' at Nauheim for the last fortnight of their stay--and I
watched her gradually growing. She was very cheerful with me. She always
even kissed me, night and morning, until she was about eighteen. And she
would skip about and fetch me things and laugh at my tales of life in
Philadelphia. But, beneath her gaiety, I fancy that there lurked some
terrors. I remember one day, when she was just eighteen, during one of
her father's rare visits to Europe, we were sitting in the gardens, near
the iron-stained fountain. Leonora had one of her headaches and we were
waiting for Florence and Edward to come from their baths. You have no
idea how beautiful Nancy looked that morning.

We were talking about the desirability of taking tickets in
lotteries--of the moral side of it, I mean. She was all in white, and
so tall and fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so that
the carriage of her neck had that charming touch of youth and of
unfamiliarity. Over her throat there played the reflection from a little
pool of water, left by a thunderstorm of the night before, and all the
rest of her features were in the diffused and luminous shade of her
white parasol. Her dark hair just showed beneath her broad, white hat
of pierced, chip straw; her throat was very long and leaned forward, and
her eyebrows, arching a little as she laughed at some old-fashionedness
in my phraseology, had abandoned their tense line. And there was a
little colour in her cheeks and light in her deep blue eyes. And to
think that that vivid white thing, that saintly and swanlike being--to
think that... Why, she was like the sail of a ship, so white and so
definite in her movements. And to think that she will never... Why, she
will never do anything again. I can't believe it...

Anyhow, we were chattering away about the morality of lotteries. And
then, suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the overtones of
her father's unmistakable voice; it was as if a modified foghorn had
boomed with a reed inside it. I looked round to catch sight of him. A
tall, fair, stiffly upright man of fifty, he was walking away with an
Italian baron who had had much to do with the Belgian Congo. They must
have been talking about the proper treatment of natives, for I heard him
say:

"Oh, hang humanity!"

When I looked again at Nancy her eyes were closed and her face was more
pallid than her dress, which had at least some pinkish reflections from
the gravel. It was dreadful t