It seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as I
flew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them. It
was in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the drooping
wellingtonias. The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers,
red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building. Into the structure
of the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took it
home. The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that had
uttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that very
moment I saw two maids in the act of closing them again.
And on the verandah, as I arrived breathless, and shaken in my soul,
Frances and Mabel, standing by the tea table, looked up to greet me. In
the faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock. They watched
me coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticed
the state in which I came. In the face of my hostess, however, I read
another and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances. Mabel knew. She
had experienced what I had experienced. She had heard that awful
sentence I had heard but heard it not for the first time; heard it,
moreover, I verily believe, complete and to its dreadful end.
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