able
peaked griffins.

What were you to make of such a woman! Alvina slept in her house
these days, instead of at the hospital. For Effie was a very bad
sleeper. She would sit up in bed, the two glossy black plaits
hanging beside her white, arch face, wrapping loosely round her her
dressing-gown of a sort of plumbago-coloured, dark-grey silk lined
with fine silk of metallic blue, and there, ivory and jet-black and
grey like black-lead, she would sit in the white bedclothes
flicking her handkerchief and revealing a flicker of kingfisher-blue
silk and white silk night dress, complaining of her neuritis nerve
and her own impossible condition, and begging Alvina to stay with
her another half-hour, and suddenly studying the big, blood-red
stone on her finger as if she was reading something in it.

"I believe I shall be like the woman in the _Cent Nouvelles_ and
carry my child for five years. Do you know that story? She said that
eating a parsley leaf on which bits of snow were sticking started
the child in her. It might just as well--"

Alvina would laugh and get tired. There was about her a kind of half
bitter sanity and nonchalance which the nervous woman liked.

One night as they were sitting thus in the bedroom, at nearly eleven
o'clock, they started and listened. Dogs in the distance had also
started to yelp. A mandoline was wailing its vibration in the night
outside, rapidly, delicately quivering. Alvina went pale. She knew
it was Ciccio. She had seen him lurking in the streets of the town,
but had never spoken to him.

"What's this?" cried Mrs. Tuke, cocking her head on one side.
"Music! A mandoline! How extraordinary! Do you think it's a
serenade?--" And she lifted her brows archly.

"I should think it is," said Alvina.

"How extraordinary! What a moment to choose to serenade the lady!
_Isn't_ it like life--! I _must_ look at it--"

She got out of bed with some difficulty, wrapped her dressing-gown
round her, pushed her feet into slippers, and went to the window.
She opened the sash. It was a lovely moonlight night of September.
Below lay the little front garden, with its short drive and its iron
gates that closed on the high-road. From the shadow of the high-road
came the noise of the mandoline.

"Hello, Tommy!" called Mrs. Tuke to her husband, whom she saw on the
drive below her. "How's your musical ear--?"

"All right. Doesn't it disturb you?" came the man's voice from the
moonlight below.

"Not a