Sylvia stared at him; for a moment the words had no more meaning than a conventional excuse to unwelcome visitors. "But how can he be dead?" she exclaimed. "I'm sorry to say that he died very suddenly. In fact, he was taken ill almost immediately after you were here last. It was a stroke. He never recovered consciousness. Mr. Abernethy is in charge temporarily. If you're anxious about your visa, I'm sure Mr. Abernethy will do everything in his power--subject, of course, to the regulations. Oh, certainly, yes, everything in his power." Mr. Mathers tried by the tone of his voice to convey that, though his late chief was dead, he could not forget the length of the interview he had granted to Sylvia and that the present rulers of the office would pay a tribute to the dead by treating her with equal condescension. "No, I wanted to see Mr. Iredale privately." The clerk sighed his sympathy with her position in face of the unattainable. "Perhaps I shall be wanting a visa presently," she added. The clerk brightened. Sylvia fancied that in the remote and happy days before the war he must have had experience of the counter. He had offered her the prospect of obtaining a visa instead of seeing Philip again much as a shop assistant might offer one shade of ribbon in the place of another no longer in stock. Sylvia left the passport-office and, without paying any heed in what direction she walked, she came to the Cimisgiu Gardens and sat down upon a seat beside the ornamental lake. It was a hot morning, and there was enough mist in the atmosphere to blur the outlines of material objects and to set upon the buildings of the city a charm of distance that was as near as Bucharest ever approximated to the mellowing of time. The shock of the news that she had just heard, coming on top of the fatigue caused by her journey without even a cup of coffee to sustain her body, blurred the outlines of her mental attitude and made her glad of the fainting landscape that accorded with her mood and did not jar upon her with the turmoil of a world insistently, almost wantonly alive.