After Marcella left him, Hallin remained for some hours in what seemed to those about him a feverish trance.  He did not sleep, but he showed no sign of responsive consciousness.  In reality his mind all through was full of the most vivid though incoherent images and sensations.  But he could no longer distinguish between them and the figures and movements of the real people in his room.  Each passed into and intermingled with the other.  In some vague, eager way he seemed all the time to be waiting or seeking for Aldous.  There was the haunting impression of some word to say—­some final thing to do—­which would not let him rest.  But something seemed always to imprison him, to hold him back, and the veil between him and the real Aldous watching beside him grew ever denser.

At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the half-sitting posture in which he had passed the day.  Death had come too near.  His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him from London watched with him.  The curtains were drawn back from both the windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.

Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of purpose and of strength.  He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to be alone with him.  But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of his showed no change.  Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of anguish and of struggle.  Three words to say—­only three words; but those he must say!  He tried again, but Aldous’s dumb grief still sat motionless.  Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, “Speech is gone; I shall speak no more!”

It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt.  But something checked both, and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.

What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it asked for that of his friend.  He placed his own within those seeking fingers, and Hallin’s latest movement—­which death stopped half-way—­was to raise it to his lips.

* * * * *

So Marcella’s confession—­made in the abandonment, the blind passionate trust, of a supreme moment—­bore no fruit.  It went with Hallin to the grave.

CHAPTER III.

“I think I saw the letters arrive,” said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter.  “And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us.”

“Let me go for them, mamma.”

“No, thank you, I must go in.”

And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel.  Marcella watched her widow’s cap and black dress as they passed along the pergola of the hotel garden, between bright masses of geraniums and roses on either side.