Egidia thought she could do it, fairly and squarely, and without this girl’s evidence, so she gathered from the lawyers, the case against Rivers and Phœbe would fall to the ground. It was Jane Anne Cawthorne herself who came forward civilly when she alighted at the door of “Heather Bell,” and asked for rooms. Egidia was as urbane in manner as she could be towards the woman who cared for Rivers, and was yet prepared to testify falsely concerning him. “A low type!” she thought to herself, “a potential villain, but still susceptible to moral influences. They have bribed her, but all the same, she is doing this thing par dépit amoureux. Therefore an apt subject for diplomacy. How low I feel! But if I can only get him out of this, I don’t care what I do.” She secured the very sitting-room that Rivers and Mrs. Elles had shared together, and derived a melancholy pleasure from the idea that it was so. There was the very rose-strewn table-cover, stained and splashed with the dabbling of the artist’s brush; there was the piano on which Mrs. Elles had played to him. But outside, in the wintry garden, the dark dank earth lay heavy upon all the flowers and verdure that had gladdened the eyes of the lovers. For in spite of Phœbe’s frivolity and Edmund’s asceticism, she could read through Phœbe’s admissions and falsifications, that for a brief space they had been lovers--the woman in her had been genuinely stirred, the man in him. It had not lasted, but it had been. But now it was winter, “the days dividing lover and lover, the light that loses, the night that wins,” the season when no man can paint, and loves that are ephemeral die down and are buried under the wrack of autumn. There was no frost as yet, the December air was mild and subdued, with only a prescience as it were of the snows and disasters of January.