"I have come to see you," she began gently, "Mr. Gershom brought me."
Raising her head, the woman stared at her without replying. Her eyes
were dull and heavy, with drooping lids beneath which a sombre glow
flickered and died down. There was a wan yellow tinge over her face; and
yet now that the approach of death had refined and purified her
features, she was not without a gravity of expression which made her
strangely impressive, like some wax mask of an avenging Fate. With a
sensation of relief, Patty's eyes wandered from the haggard face to a
calla lily in a pot on the window-sill, and she noticed that it bore a
single perfect blossom. While she waited, overcome by a dumbness which
seemed to invade her from head to foot, her eyes clung to that calla
lily as if it were her one connection with reality. All the rest, the
close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the
sickening sweetish odour with which she was unfamiliar, the waxen mask
and the blank, drooping eyes of the woman; all these things seemed to
exist not in her actual surroundings, but in some hideous dream from
which she was struggling to awake.
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