THREE minutes later Tony Bream put his question to his other visitor. “ Is it true that you know what Julia a while ago had the room cleared in order to say to me? ”

Rose hesitated. “ Mrs. Beever repeated to you that I told her so? Yes, then; I probably do know.” She waited again a little. “The poor darling announced to you her conviction that she’s dying.” Then at the face with which he greeted her exactitude: “ I haven’t needed to be a monster of cunning to guess! ” she exclaimed.

He had perceptibly paled: it made a difference, a kind of importance for that absurdity¹ that it was already in other ears. “She has said the same to you? ”

Rose gave a pitying smile. “ She has done me that honour.”

“Do you mean today? ”

“To-day and once before.”

Tony looked simple in his wonder. “Yester day?”

Rose hesitated again. “No; before your child was born. Soon after I came.”

“She had made up her mind then from the first? ”

“Yes,” said Rose, with the serenity² of superior sense; “she had laid out for herself that pleasant little prospect³. She called it a presentiment⁴, a fixed⁵ idea.”

Tony took this in with a frown. “And you never spoke⁶ of it? ”

“To you? Why in the world should I when she herself didn’t? I took it perfectly⁷ for what it was an inevitable⁸ but unimportant result of the nervous depression produced by her step mother’s visit.”

Tony had fidgeted away with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “Damn her stepmother’s visit! ”

“That’s exactly what I did! ” Rose laughed. “Damn her stepmother too! ” the young man angrily pursued.

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