When at last I called at Howard's nursing-home and asked for him, the maid said she would ask the matron. But I said I would go up to see the matron myself, and was going upstairs to her room when I met her descending. As she saw me she shook her head gently and told me that Mr. Wentworth was not allowed to see any one, he was very ill. The crisis had not passed yet.... She was a sweet, white-haired old woman, on whose kind face grief had never been disciplined into that geniality which makes matrons sometimes horrible. "I'm afraid for him...." she added inconclusively, sadly. And then she said: "I have spent most of my life among sick and ailing people, Mr. Arlen, but this has been the saddest time of all. Terribly sad it's been! Only this morning a dear sweet lady, who only came in two days ago.... An English lady married to an Italian, and she was just spending a day in London on her way to Tonbridge where her mother lives, when...." I am almost certain that there were tears, repressed rebellious tears in the kind eyes. "I think her dying has affected me most of all," she added apologetically. "She was such a sweet, beautiful lady!" As I put up my umbrella against the rain outside I thought to myself that it was like the end of a tale by a sentimentalist, for he had compromised with the angels and brought together in the end, a Juliet unaware of Romeo, the bodies of a man and woman who had loved so unhappily and so incompletely. I heard a tired voice saying bitterly, "I know no more of Fay Richmond." III: CONSUELO III: CONSUELO AS far as I could see in the dim light of the Hallidays' hall, whose house in Cheyne Walk I was just that moment leaving after one of their too crowded and rather tiresome parties, the owner of the voice which had asked me from the stairs if I was walking "Mayfair way" was of about my age, too near fifty, and of a genial and polished air, rare in these days of careless manners and--can one say it?--mannered carelessness; the sort of man who had long since overcome his shyness on meeting strangers, and, at a glance, seemed without that wretched self-consciousness which so gets between a man and his power to entertain; altogether, a cultivated and comfortable person, I thought. But I am afraid that I was not in the best of tempers that night; for as we walked away from the house I made very little attempt to justify my companion's courteous invitation to share the walk. We had turned into the King's Road on our way Eastward before his talk, which had almost died down in the face of my wretched monosyllables, abruptly began again with:-- "A tragic pity, that Carew business!" At that I quite woke up. "What! Did you know her?" I asked, and immediately felt ashamed of my complete boorishness.