“Timid?  Oh, no.”  Running lightly up the stairs, the girl hesitated a moment before the half-open door of the room at the back of the house.  Then, in obedience to a gesture from Gershom as he pushed the door wider, she crossed the threshold, and went rapidly toward a couch in front of the window.  As she went forward there floated to her a heavy, sweetish scent which seemed to her to be the very breath of despair.  Her first thought was that the sun had gone under a cloud; the next instant she perceived that the window was shaded by a ragged ailantus tree and that beyond the tree there was a high brick wall which shut out the daylight.  Then she looked at the woman lying under a ragged blanket on the couch; and she felt vaguely that the haggard features framed in coarse black hair awakened a troubled sense of familiarity or recognition.  The next instant there returned to her the memory of her walk in the Square with Corinna a few weeks before, and of the strange woman who had looked at them so curiously.

“I have come to see you,” she began gently, “Mr. Gershom brought me.”

Raising her head, the woman stared at her without replying.  Her eyes were dull and heavy, with drooping lids beneath which a sombre glow flickered and died down.  There was a wan yellow tinge over her face; and yet now that the approach of death had refined and purified her features, she was not without a gravity of expression which made her strangely impressive, like some wax mask of an avenging Fate.  With a sensation of relief, Patty’s eyes wandered from the haggard face to a calla lily in a pot on the window-sill, and she noticed that it bore a single perfect blossom.  While she waited, overcome by a dumbness which seemed to invade her from head to foot, her eyes clung to that calla lily as if it were her one connection with reality.  All the rest, the close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the sickening sweetish odour with which she was unfamiliar, the waxen mask and the blank, drooping eyes of the woman; all these things seemed to exist not in her actual surroundings, but in some hideous dream from which she was struggling to awake.  Somewhere long ago, in a dreadful nightmare, she had smelled that cloying scent and seen those half-shut eyes looking back at her.  Somewhere—­and yet it was impossible.  She could only have imagined it all.

Suddenly the woman spoke in a thick voice.  “You are the Governor’s daughter?  Gideon Vetch’s daughter?”

“Yes.  Mr. Gershom told me you wanted to see me.”

“Mr. Gershom?” The woman’s eyelids flickered and then fell heavily over her expressionless eyes.  “Oh, you mean Julius.  Yes, I told him I wanted to see you.”  A quiver of animation passed like a spasm over her features, and she inquired eagerly, “Where is he?  Did he come?”

“I’m here all right,” said Gershom, stepping briskly into the range of her vision.

She gazed up at him as he approached her with the look of a famished animal, a look so little human and so full of physical hunger that Patty turned her eyes again to the calla lily on the window-sill, and then to the young green on the ailantus tree and the brick wall beyond.  To the girl it seemed that minutes must have gone by before the next words came.  “You brought the medicine?”