“But my father?” protested Laura; “he broke his heart for her.”

A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man’s sunken lips.  “He gave to her dead what she had never had from him living,” he returned.  “When she was gone everything—­even the man’s life for which he had sacrificed her—­turned worthless.  He always had the seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to develop.”

A short silence followed his words, while Laura stared at him with eyes which seemed to weigh gravely the meaning of his words.  Then, rising hurriedly, she made a gesture as if throwing the subject from her and walked rapidly to the door.

“Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy are coming to dine,” she said, “so I must glance at the table.  I can’t remember now whether I ordered the oysters or not.”

The old man glanced after her with timid disappointment.  “So you haven’t time to hear me play?” he asked wistfully.

“Not now—­there’s Aunt Angela’s dinner to be seen to.  If Mr. Bleeker comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him.  He likes it.”

“But he always goes to sleep, Laura.  He doesn’t listen—­and besides he snores so that I can’t enjoy my own music.”

“That’s because he’d rather snore than do anything else.  I wouldn’t let that worry me an instant.  He goes to sleep at the opera.”

She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner.  As she opened the door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment.

To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division between two opposing civilisations.  Even the gas light, which Angela could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World cloisters.  The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as pitiless as an obsession of insanity.  On a small table by a couch, which was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body.  Only the woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason.  Her eyes looking wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she had met the blow that destroyed her youth.