Mary Alison at thirty should have been in the zenith of her beauty. That auburn hair had deepened in ten years like a gathered chestnut, but like a chestnut it had preserved the gloss of youth. Experience had given her blue eyes those profundities of color which inaccurate and ambitious observers have miscalled violet. Her complexion held the exquisite translucent hues of a September rose. And yet so much of her young grace was destroyed by the dress, which made any woman of the period appear like Noah's wife in a toy Ark, that she seemed less lovely now than ten years ago when she had stood by the drawing-room window of this house, up the steps of which she was now walking with such slow and stately ease of movement. With her long forefinger pressing the bell, she turned and said to the coachman: "Burton, you had better leave Mac at home when you come back for me at six." At the sound of his mistress' voice, the grizzled head of the Dandie Dinmont gazed anxiously through the closed windows of the brougham. She raised a warning finger to bid him be good, and a moment later was lost to sight in the darkling hall. "How is her ladyship, Adèle?" "_Miladi_ grows very weak, madame," the maid replied, leading the way upstairs. Across Mary's mind floated the picture of herself as a little girl in Paris following Adèle upstairs to bed. Even so had she led the way in those days and from time to time had turned round with flashing, frightening eyes to see if her charge was close behind her. How shadowy those days in Paris now, shadowy like this flight of London stairs, on which Adèle alone stood out clear, with her sallow face and eyebrows like the hair of a Japanese doll. Shadows.... Shadows.... "Mrs. Alison is here, _Miladi_." Adèle stood aside to let Mary enter the room, where under a canopy of purple velvet, looking hardly more substantial than a lace handkerchief left upon the pillow, Lady Flower sat huddled in her last bed. One hand fluttered down upon the quilt like a faded white petal to greet her granddaughter, who took it gently in her own that was still fresh and taper as a rosebud. "I shall die very soon now, Mary," whispered the old lady. "At any moment. At any moment. Perhaps to-night. Perhaps this afternoon. Did you tell Burton to wait?" "No. I sent him back to Campden Hill. I wanted to stay with you till you went to sleep." "To sleep," her grandmother echoed. "I feel disinclined to sleep. I have such a long sleep before me." Mary could not bring herself to make the conventionally optimistic reply. It did not seem worth while to pretend with phrases in the presence of this old woman already seemingly discarnate for that obscure event of death. "A long sleep," the old lady went on in her tenuous voice. "A very long sleep. And yet I wonder. Ah, well, it was all said by Shakespeare, was it not? Though frankly I never cared greatly for Shakespeare. It is all too excitable. And yet I wonder." "What are you wondering, Grandmamma?"