Then came a long account of the frocks that were being made for the shires, and the scarlet top-coat to be worn with a grey habit, which Roger hated.
"I think he would like me in an early-Victorian get up, with the edge of my habit touching my horse's fetlocks, a large white muslin collar, and a low beaver hat with a long feather. Those early-Victorian collars cost two or three pounds apiece, my Grannie told me, and those poor wretches who never changed their clothes till dinner, wore them all day long; and yet they talk of our extravagance; as if nobody paid anything for clothes in those days."
And then, when the houses to which she was going, and the clothes she was to wear, and her quarrels with her husband and her maid had been discussed at length, Susan began to talk about her friend.
"Lady O. told me how ill you had been, ma mie, and of your curious whim about this house. She says Selwyn Tower would have liked you to go to the Transvaal, and told her that two or three months in that delicious climate would make you a strong woman; but finding you set upon stopping in your own house he gave way, as your illness is chiefly a question of nerves. It is a comfort to know that, n'est-ce pas, mein Schatz?"
"Yes, of course it is a comfort. I suppose, with nothing amiss but one's nerves, one might live to be ninety."
"True, dearest, quite ninety," Susan answered, shuddering.
Susan Amphlett was out of her element in a sick room. The mere thought that the friend she was talking to was marked for death seemed to freeze her blood. Her own hand grew as cold as the cold hand she was holding. She could not be bright and pleasant with Death in sight.
As she sat with Vera in the library that had been Provana's favourite room she felt as if there were someone standing behind the door of that inner room, a door that had been left ajar. There was someone waiting there whose unseen presence made her dumb. Someone! Not Provana—but another and more terrible shape.
"Vera," she burst out at last, "why do you sit in this horrid room instead of in your sweet white den, with Byron and Browning and all your dear people?"
"I like this room better, now that my thoughts have gone backward."