distressed
gaze wandering about her. "Horrible!" she said. "Absolutely horrible!...
Did SHE do this?"

Her question disconcerted the doctor very much. "You mean Lady Hardy?"
he asked. "She doesn't paint."

"No, no. I mean, did she get all these things together?"

"Naturally," said Dr. Martineau.

"None of them are a bit like him. They are like blows aimed at his
memory. Not one has his life in it. How could she do it? Look at that
idiot statuette!... He was extraordinarily difficult to get. I have
burnt every photograph I had of him. For fear that this would happen;
that he would go stiff and formal--just as you have got him here. I have
been trying to sketch him almost all the time since he died. But I can't
get him back. He's gone."

She turned to the doctor again. She spoke to him, not as if she expected
him to understand her, but because she had to say these things which
burthened her mind to someone. "I have done hundreds of sketches. My
room is littered with them. When you turn them over he seems to be
lurking among them. But not one of them is like him."

She was trying to express something beyond her power. "It is as if
someone had suddenly turned out the light."

She followed the doctor upstairs. "This was his study," the doctor
explained.

"I know it. I came here once," she said.

They entered the big bedroom in which the coffined body lay. Dr.
Martineau, struck by a sudden memory, glanced nervously at the desk, but
someone had made it quite tidy and the portrait of Aliss Grammont had
disappeared. Miss Leeds walked straight across to the coffin and
stood looking down on the waxen inexpressive dignity of the dead. Sir
Richmond's brows and nose had become sharper and more clear-cut than
they had ever been in life and his lips had set into a faint inane
smile. She stood quite still for a long time. At length she sighed
deeply.

She spoke, a little as though she thought aloud, a little as though she
talked at that silent presence in the coffin. "I think he loved," she
said. "Sometimes I think he loved me. But it is hard to tell. He was
kind. He could be intensely kind and yet he didn't seem to care for
you. He could be intensely selfish and yet he certainly did not care for
himself.... Anyhow, I loved HIM.... There is nothing left in me now to
love anyone else--for ever...."

She put her hands behind her back and looked at the dead man with her
head a little on one side. "Too kind," she said very s