It must have taken me, for my broken, difficult account, half an hour. Not once in that time was I interrupted. She seemed hardly to breathe. I told her to the very date and hour of his execution. I could give her no comfort; only, at best, bald facts. For what exhibition of self-loathing or self-pity I had been prepared I do not know; but surely for some. I had been bracing myself throughout for any kind of scene. No scene of any kind occurred. She was hard and mute as stone. I could have dealt better, when at last I stopped, with hysterics than with that figure before me--tense, exhausted, terrible. I found myself praying for her tears. But none came. At last I rose--hoping by the sudden gesture to break her trance. Her eyes followed me. “Terrible--terrible--beyond anything I ever dreamed.” I caught the whispered words. I took the chance for pity; found myself--though I detested the woman as never before--wanting to comfort her. “He never appealed,” I reminded her. “Perhaps he was glad to die.” It sounded weak and strange; but who could tell what words would reach that weak, strange heart? I stood before her, more perplexed than at any other moment of my life. At last she opened her eyes and spoke. “Leave me. And do not tell your sister who I am. I shall pull myself together by dinnertime. Go!” She just lifted her hand, then closed her eyes again. I went out, and, stumbling across a Chinese servant, got him to show me my room. Of what use would it be to recall, after all the years, what I felt and thought during the next hours? I did not try to send Letitia to Mrs. Upcher. Letitia would have been of no use, even if she had consented to go. It was sheerest wisdom to obey Rachel Upcher, and not to tell. But I had a spasm of real terror when I thought of her “pulling herself together” in her lonely chamber. I listened for a scream, a pistol-shot. It did not seem to me that a woman could hear news like that which it had been my tragic luck to give, without some according show of emotion. Yet a little later I asked myself in good faith what show could ever fit that situation. What speech, what gesture, in that hour, would have been adequate? The dangerous days, in point of fact, would probably come later. I thought more of her, in those two hours, than of Filippo. Though she might well, from all the evidence, have hated him quite honestly, hers was the ironic destiny that is harder to bear than mere martyrdom. No death had ever been more accidental, more irrelevant, more preventable than Filippo’s. One fortnight sooner, she could have turned back the wheel that had now come full circle. That was to be her Hell, and--well, having descended into it in those two hours, I was glad enough to mount once more into the free air.