a ghastly death's-head lurking behind it. The divine Juliana
as a grinning skull--the vision hung there until it passed.
Then it came to me that she WAS tremendously old--
so old that death might take her at any moment, before I had time
to get what I wanted from her. The next thought was a correction
to that; it lighted up the situation. She would die next week,
she would die tomorrow--then I could seize her papers.
Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speaking. She was
very small and shrunken, bent forward, with her hands in her lap.
She was dressed in black, and her head was wrapped in a piece
of old black lace which showed no hair.

My emotion keeping me silent she spoke first, and the remark
she made was exactly the most unexpected.



III


"Our house is very far from the center, but the little canal
is very comme il faut."

"It's the sweetest corner of Venice and I can imagine nothing more charming,"
I hastened to reply. The old lady's voice was very thin and weak, but it
had an agreeable, cultivated murmur, and there was wonder in the thought
that that individual note had been in Jeffrey Aspern's ear.

"Please to sit down there. I hear very well,"
she said quietly, as if perhaps I had been shouting at her;