Late at night Rosamund was allowed to enter the chill unlighted chamber, where the unhappy lady had been lying for hours in the gloom of a London Winter’s daylight and gaslight.

‘Madame de Rouaillout is indisposed with headache,’ was her report to Beauchamp.

The conventional phraseology appeased him, though he saw his grief behind it.

Presently he asked if Renee had taken food.

‘No:  you know what a headache is,’ Rosamund replied.

It is true that we do not care to eat when we are in pain.

He asked if she looked ill.

‘She will not have lights in the room,’ said Rosamund.

Piecemeal he gained the picture of Renee in an image of the death within which welcomed a death without.

Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid.  These men!  She remarked very honestly: 

‘Oh, no; doctors are not needed.’

‘Has she mentioned me?’

‘Not once.’

‘Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma’am?’ cried Beauchamp, bounding off his chair.

He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it; and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs-accompanied by her, of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer to a message was to satisfy him.

‘Any message would trouble her:  what message would you send?’ Rosamund asked him.

The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be thought of.

’You are unused to real suffering—­that is for women!—­and want to be doing instead of enduring,’ said Rosamund.

She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally sick lovers.  Beauchamp’s outcries against himself gave her the shadows of their story.  He stood in tears—­a thing to see to believe of Nevil Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past midnight.  Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate knowledge of him:  she made as if to soothe and kiss him compassionately.

In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to England.  Rosamund tempered her report of Renee by saying of her, that she was very quiet.  He turned to the window.

‘Look, what a climate ours is!’ Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.  ’Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe!  This is what she has come to!  Has she spoken of me yet?’

‘No.’

‘Is she dead silent?’

‘She answers, if I speak to her.’

‘I believe, ma’am,’ said Beauchamp, ’that we are the coldest-hearted people in Europe.’

Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog.  Consequently nothing was left for him to abuse but himself.  In that she tried to moderate him, and drew forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renee, would for love’s sake be friendly to them.