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.

Somewhere long ago, in a dreadful nightmare, she had smelled that cloying scent and seen those half-shut eyes looking back at her.

Somewhere--and yet it was impossible.