Tomorrow she would return to England and to Stibbards. Everything would be as it was, outwardly, at least. She would not soon be able to forget, perhaps she would not be able to ever forget the interview in this hateful, gaudy room, with the vulgar, red plush and gilt furniture, the great mirrors, wreathed with coarse carvings that rose to the ceiling. Neither of the sisters would influence the other by one iota. Their tragedy was that neither could forget the other.

Her last bouquet!

What did she mean by that? How could she say anything so absurd?

'Send me her last bouquet!' Kezia Faunce could not get that out of her excited mind. She, who all her life had never had a posy sent her, to receive that bouquet which would mean that her sister's life of sin was over! The idea was as exasperating, as ridiculous as it was hateful.

Miss Faunce left Paris the next day. Her progress to the station was rendered hateful by constant glimpses of her sister, pretty, provoking, and elegant, smiling at her in red and black paint from the bill posters. In one of these she was depicted as holding an enormous cluster of scarlet roses in a stiff white paper frill, and Miss Faunce, staring at the vivid drawing which had in the set of the nose and chin a grotesque likeness to herself, repeated with bitter vexation:

'Her last bouquet! Her last bouquet!'

II

Kezia Faunce lived very well at Stibbards. She had power, money, position, activities and leisure, and valued all these things exactly in that order.

There was no one to dispute her authority either in her own household or in the village; there was no fear of any contradiction either in her management of the Manor or in her general supervision of her poorer neighbours' affairs. She was charitable and even kind, for she felt these things to be virtuous and she had early set herself out to be virtuous. The fine Palladian Manor House, Tudor timber and bricks, re-fronted with eighteenth-century stone, classic portico and windows, was far too large for her, for she lived alone and seldom entertained. But she refused to shut up any of the rooms and the large staff of servants kept everything as precise and orderly as if the original number for which the house had been built still inhabited its spacious wings. And she filled her days that would otherwise have been sometimes empty and often lonely, by a minute supervision of all the details of her own household, by a close supervision of all the affairs of all her servants, tenants, and poorer neighbours.

For years she had led this active, authoritative life with no trouble save the annoying thought of Martha in Paris, and since she had been to Paris and seen Martha this thought had grown until it overspread all her days as a fungus will overspread a healthy tree, seizing on a speck of diseased wood and growing until there is no sap or vitality in root or branch, and, in the next Spring, no leaves are put forth.

There was no one to whom Kezia Faunce could speak of her sister, and therefore she brooded the more deeply day and night on that same personality that was at once so alien and so much part of herself, leading that other life so distant from her own, and yet very much a life that would have expressed something of herself that had never been expressed. It was not likely that she would ever see her again or that they would ever correspond. Some day she would read in the paper of the retirement or the death of Mme. Marcelle Lesarge; possibly of her marriage or her disappearance into a convent. There was only one thing that Mme. Lesarge, supposing that she ever looked at an English newspaper, could read of her, and that would be her death and her burial in the churchyard which was so near Stibbards and where every other Faunce lay and would lie, except Martha herself.

The estate would go to a distant cousin whose name was not Faunce, and Kezia's money would go to austere charities. And so the very existence of the two sisters would be, as it were, wiped off the earth. There would only be Kezia's name among all her ancestors in the English churchyard, and that assumed, false name of Marcelle Lesarge in some huge Parisian cemetery. And Kezia often wondered which of them would die first. Which would read the notice of the other's death in the paper? And what would it be like for her to realise that that other self of hers in Paris had ceased to exist, or for Martha to know that her second half which had stayed at home in Stibbards had left the familiar rooms empty?

Kezia Faunce tried, often enough, to analyse her feelings towards her sister, to get, as it were, to the very heart of this dull, envious hatred, but she could not. Whenever she tried to do so she became both confused and rebellious. She was quite sure that her scorn for Martha was sincere and that she despised the kind of woman that Martha was, and yet she was forced to admit that Martha had had a great deal that she would have liked to have had, experiences that she would have given much to have enjoyed, adventures that she would have delighted to have tested.

She believed that Martha felt much the same about her; surely she had seen regret and envy in those dark, painted eyes under the elegant little hat with the crimson ostrich feathers!

Martha had regretted, ah, surely, that she had forfeited her status as an English gentlewoman, that she had no part in Stibbards, and all that Stibbards meant. She had envied Kezia and the courage which had chosen the dull, monotonous way, the dignity that had clung to duty, the self-sacrifice, the austere decorum which would force even the most ribald and light-minded to respect Miss Kezia Faunce.

This obsession about Martha, which she had hoped a sight of her would efface, grew, on the contrary, from day to day, until it became almost unbearable.

'I suppose it will go on for years and years,' she thought, with a sense of panic, 'I used to think I saw her sitting at table with me, walking beside me in the garden, and even through the woods and the orchards; meeting me in the village and coming into my bedroom at night. But I always saw her as I remembered her—a young girl in a muslin frock, doeskin slippers, and long curls falling from under a chip straw bonnet. Well, I have got rid of that image, but it has been replaced by another. I see her now as I saw her in that detestable red plush and gilt drawing-room in the Paris hotel, in that vulgar interchangeable blue and red silk, in those diamonds—yes, I believe they were real—in that lace, I was sure it was genuine, on her bosom, with her hair dyed and her face painted, and the little hat with the crimson feather placed so elegantly on her curls; looking, I must confess, no more than thirty-five, and yet I thought that towards the end of the interview she looked as old as I do. Yes I see her like that now. It is quite unescapable. I don't know what I shall do. It must be some kind of an illness.'

And she wondered passionately if Martha were haunted by her, if Martha, at the theatre, in her choice little apartment, in her tilbury, driving in the Bois in the midst of her little supper parties, saw her, Kezia Faunce, in her plain frock, cut by a provincial dressmaker, with her grey hair in the chenille net, with her uncared-for complexion and dull eyes, with her keys at her waist, and her account or receipt book in her hand, going from still-room to closet, from kitchen to dairy, through all the handsome well-kept, unused rooms of Stibbards.

'It is grotesque, it is absurd.' With all the force of her strong mind she endeavoured to shake off the obsession, and threw herself with suppressed and burning energy into good works.

Her charities, always considerable, became lavish; she gave away blankets and coals, medicines and foods, until the vicar protested that she was spoiling his parishioners.