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He felt and heard a sigh at his cheek. 'She can't have heard us....' The window was darkened by the Virginia Creeper.

'You speak as though nothing could be more terrible than her hearing us,' he replied aloud. 'As a matter of fact, it would probably be one of the best things which could happen if they overheard us—both of them—discussing them in the harshest and least sympathetic manner.' His own surprised misgiving at the urgency of these words was only equalled by hers. She was struck silent in a way which made patent the effort with which she began speaking again.

'She has always loved the narcissi.' Ada's cadence on that word 'loved' was enough to show that her fear was well grounded, and that pity could drain her soul. Instead of seeing an unreal, almost delusive quality in the situation, as one fresh from the sane world, she appeared to conceive of no other reality beyond this abnormal state of affairs. She accepted wholeheartedly the fact of her mother and her mother's state, where one unobsessed would have implied, for all its gravity, a lightness of reservation.