She made a movement towards the window but checked herself.  I hadn’t moved.  The rattle of wheels on the cobble-stones died out almost at once.

“Will Monsieur write an answer?” Rose suggested after a short silence.

“Hardly worth while,” I said.  “I will be there very soon after you.  Meantime, please tell Madame from me that I am not anxious to see any more tears.  Tell her this just like that, you understand.  I will take the risk of not being received.”

She dropped her eyes, said:  “Oui, Monsieur,” and at my suggestion waited, holding the door of the room half open, till I went downstairs to see the road clear.

It was a kind of deaf-and-dumb house.  The black-and-white hall was empty and everything was perfectly still.  Blunt himself had no doubt gone away with his mother in the brougham, but as to the others, the dancing girls, Therese, or anybody else that its walls may have contained, they might have been all murdering each other in perfect assurance that the house would not betray them by indulging in any unseemly murmurs.  I emitted a low whistle which didn’t seem to travel in that peculiar atmosphere more than two feet away from my lips, but all the same Rose came tripping down the stairs at once.  With just a nod to my whisper:  “Take a fiacre,” she glided out and I shut the door noiselessly behind her.

The next time I saw her she was opening the door of the house on the Prado to me, with her cap and the little black silk apron on, and with that marked personality of her own, which had been concealed so perfectly in the dowdy walking dress, very much to the fore.

“I have given Madame the message,” she said in her contained voice, swinging the door wide open.  Then after relieving me of my hat and coat she announced me with the simple words:  “Voila Monsieur,” and hurried away.  Directly I appeared Dona Rita, away there on the couch, passed the tips of her fingers over her eyes and holding her hands up palms outwards on each side of her head, shouted to me down the whole length of the room:  “The dry season has set in.”  I glanced at the pink tips of her fingers perfunctorily and then drew back.  She let her hands fall negligently as if she had no use for them any more and put on a serious expression.

“So it seems,” I said, sitting down opposite her.  “For how long, I wonder.”

“For years and years.  One gets so little encouragement.  First you bolt away from my tears, then you send an impertinent message, and then when you come at last you pretend to behave respectfully, though you don’t know how to do it.  You should sit much nearer the edge of the chair and hold yourself very stiff, and make it quite clear that you don’t know what to do with your hands.”

All this in a fascinating voice with a ripple of badinage that seemed to play upon the sober surface of her thoughts.  Then seeing that I did not answer she altered the note a bit.