She had no very clear idea of how she had got to Cannes.  The going was wiped out.  She had been driven through the garden of the Villa des Palmes and had recognized it as the garden of her dream.  She had passed (through the doors of the Villa) into a state of stupor in which she had recognized nothing, and thence into a sequence of states which she could now too well recall.  There had been a state of waking, in which she had found herself in a little gilt and velvet salon.  There was another woman in it, a vast woman in a thin black dress twinkling all over with little black eyes.  She had a great white powdered face, and they called her Madame.  Then followed a state of hallucination, in which she believed Madame to be an innocent person, the housekeeper; a state of obsession, in which Madame, as she looked at her, seemed to grow vaster, to become immense; a state of imbecility in which her mind feebly tried to grapple with the details of her father’s death as presented brokenly by Madame.  Last had come a state of frenzy, in which she had freed herself from Madame.  After that something had appeared to her in vivid violent illumination.

So vivid and so violent that it seemed to her even now that she was still sitting in the gilt and velvet salon in the Villa des Palmes; she still saw the thin green light that came slanting through the half-closed shutters; warm southern smells floated in, they mixed with the thick stifling scent of patchouli and orris root wafted from Madame as she went to and fro, and with some other odour, bitter and sickly, that came from the room beyond.

She had made out certain familiar objects in this unfamiliar scene.  Her father’s travelling rug lay folded on the red velvet sofa; his cap and gloves were there, just as he had flung them down; his violin, dumb in its black coffin-like case, stood propped up against the wall.  Everywhere else (only gradually discerned) were things belonging to Madame, evidence of her supreme and intimate occupation of the room.

And outside was the garden of sharp aloes and 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.