s. The niece, with her sleek brown bandeaux and fifteenth
century profile, passed noiselessly through the hall; and presently a
smell of cooking entered the sitting room.

"As late as that?"

Lilla drove uptown, heaped her arms with flowers, entered the rooms to
which Lawrence Teck had led her on the night of their marriage.

The characteristic odor of the place--the odor of skins and sandalwood,
camphor and dried grasses--nearly stifled her. In the gloom she saw
the savage weapons gleaming. Then the shadow of clustered tomtoms
against the bedroom door made her heart stand still. As if to exorcise
a ghost that she no longer dared to meet, still clutching the mass of
tributary blossoms to her breast, she tore the window curtains apart.
The sunset struck in like a sword blade relentlessly cleaving through
the veils of time. Dust lay over everything. On the center table, in
the polished gourd, a bouquet of winter roses stood rigid, brown, like
the lips of mummies, dry enough to crumble at a touch.

Standing there in her modish suit so cunningly devised to emphasize her
charms, with the flowers slipping from her arms to the dusty rug, she
wept at the vagueness of her recollections, the fading away of grief,
to which she had once dedicated herself "for life."

"Why do I keep this place up? It's dreadful that everything should be
just the same here----"

She meant, "While I am so changed."

She went downstairs intending to tell the janitor to give the rooms a
cleaning; but she found him--a fat, undersized old fellow in a
skullcap--talking to a young man who had a leather portfolio stuck
under his arm. As her eyes were red, and her voice no doubt still
unsteady, she averted her head, and passed quickly out to her car.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Though a genius--at any rate according to Brantome--it was now David
Verne, instead of Lilla, who suffered from the feeling of inferiority.
To hold her, he had only his music, and perhaps his bodily feebleness
that excited her compassion. Yet this feebleness, profound,
insurmountable, was what caused his torments of jealousy.

The question was, how long would she be content with this wan sort of
love?

And what did he know of her life during all the hours when she was
invisible to him? What homage, what persuasions, must she, with her
peculiar loveliness, not be object of, out there in the world full of
gaiety and vitality, where strength was always offering itself to