“Then,” she said, as though resuming some conversation—­“then he is, in truth, sick to death?”

“You mean—­Regnault!” asked O’Neill, caught unawares.  “Yes, Senora.  He is sick to death.”

Her steady gaze from under the level brows embarrassed him like an assault.

“And he is frightened?” she demanded.

“I don’t think he is in the least frightened,” replied O’Neill.

She nodded to him, with the shape of a smile on her full lips.

“I tell you, then, that he is frightened,” she said.  “I know.  There is nothing in all that man I do not know.  He is frightened.”

She paused, still staring at him.

“People like us are always frightened in the end,” she went on.  She lifted her forefinger like one who teaches a little child.  “You see, with us, we guess.  We guess at what comes after.  We are sure—­certain and very sure—­that we, at least, deserve to suffer.  And that is why I have lived under my confessor for ten lifetimes.  You gee!”

O’Neill nodded.  It was not hard to understand that the splendid animal in the Senora could never conceive the idea, of its utter extinction.  Death—­to Lola and her kind—­is not the end, it is the beginning of bondage.

There was another interval of silence while she twisted her fingers in her lap.

“Ah,” she said.  “I know.  He will be beautiful in his bed, dying like an abbot.  He is frightened—­yes.  But he thinks himself safe from me.  He imagines me sour, decorous, with a skinny neck.  Because he thinks me all but a nun, he will be all but a priest.  We shall see, Senor O’Neill.  We shall see!”

Soon after that she left him to retire to the compartment in which her maid traveled alone.

“We arrive at eight, do we not?” she asked him.  “Then I must make my toilet.”  She smiled down on him as she spoke, and gave him a little significant nod.

The train was already running into the station when she returned.  O’Neill, nervous and apprehensive, gave her a quick glance.  She was covered in a long cloak of black silk that hid her figure entirely; the hood of it rose over her hair and made a frame to her face.  Under the hood he could distinguish the soft brightness of a red rose stuck ever one ear.

“Senora,” he said, “I take the liberty to remind you that we are going to the bedside of a dying man.”

She turned on him with slow scorn.  “Yes,” she replied.  “It is, as you say, a liberty.”

The long robe rose and fell over her breast with her breathing; her eyes traveled over him from head to feet and back again deliberately.

O’Neill took his temper into custody.  “Still,” he urged, “if you have it in mind to compass any surprising effect, remember—­it may be his death.”

She laughed slowly.  “What is a death?” she answered.  And then, with a hissing vehemence:  “He sent for me, and I am here.  Should I wear a veil, then—­Lola?”