjects is not appetising. Nothing will make any difference. In his heart the doctor will say to himself: “I wonder what she married him for--money, I suppose. He must have been a horror when she first met him. Women will do anything to get money and money’s worth.” ‘After dinner I shall say that I am going to see my husband; that I am very tired, and shall not see him again to-night; that he is to ask for everything he wants, and that I have given orders that he is to be attended to. Then we shall shake hands, and I shall leave him in the dining-room with the dessert and the wine. Then I shall come back here, and shall make inquiries, and shall speak to the nurse, and shall say, to her more than to him, “Well, I hope you will have a good-night.” I shall then look round as one does before one leaves a room in which someone is ill, and I shall repeat, “Good-night,” and shall go.... In ten minutes more I shall be on the path to the pond, breathing.’ She suddenly lifted her arms above her head, and stretched them out wide and high, as if to take in a deep draught of air, then heaved a huge sigh, and slowly let them fall again. The sigh was repeated, and her face looked worn, and almost desperate. Almost mechanically her thoughts went on, and with none of the excited hope which had heretofore floated them through her mind: ‘I shall breathe--oh, to breathe again, after being stifled for five years!’ She sat motionless again, until a servant came and told her that lunch was ready. Marchmont was still sleeping or stupefied. She went away, leaving the nurse, who had just come in, to take her place. In the dining-room she dismissed the servant who was in waiting, and sat down alone in the immense, rather light, cold room, at a great table spread with snowy linen and glittering with silver and glass. There was perhaps no need for her to endure this solitary, cold, and comfortless splendour; but it is happy people who think of comforts and who arrange pleasant places in which to eat and drink and chat, not those whose lives are spoiled by a great wrong, so that they have no energy to attend to such trifles. She took something on her plate, but found she could not eat it.