Alice Manisty scarcely responded; she sat motionless, her wild black head bent like that of a Mænad at watch, her gaze fixed, her long thin hands grasping the arm of her chair with unconscious force.
'What is she thinking of?' thought Lucy once, with a momentary shiver.
'Herself?'
When bedtime came, Manisty gave the ladies their candles. As he bade good-night to Lucy, he said in her ear: 'You said you wished to see the Lateran Museum. My aunt will send Benson with you to-morrow.'
His tone did not ask whether she wished for the arrangement, but simply imposed it.
Then, as Eleanor approached him, he raised his shoulders with a gesture that only she saw, and led her a few steps apart in the dimly lighted ante-room, where the candles were placed.
'She wants the most impossible things, my dear lady,' he said in low-voiced despair—'things I can no more do than fly over the moon!'
'Edward!'—said his sister from the open door of the salon—'I should like some further conversation with you before I go to bed.'
Manisty with the worst grace in the world saw his aunt and Eleanor to their rooms, and then went back to surrender himself to Alice. He was a man who took family relations hardly, impatient of the slightest bond that was not of his own choosing. Yet it was Eleanor's judgment that, considering his temperament, he had not been a bad brother to this wild sister. He had spent both heart and thought upon her case; and at the root of his relation to her, a deep and painful pity was easily to be divined.
Vast as the villa-apartment was, the rooms were all on one floor, and the doors fitted badly. Lucy's sleep was haunted for long by a distant sound of voices, generally low and restrained, but at moments rising and sharpening as though their owners forgot the hour and the night. In the morning it seemed to her that she had been last conscious of a burst of weeping, far distant—then of a sudden silence …
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