nd them? On the other hand would he indeed
understand the silence the silence which seemed now intolerable to her?
She folded the note and directed it, the tumult in her heart growing
wilder as she did so. Once more there raged the battle which she had
fought in the amphitheatre that morning, and she was not so strong now;
she was weakened by physical pain, and to endure was far harder. It
seemed to her that her whole life would be unbearable if she did not
send him that message. And to send it was so fatally easy; she had
merely to ring, and then in a few minutes the note would be in his
hands.

It was a little narrow slip of a room; all her life long she could
vividly recall it. The single bed pushed close to the wall, the writing
table with its gay-patterned cloth, the hanging wardrobe with glass
doors, the walls trellised with roses, and on the ceiling a painting of
some white swans eternally swimming in an ultra-marine lake. The window,
unshuttered, but veiled by muslin curtains, looked out upon the Arno;
from her bed she could see the lights on the further bank. On the wall
close beside her was a little round wooden projection. If it had been a
rattlesnake she could not have gazed at it more fixedly. Then she looked
at the printed card above, and the words written in French and English,
German, and Italian, seemed to fall mechanically on her brain, though
burning thoughts seethed there, too.

"Ring once for hot water, twice for the chamber maid, three times for
the waiter."

Merely to touch that ivory knob, and then by the lightest pressure of
the finger tips a whole world of love and happiness and rest might open
for her, and life would be changed forever.

Again and again she was on the point of yielding, but each time she
resisted, and each resistance made her stronger. At length, with a
fearful effort, she turned her face away and buried it in the pillow,
clinging with all her might to the ironwork of the bed.

For at least an hour the most frightful hour of her life she did not
dare to stir. At last when her hands were stiff and sore with that rigid
grasping, when it seemed as if her heart had been wrenched out of
her and had left nothing but an aching void, she sat up and tore both
Brian's note and her reply into a thousand pieces; then, in a weary,
lifeless way, made her preparations for the night.

But sleep was impossible. The struggle was over forever, but the pain
was but just begun, and she was