palms, where, as she
believed, her father's spirit had gone looking for her, and had not
found her. His body lay in the inner room behind the closed door.

That horrible little gilt and velvet salon! Whenever she thought of it
she saw Madame; she saw Madame's little dry eyes blinking in her great
white powdered face; she saw the vast heaving of Madame's bust where
the little jet sequins shivered and shook; she heard her voice cooing
and purring voluptuous condolence; and she felt again her own passion
of disgust and fear as she wrenched herself free from the warm scented
body, quivering in its thin black sheath.

Then she saw the inner room behind the closed door. Nothing was
obscure and secret there. The slats of the shutter let in great shafts
of daylight; the coffin stood in the middle of the room, raised on
trestles, and covered with a white sheet. A crucifix stood at the head
of the coffin, propped against a chest of drawers. Three candles,
flickering in their sockets, were set on the table at its foot. On
each knob of the two top-drawers hung a wreath of yellow immortelles.

That long coffin, raised high on its trestles, seemed to fill the
little room. Lucia saw it now, she saw the face in it turned up to the
ceiling, sharp and yellow, the limp red moustache hanging like a
curtain over the half-open mouth. No trace of the tilted faun-like
smile.

She would never get away from that terrible room. The pattern of its
walls (garlands of pink rosebuds between blue stripes) was stamped
upon her brain. There too, as in the salon, abode the inextinguishable
odour shaken from Madame's dress, it mixed with the hot reek of
carbolic and the bitter stabbing odour of the coffin.

On the floor by the trestles lay a glove, a long enormous glove,
Madame's glove; it was greyish white, and wrinkled like the cast skin
of a snake. The finger of its fellow hung from the chest of drawers
beside the crucifix. It pointed downwards at the dead man.

Within the gay garlanded walls, surrounded by those symbols and
souvenirs of Madame, he lay with his face turned up to the ceiling,
and his mouth half open, as if it still gasped piteously for breath.
One more breath to beg for forgiveness, to defend himself, explain;
while bit by bit the place he had lived in gave up his secret.

She could not tell whether she forgave him or not. When she stood by
him there she could have implored _his_ forgiveness for having thus
come upon him unaware