“Shall I make up the fire?” . . .  I waited.  “Do you hear me?” She made no sound and with the tip of my finger I touched her bare shoulder.  But for its elasticity it might have been frozen.  At once I looked round for the fur coat; it seemed to me that there was not a moment to lose if she was to be saved, as though we had been lost on an Arctic plain.  I had to put her arms into the sleeves, myself, one after another.  They were cold, lifeless, but flexible.  Then I moved in front of her and buttoned the thing close round her throat.  To do that I had actually to raise her chin with my finger, and it sank slowly down again.  I buttoned all the other buttons right down to the ground.  It was a very long and splendid fur.  Before rising from my kneeling position I felt her feet.  Mere ice.  The intimacy of this sort of attendance helped the growth of my authority.  “Lie down,” I murmured, “I shall pile on you every blanket I can find here,” but she only shook her head.

Not even in the days when she ran “shrill as a cicada and thin as a match” through the chill mists of her native mountains could she ever have felt so cold, so wretched, and so desolate.  Her very soul, her grave, indignant, and fantastic soul, seemed to drowse like an exhausted traveller surrendering himself to the sleep of death.  But when I asked her again to lie down she managed to answer me, “Not in this room.”  The dumb spell was broken.  She turned her head from side to side, but oh! how cold she was!  It seemed to come out of her, numbing me, too; and the very diamonds on the arrow of gold sparkled like hoar frost in the light of the one candle.

“Not in this room; not here,” she protested, with that peculiar suavity of tone which made her voice unforgettable, irresistible, no matter what she said.  “Not after all this!  I couldn’t close my eyes in this place.  It’s full of corruption and ugliness all round, in me, too, everywhere except in your heart, which has nothing to do where I breathe.  And here you may leave me.  But wherever you go remember that I am not evil, I am not evil.”

I said:  “I don’t intend to leave you here.  There is my room upstairs.  You have been in it before.”

“Oh, you have heard of that,” she whispered.  The beginning of a wan smile vanished from her lips.

“I also think you can’t stay in this room; and, surely, you needn’t hesitate . . .”

“No.  It doesn’t matter now.  He has killed me.  Rita is dead.”

While we exchanged these words I had retrieved the quilted, blue slippers and had put them on her feet.  She was very tractable.  Then taking her by the arm I led her towards the door.

“He has killed me,” she repeated in a sigh.  “The little joy that was in me.”

“He has tried to kill himself out there in the hall,” I said.  She put back like a frightened child but she couldn’t be dragged on as a child can be.