Jarniman opened it.  ’His mistress was prepared to see them.’—­Not like one near death.—­They were met in the hall by the Rev. Groseman Buttermore.  ‘You will find a welcome,’ was his reassurance to them:  gently delivered, on the stoop of a large person.  His whispered tones were more agreeably deadening than his words.

Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.

‘Can she bear it?’ Victor said, and heard:  ‘Her wish ten minutes.’

‘Soon over,’ he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate exclamation for the invalid.

They rounded the open door.  They were in the drawing-room.  It was furnished as in the old time, gold and white, looking new; all the same as of old, save for a division of silken hangings; and these were pale blue:  the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom.  He glanced at the ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory.  Here she lived,—­here she slept, behind the hangings.  There was refreshingly that little difference in the arrangement of the room.  The corner Northward was occupied by the grand piano; and Victor had an inquiry in him:—­tuned?  He sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings.  Sensible that Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.

Mrs. Burman was present; seated.  People may die seated; she had always disliked the extended posture; except for the night’s rest, she used to say; imagining herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in her attitude when seated by day:—­and often at night the poor woman had to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia!—­But I ’m bound to think humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and he fetched the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from a pale blue silk veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by morning.

Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.

Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken eyes was distinguishable as the one once known.  If the world could see it and hear, that it called itself a man’s wife!  She looked burnt out.

Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa.  Execution there!  Victor thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man really feeling devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown by the dread Shade.

‘Ten minutes,’ Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly placing them on the chairs.

He went.  They were alone with Mrs. Burman.

No voice came.  They were unsure of being seen by the floating grey of eyes patient to gaze from their vast distance.  Big drops fell from Nataly’s.  Victor heard the French timepiece on the mantel-shelf, where a familiar gilt Cupid swung for the seconds:  his own purchase.  The time of day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.

Nataly’s mouth was taking breath of anguish at moments.  More than a minute of the terrible length of the period of torture must have gone:  two, if not three.