At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the visitors at the hotel were beginning to leave; there were fewer every day.  There were only forty people at luncheon, instead of the sixty that there had been.  So old Mrs. Paley computed, gazing about her with her faded eyes, as she took her seat at her own table in the window.  Her party generally consisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and to-day Evelyn was lunching with them also.

She was unusually subdued.  Having noticed that her eyes were red, and guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep up an elaborate conversation between themselves.  She suffered it to go on for a few minutes, leaning both elbows on the table, and leaving her soup untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly, “I don’t know how you feel, but I can simply think of nothing else!”

The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.

Susan replied, “Yes—­isn’t it perfectly awful?  When you think what a nice girl she was—­only just engaged, and this need never have happened—­it seems too tragic.”  She looked at Arthur as though he might be able to help her with something more suitable.

“Hard lines,” said Arthur briefly.  “But it was a foolish thing to do—­to go up that river.”  He shook his head.  “They should have known better.  You can’t expect Englishwomen to stand roughing it as the natives do who’ve been acclimatised.  I’d half a mind to warn them at tea that day when it was being discussed.  But it’s no good saying these sort of things—­it only puts people’s backs up—­it never makes any difference.”

Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here intimated, by raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to know what was being said.

“You heard, Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died of the fever,” Susan informed her gently.  She could not speak of death loudly or even in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley did not catch a word.  Arthur came to the rescue.

“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he said very distinctly.

Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked, “Eh?”

“Miss Vinrace is dead,” he repeated.  It was only by stiffening all the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself from bursting into laughter, and forced himself to repeat for the third time, “Miss Vinrace. . . .  She’s dead.”

Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley’s consciousness.  A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though not damaging its action.  She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what Arthur meant.

“Dead?” she said vaguely.  “Miss Vinrace dead?  Dear me . . . that’s very sad.  But I don’t at the moment remember which she was.  We seem to have made so many new acquaintances here.”  She looked at Susan for help.  “A tall dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high colour?”