put them away in the top room of the house where she could not possibly find them. When they arrived she was still in bed, suffering from a wild headache that did not leave her for days after the experience with Madame Blaise.
"It was horrible," she told Ellen. "More horrible than you can imagine, to see that old devil dancing before me like an omen . . . a warning of old age. If you had seen her . . . so like me in the pictures . . . so like me even in the reality, like me as I might easily be some day. It was horrible . . . horrible!" And she buried her face in her hands.
Ellen, as usual, consulted Madame Gigon.
"She is really ill, this time," she said. "It isn't that she's just tired. She's frightened by something. She's much worse than she's ever been before."
And they sent for a physician, a great bearded man, recommended by Madame de Cyon, who diagnosed the case as a crise de nerfs and bade her go at once to the lodge in the country. The servants remarked that Madame seemed ill and tired for the first time in her life.
After a time she appeared to forget the mysterious photograph. It was clear that her father was destined to remain, as he had always been, a solitary, fascinating, malevolent figure translated by some turn of circumstance from the intrigues of the old world into the frontier life of the new. What lay in the past—murder, disgrace, conspiracy—must remain hidden, the secret of the dead and of a mad old woman who in her youth and beauty had been his mistress at the very moment that his bride struggled in the school at St. Cloud to learn the tricks of a great lady. Out of all the mystery only one thing seemed clear—that Lily was his favorite child; and now the reason seemed clear enough. By some whim of Fate she was like The Girl in the Hat, the lovely creature who was now Madame Blaise.
So the crise de nerfs persisted throughout the summer. Indeed there were times when it appeared that Lily was on the verge of a settled melancholia, times when she would walk in solitude for hours along the towpaths beneath the mottled limbs of the plane trees. Yet her beauty persisted. She might have been a goddess . . . Ceres . . . as she walked along the green
