"No," said the Russian in her strange, empty voice; "I thought."
Edith smiled. "What did you think?"
"I thought, why do you lie?"
Edith sat up, flushing, and her breath went a little shorter. "What?" she said.
Rosalia Antonowa kept her deep eyes on Edith's face.
"You said you were glad that he was going. Perhaps you meant it," she said. "You are here so short a time; but in a year, in two years, or four years, your lips will not be able to say that, and your heart will turn sick when another goes away, and you know that you will never go—never." Her bistre lids closed.
Edith tried to find something comforting to say to her.
"Davos is so beautiful, one ought not to mind. Surely you must love all this blue and white loveliness—the mountains, and the snow, and the sun."
"Oh, the mountains!" murmured Rosalia, with clenched teeth. "The mountains, weighing on my breast, and the snow freezing and choking me, and the sun blazing and blinding me. Oh!"—she raised her thin fist to the towering immensity round her—"oh, this unspeakable, this monstrous prison of death!"
Just then a Belgian girl passed, with pale lips and a tiny waist. She stopped to ask Antonowa how she was.