Flora had come to the conviction that the European custom of sending a servant around with children was based on a realistic recognition of facts. It was better for both sides; for she knew that, although she tried to be patient, Marise felt her lack in interest in chatter about whether the stone would hit the tree _this_ time, or how long Marise could walk over flagged sidewalks without once stepping on a crack. Good Heavens! What difference did it make! It was inevitable that a servant's vacant mind should be naturally more nearly on the childish level. And yet, once in a while, when Marise came into the salon to kiss her mother good-night, Flora's arms caught her fast, wistfully, feeling an aggrieved, helpless resentment at somehow being cheated out of what seemed to mean so much more to other mothers. Marise always felt instantly this special mood in her mother and always flashed up in an ardent return, straining her mother to her in a great silent hug. It was a good moment for them both, but so quickly gone. She looked now at her watch and remembered an engagement at her dressmaker's to try on a new house-dress. It suddenly made her sick to think of bothering with it. What was the use of a new house-dress? Who would see it except Horace, who never saw anything, or perhaps some one like Madame Fortier or Madame Garnier, who would think it unbecoming for a married woman to wear pretty, frilly things, or to think of anything but how to shove their husbands and sons and daughters ruthlessly ahead of other women's. Heavens above! How tiresome they were about their families! They never saw another thing in the world! Except scandalous suppositions about other people's actions. She discovered that she did not feel at all well, not nearly well enough to go to have the dress tried on. She was always tired. The enervating climate certainly did not agree with her. The doctor paid no real attention to her case, and the sulphur baths at Saint Sauveur had done her no good, for all they cost so much. How she had hated the dreary little village, full of sick women, perched on the narrow ledge, from which the sanitarium and the bathing establishment looked dizzily down into the frightful gorge where the gave of Gavarnie boiled among its rocks. It had given her materials for many a nightmare, that long black cleft in the earth, so full of the wild haste of the waters that the ear was never for an instant, asleep or awake, freed from their plunging roar. It had given her nightmare; and the sulphur baths had not helped her worn feeling of prostrated weakness in the least. And now she feared there was something else--her heart was certainly not quite normal. There were times as now (she put her fingers to her wrist) when sitting perfectly still, she felt her pulse drop almost to nothing. A muffled, listless beat, like a clock that is running down....