She held her eyes fixed in front of her, seeming to contemplate the future. She did not enter into the conversation, perhaps because of her humbler condition, or because her thoughts were bent upon the event to come. The two others were conversing. The man had a cracked, uneven voice. A slight feverish tremour sometimes shook his shoulders, and now and then he gave a sudden involuntary jerk. The fire had died out of his eyes and his speech had traces of a foreign accent. The woman sat beside him quietly. She had the fairness and gentle calm of the northern races, so white and light that the daylight seemed to die more slowly than elsewhere upon her pale silver face and the abundant aureole of her hair. Were they father and daughter or brother and sister? It was plain that he adored her but that she was not his wife. With his dimmed eyes he looked at the reflection of the sunlight upon her. "Some one is going to be born, and some one is going to die," he said. The other woman started, while the man's companion cried in a low tone, bending over him quickly. "Oh, Philip, don't say that." He seemed indifferent to the effect he had produced, as though her protest had not been sincere, or else were in vain. Perhaps, after all, he was not an old man. His hair seemed to me scarcely to have begun to turn grey. But he was in the grip of a mysterious illness, which he did not bear well. He was in a constant state of irritation. He had not long to live. That was apparent from unmistakable signs--the look of pity in the woman's eyes mingled with discreetly veiled alarm, and an oppressive atmosphere of mourning. . . . . . With a physical effort he began to speak so as to break the silence. As he was sitting between me and the open window, some of the things he said were lost in the air. He spoke of his travels, and, I think, also of his marriage, but I did not hear well. He became animated, and his voice rose painfully. He quivered. A restrained passion enlivened his gestures and glances and warmed his language. You could tell that he must have been an active brilliant man before his illness. He turned his head a little and I could hear him better. He told of the cities and countries that he had visited. It was like an invocation to sacred names, to far-off different skies, Italy, Egypt, India. He had come to this room to rest, between two stations, and he was resting uneasily, like an escaped convict. He said he would have to leave again, and his eyes sparkled. He spoke of what he still wanted to see. But the twilight deepened, the warmth left the air, and all he thought of now was what he had seen in the past. "Think of everything we have seen, of all the space we bring with us." They gave the impression of a group of travellers, never in repose, forever in flight, arrested for a moment in their insatiable course, in a corner of the world which you felt was made small by their presence. . . . . . "Palermo--Sicily."