nobody's asked me. Is
she going out, this weather?"

"No: I wish she would. She says it tires her too much. It's a pity
she hates the South so."

They walked to the tiny tapestried lift, beyond the curve of the great
stairs, and she pressed the ivory button that sent them up. At the
fourth floor the car settled lightly and they stepped out.

"She's not speaking much," the nurse warned him, "but of course she
may, for you. Very gloomy, for two days, she's been."

She knocked lightly at a door and entered without waiting. The room
was very light, with bowls of cut flowers everywhere and a pair of
green love-birds billing eternally on a brass standard: they chirped
softly now and then. A miniature grand piano filled one corner, and
the light fell richly on the tooled leather of low book-cases, and
slipped into reflected pools of violet, green and blood-red on the
polished floor. A great tiger skin stretched in front of a massive,
claw-legged davenport, and in the corner of it, away from the cheerful,
crackling fire, a black-haired woman sat, tense and silent, her eyes
fixed in a brooding stare. She was all in delicate, cunningly mingled
tints of mauve, violet and lavender; near her neck tiny diamond points
winked; magnificent emeralds edged with diamonds lay like green stains
on her long white hands. In her dark immobility, among the rich, clear
objects scattered so artfully about the sun-lighted chamber, she had a
marvellous effect of being the chief figure in some modern French
artist's impressionistic "interior." She gave a distinct sense of
having been bathed and dried, scented and curled, dressed--and
abandoned there, between the love-birds and the polished piano: a large
gold frame about the room would have supplied the one note lacking.

"Well, Miss Mary, and how goes it?" Dr. Stanchon said, sitting beside
her and taking her hand easily, since she failed to notice his own
outstretched.

She lifted her eyes slightly to his, moved her lips, then sighed a
little and dropped her lids. She might have been a young-looking woman
of forty, or a girl of twenty-five who had been long ill or distressed.

"Come, now, Miss Mary, I hear you've given me up--wasn't I high priced
enough for you? Because I can always accommodate, you know, in that
direction," Stanchon went on persuasively.

Again she raised her eyes, swallowed, appeared to overcome an almost
unconquerable lethargy of spirit, and spoke.

"It's